Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) is a crucial approach to enhance the generalization capabilities and improve the sample efficiency of RL algorithms. However, current MBRL methods focus primarily on building world models for single tasks and rarely address generalization across different scenarios. Building on the insight that dynamics within the same simulation engine share inherent properties, we attempt to construct a unified world model capable of generalizing across different scenarios, named Meta-Regularized Contextual World-Model (MrCoM). This method first decomposes the latent state space into various components based on the dynamic characteristics, thereby enhancing the accuracy of world-model prediction. Further, MrCoM adopts meta-state regularization to extract unified representation of scenario-relevant information, and meta-value regularization to align world-model optimization with policy learning across diverse scenario objectives. We theoretically analyze the generalization error upper bound of MrCoM in multi-scenario settings. We systematically evaluate our algorithm's generalization ability across diverse scenarios, demonstrating significantly better performance than previous state-of-the-art methods.

Comprehending natural language and following human instructions are critical capabilities for intelligent agents. However, the flexibility of linguistic instructions induces substantial ambiguity across language-conditioned tasks, severely degrading algorithmic performance. To address these limitations, we present a novel method named DAIL (Distributional Aligned Learning), featuring two key components: distributional policy and semantic alignment. Specifically, we provide theoretical results that the value distribution estimation mechanism enhances task differentiability. Meanwhile, the semantic alignment module captures the correspondence between trajectories and linguistic instructions. Extensive experimental results on both structured and visual observation benchmarks demonstrate that DAIL effectively resolves instruction ambiguities, achieving superior performance to baseline methods. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/RunpengXie/Distributional-Aligned-Learning.

In the domain of multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), the limited information availability, complex agent interactions, and individual capabilities among agents often pose a bottleneck for effective decision-making. Previous studies frequently fall short due to insufficient consideration of these multi-dimensional challenges. Thus, this paper introduces a novel methodology, termed Multi-scale Decision Enhancement (MaDE), anchored by a dual-wise bisimulation framework for pre-training agent encoders. The MaDE framework aims to facilitate decision-making across three pivotal dimensions: macroscale awareness, mesoscale coordination, and microscale insight. At the macro level, a pretrained global encoder captures a situational awareness map to guide overall strategies. At the meso level, specialized local encoders generate cluster-based representations to promote inter-agent cooperation. At the micro level, individual agents focus on the accurate decision-making process. Empirical evaluations validate that MaDE outperforms state-of-the-art methods in various multi-agent environments, which shows the potential to tackle the intricate challenges of MARL, enabling agents to make more informed, coordinated, and adaptive decisions. Code is available at https://github.com/paper2023/MaDE.

Lexical cohesion is a fundamental mechanism for text which requires a pair of words to be interpreted as a certain type of lexical relation (e.g., similarity) to understand a coherent context; we refer to such relations as the contextual lexical relation. However, work on lexical cohesion has not modeled context comprehensively in considering lexical relations due to the lack of linguistic resources. In this paper, we take initial steps to address contextual lexical relations by focusing on the contrast relation, as it is a well-known relation though it is more subtle and relatively less resourced. We present a corpus named Cont 2 Lex to make Contextual Lexical Contrast Recognition a computationally feasible task. We benchmark this task with widely-adopted semantic representations; we discover that contextual embeddings (e.g. BERT) generally outperform static embeddings (e.g. Glove), but barely go beyond 70% in accuracy performance. In addition, we find that all embeddings perform better when CLC occurs within the same sentence, suggesting possible limitations of current computational coherence models. Another intriguing discovery is the improvement of BERT in CLC is largely attributed to its modeling of CLC word pairs co-occurring with other word repetitions. Such observations imply that the progress made in lexical coherence modeling remains relatively primitive even for semantic representations such as BERT that have been empowering numerous standard NLP tasks to approach human benchmarks. Through presenting our corpus and benchmark, we attempt to seed initial discussions and endeavors in advancing semantic representations from modeling syntactic and semantic levels to coherence and discourse levels.