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Goal Misgeneralization in Deep Reinforcement Learning

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arxiv 2105.14111 v7 pith:RDZC4P7R submitted 2021-05-28 cs.LG cs.AI

classification cs.LGcs.AI
keywords goalmisgeneralizationagentgeneralizationcapabilityfailureslearningout-of-distribution
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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We study goal misgeneralization, a type of out-of-distribution generalization failure in reinforcement learning (RL). Goal misgeneralization failures occur when an RL agent retains its capabilities out-of-distribution yet pursues the wrong goal. For instance, an agent might continue to competently avoid obstacles, but navigate to the wrong place. In contrast, previous works have typically focused on capability generalization failures, where an agent fails to do anything sensible at test time. We formalize this distinction between capability and goal generalization, provide the first empirical demonstrations of goal misgeneralization, and present a partial characterization of its causes.

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Cited by 3 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. OpenAlex reports about 22 citations worldwide. Full citation record

  1. When Does Reward Teach State? A Hidden-Automaton Instrument and the Group-Language Boundary

    cs.LG 2026-07 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    High reward in sparse RL does not imply latent-state recovery; a hidden-DFA instrument separates perception from planning gaps and flags group-language structure as a pre-training warning.

  2. Draining the Energy Commons: Self-Defeating Over-Appropriation as a Coordination Failure in Agentic LLM Collectives

    cs.MA 2026-07 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    LLM prosumers deplete a shared renewable reserve exactly when demand exceeds peak replacement, acting like impatient open-access users even when sustaining the reserve is feasible.

  3. Machine Theory of Mind and the Structure of Human Values

    cs.AI 2025-05 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    Human values are claimed to have a rational instrumental structure that lets AI infer unseen values from known ones, framing this as the 'value generalization problem' in AI safety.

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