Enlarge (credit: boonchai wedmakawand)

Reinforcement-learning algorithms in systems like ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini can work wonders, but they usually need hundreds of thousands of shots at a task before they get good at it. That’s why it’s always been hard to transfer this performance to robots. You can’t let a self-driving car crash 3,000 times just so it can learn crashing is bad.

But now a team of researchers at Northwestern University may have found a way around it. “That is what we think is going to be transformative in the development of the embodied AI in the real world,” says Thomas Berrueta who led the development of the Maximum Diffusion Reinforcement Learning (MaxDiff RL), an algorithm tailored specifically for robots.

Introducing chaos

The problem with deploying most reinforcement-learning algorithms in robots starts with the built-in assumption that the data they learn from is independent and identically distributed. The independence, in this context, means the value of one variable does not depend on the value of another variable in the dataset—when you flip a coin two times, getting tails on the second attempt does not depend on the result of your first flip. Identical distribution means that the probability of seeing any specific outcome is the same. In the coin-flipping example, the probability of getting heads is the same as getting tails: 50 percent for each.