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CIC: Contrastive Intrinsic Control for Unsupervised Skill Discovery

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arxiv 2202.00161 v3 pith:LEMK5LPS submitted 2022-02-01 cs.LG cs.AI

classification cs.LGcs.AI
keywords skillunsupervisedalgorithmcontrastivediscoveryintrinsicadaptationcontrol
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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We introduce Contrastive Intrinsic Control (CIC), an algorithm for unsupervised skill discovery that maximizes the mutual information between state-transitions and latent skill vectors. CIC utilizes contrastive learning between state-transitions and skills to learn behavior embeddings and maximizes the entropy of these embeddings as an intrinsic reward to encourage behavioral diversity. We evaluate our algorithm on the Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning Benchmark, which consists of a long reward-free pre-training phase followed by a short adaptation phase to downstream tasks with extrinsic rewards. CIC substantially improves over prior methods in terms of adaptation efficiency, outperforming prior unsupervised skill discovery methods by 1.79x and the next leading overall exploration algorithm by 1.18x.

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Cited by 4 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Task Adaptation from Skills: Information Geometry, Disentanglement, and New Objectives for Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning

    cs.LG 2025-06 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    The paper derives theoretical connections between skill disentanglement metrics and downstream task adaptation cost, and proposes Wasserstein-based objectives that can discover more (or all) optimal initial skills.

  2. Weights or Skills? A Survey of Robot-Learning Techniques: from Action-Predicting Weights to Robots that Write their Own Skills

    cs.RO 2026-08 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A taxonomy of robot learning on a weights-versus-skills axis, with a five-rung self-improvement ladder whose top cell (feedback plus memory plus search) holds only a few recent systems.

  3. Epistemically-guided forward-backward exploration

    cs.LG 2025-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Choosing exploration policies by the ensemble disagreement of forward-backward value estimates improves zero-shot RL sample efficiency on DeepMind Control Suite tasks.

  4. RedRFT: A Light-Weight Benchmark for Reinforcement Fine-Tuning-Based Red Teaming

    cs.LG 2025-06 reject novelty 5.0 of 10

    RedRFT is a new open-source benchmark with a unified PPO backbone, five reimplemented red teaming baselines, a proposed diversity metric, and ablation insights.

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