Leveraging vast amounts of unlabeled internet video data for embodied AI is currently bottlenecked by the lack of action labels and the presence of action-correlated visual distractors. Although recent latent action policy optimization (LAPO) has shown promise in inferring proxy action labels from visual observations, its performance degrades significantly when distractors are present. To address this limitation, we propose a novel object-centric latent action learning framework that centers on objects rather than pixels. We leverage self-supervised object-centric pretraining to disentangle the movement of the agent and distracting background dynamics. This allows LAPO to focus on task-relevant interactions, resulting in more robust proxy-action labels, enabling better imitation learning and efficient adaptation of the agent with just a few action-labeled trajectories. We evaluated our method in eight visually complex tasks across the Distracting Control Suite (DCS) and Distracting MetaWorld (DMW). Our results show that object-centric pretraining mitigates the negative effects of distractors by 50%, as measured by downstream task performance: average return (DCS) and success rate (DMW).

Following the success of the in-context learning paradigm in large-scale language and computer vision models, the recently emerging field of in-context reinforcement learning is experiencing a rapid growth. However, its development has been held back by the lack of challenging benchmarks, as all the experiments have been carried out in simple environments and on small-scale datasets. We present **XLand-100B**, a large-scale dataset for in-context reinforcement learning based on the XLand-MiniGrid environment, as a first step to alleviate this problem. It contains complete learning histories for nearly $30,000$ different tasks, covering $100$B transitions and $2.5$B episodes. It took $50,000$ GPU hours to collect the dataset, which is beyond the reach of most academic labs. Along with the dataset, we provide the utilities to reproduce or expand it even further. We also benchmark common in-context RL baselines and show that they struggle to generalize to novel and diverse tasks. With this substantial effort, we aim to democratize research in the rapidly growing field of in-context reinforcement learning and provide a solid foundation for further scaling.

Recently, latent action learning, pioneered by Latent Action Policies (LAPO), have shown remarkable pre-training efficiency on observation-only data, offering potential for leveraging vast amounts of video available on the web for embodied AI. However, prior work has focused on distractor-free data, where changes between observations are primarily explained by ground-truth actions. Unfortunately, real-world videos contain action-correlated distractors that may hinder latent action learning. Using Distracting Control Suite (DCS) we empirically investigate the effect of distractors on latent action learning and demonstrate that LAPO struggle in such scenario. We propose LAOM, a simple LAPO modification that improves the quality of latent actions by 8x, as measured by linear probing. Importantly, we show that providing supervision with ground-truth actions, as few as 2.5% of the full dataset, during latent action learning improves downstream performance by 4.2x on average. Our findings suggest that integrating supervision during Latent Action Models (LAM) training is critical in the presence of distractors, challenging the conventional pipeline of first learning LAM and only then decoding from latent to ground-truth actions.

In-Context Reinforcement Learning (ICRL) represents a promising paradigm for developing generalist agents that learn at inference time through trial-and-error interactions, analogous to how large language models adapt contextually, but with a focus on reward maximization. However, the scalability of ICRL beyond toy tasks and single-domain settings remains an open challenge. In this work, we present the first steps toward scaling ICRL by introducing a fixed, cross-domain model capable of learning behaviors through in-context reinforcement learning. Our results demonstrate that Algorithm Distillation, a framework designed to facilitate ICRL, offers a compelling and competitive alternative to expert distillation to construct versatile action models. These findings highlight the potential of ICRL as a scalable approach for generalist decision-making systems.

Recently, it has been shown that transformers pre-trained on diverse datasets with multi-episode contexts can generalize to new reinforcement learning tasks in-context. A key limitation of previously proposed models is their reliance on a predefined action space size and structure. The introduction of a new action space often requires data re-collection and model re-training, which can be costly for some applications. In our work, we show that it is possible to mitigate this issue by proposing the Headless-AD model that, despite being trained only once, is capable of generalizing to discrete action spaces of variable size, semantic content and order. By experimenting with Bernoulli and contextual bandits, as well as a gridworld environment, we show that Headless-AD exhibits significant capability to generalize to action spaces it has never encountered, even outperforming specialized models trained for a specific set of actions on several environment configurations.

Recently, extensive studies in Reinforcement Learning have been carried out on the ability of transformers to adapt in-context to various environments and tasks. Current in-context RL methods are limited by their strict requirements for data, which needs to be generated by RL agents or labeled with actions from an optimal policy. In order to address this prevalent problem, we propose AD$^\varepsilon$, a new data acquisition approach that enables in-context Reinforcement Learning from noise-induced curriculum. We show that it is viable to construct a synthetic noise injection curriculum which helps to obtain learning histories. Moreover, we experimentally demonstrate that it is possible to alleviate the need for generation using optimal policies, with in-context RL still able to outperform the best suboptimal policy in a learning dataset by a 2x margin.

Inspired by the diversity and depth of XLand and the simplicity and minimalism of MiniGrid, we present XLand-MiniGrid, a suite of tools and grid-world environments for meta-reinforcement learning research. Written in JAX, XLand-MiniGrid is designed to be highly scalable and can potentially run on GPU or TPU accelerators, democratizing large-scale experimentation with limited resources. Along with the environments, XLand-MiniGrid provides pre-sampled benchmarks with millions of unique tasks of varying difficulty and easy-to-use baselines that allow users to quickly start training adaptive agents. In addition, we have conducted a preliminary analysis of scaling and generalization, showing that our baselines are capable of reaching millions of steps per second during training and validating that the proposed benchmarks are challenging. XLand-MiniGrid is open-source and available at \url{https://github.com/corl-team/xland-minigrid}.