RESEARCH
Learning General World Models in a Handful of Reward-Free Deployments
October 25, 2022
Abstract
Building generally capable agents is a grand challenge for deep reinforcement learning (RL). To approach this challenge practically, we outline two key desiderata: 1) to facilitate generalization, exploration should be task agnostic; 2) to facilitate scalability, exploration policies should collect large quantities of data without costly centralized retraining. Combining these two properties, we introduce the reward-free deployment efficiency setting, a new paradigm for RL research. We then present CASCADE, a novel approach for self-supervised exploration in this new setting. CASCADE seeks to learn a world model by collecting data with a population of agents, using an information theoretic objective inspired by Bayesian Active Learning. CASCADE achieves this by specifically maximizing the diversity of trajectories sampled by the population through a novel cascading objective. We provide theoretical intuition for CASCADE which we show in a tabular setting improves upon naïve approaches that do not account for population diversity. We then demonstrate that CASCADE collects diverse task-agnostic datasets and learns agents that generalize zero-shot to novel, unseen downstream tasks on Atari, MiniGrid, Crafter and the DM Control Suite. Code and videos are available at https://ycxuyingchen.github.io/cascade/
AUTHORS
Written by
Aldo Pacchiano
Edward Grefenstette
Jack Parker-Holder
Oleh Rybkin
Philip J. Ball
Stephen Roberts
Tim Rockstäschel
Publisher
NeurIPS
Research Topics
Related Publications
May 12, 2026
HUMAN & MACHINE INTELLIGENCE
RESEARCH
NeuralSet: A High-Performing Python Package for Neuro-AI
Corentin Bel, Linnea Evanson, Julien Gadonneix, Andrea Santos Revilla, Mingfang (Lucy) Zhang, Julie Bonnaire, Charlotte Caucheteux, Alexandre Défossez, Théo Desbordes, Pablo Diego-Simón, Shubh Khanna, Juliette Millet, Pierre Orhan, Saarang Panchavati, Antoine Ratouchniak, Alexis Thual, Hubert Jacob Banville, Jarod Levy, Jean Remi King, Josephine Raugel, Jérémy Rapin, Katelyn Begany, Marlene Careil, Simon Dahan, Sophia Houhamdi, Stéphane d'Ascoli, Teon Brooks, Yohann Benchetrit
May 12, 2026
May 06, 2026
HUMAN & MACHINE INTELLIGENCE
RESEARCH
NeuralBench: A Unifying Framework to Benchmark NeuroAI Models
Saarang Panchavati, Antoine Ratouchniak, Mingfang (Lucy) Zhang, Elisa Cascardi, Hubert Banville, Jarod Levy, Jean-Rémi King, Jérémy Rapin, Katelyn Begany, Marlene Careil, Simon Dahan, Stéphane d'Ascoli, Teon Brooks, Yohann Benchetrit
May 06, 2026
April 16, 2026
RESEARCH
AIRA₂: Overcoming Bottlenecks in AI Research Agents
Nicola Cancedda, Pontus Stenetorp, Alexis Audran-Reiss, Alisia Lupidi, Anton Protopopov, Bassel Al Omari, Carole-Jean Wu, Derek Dunfield, Despoina Magka, Edan Toledo, Hela Momand, Ishita Mediratta, Jakob Foerster, Jean-Christophe Gagnon-Audet, Karen Hambardzumyan, Kelvin Niu, Martin Josifoski, Michael Kuchnik, Michael Shvartsman, Nicolas Baldwin, Parth Pathak, Rishi Hazra, Tatiana Shavrina, Thomas Simon Foster, Yoram Bachrach
April 16, 2026
March 17, 2026
RESEARCH
NLP
Omnilingual MT: Machine Translation for 1,600 Languages
Omnilingual MT Team, Niyati Bafna, Ioannis Tsiamas, Mark Duppenthaler, Albert Ventayol-Boada, Alexandre Mourachko, Andrea Caciolai, Arina Turkatenko, Artyom Kozhevnikov, Belen Alastruey, Charles-Eric Saint-James, Chierh CHENG, Christophe Ropers, Cynthia Gao, David Dale, Edan Toledo, Eduardo Sánchez, Gabriel Mejia Gonzalez, Holger Schwenk, Jean Maillard, Joe Chuang, João Maria Janeiro, Kevin Heffernan, Marta R. Costa-jussa, Mary Williamson, Nate Ekberg, Paul-Ambroise Duquenne, Pere Lluís Huguet Cabot, Rashel Moritz, Shireen Yates, Surya Parimi
March 17, 2026
Help Us Pioneer The Future of AI
We share our open source frameworks, tools, libraries, and models for everything from research exploration to large-scale production deployment.
Our approach
Latest news
Foundational models
Meta © 2026