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Cédric Colas

14 accepted papers

2026

Goal-Conditioned Agents that Learn Everything All at Once

ICML 2026poster

A goal-conditioned reinforcement learning agent acting in an environment will see a wealth of information throughout a trajectory, most of which is discarded when only considering the trajectory with respect to a single goal. All-goals learning, where each transition is used for learning off-policy …

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2026

Language and Experience: A Computational Model of Social Learning in Complex Tasks

ICLR 2026poster

The ability to combine linguistic guidance from others with direct experience is central to human development, enabling safe and rapid learning in new environments. How do people integrate these two sources of knowledge, and how might AI systems? We present a computational framework that models huma…

Cited by 0SourcecodeScholar
2025

MAGELLAN: Metacognitive predictions of learning progress guide autotelic LLM agents in large goal spaces

ICML 2025poster

Open-ended learning agents must efficiently prioritize goals in vast possibility spaces, focusing on those that maximize learning progress (LP). When such autotelic exploration is achieved by LLM agents trained with online RL in high-dimensional and evolving goal spaces, a key challenge for LP predi…

2025

Self-Improving Language Models for Evolutionary Program Synthesis: A Case Study on ARC-AGI

ICML 2025poster

Many program synthesis tasks prove too challenging for even state-of-the-art language models to solve in single attempts. Search-based evolutionary methods offer a promising alternative by exploring solution spaces iteratively, but their effectiveness remain limited by the fixed capabilities of the…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2025

When LLMs Play the Telephone Game: Cultural Attractors as Conceptual Tools to Evaluate LLMs in Multi-turn Settings

ICLR 2025poster

As large language models (LLMs) start interacting with each other and generating an increasing amount of text online, it becomes crucial to better understand how information is transformed as it passes from one LLM to the next. While significant research has examined individual LLM behaviors, existi…

2024

ACES: Generating a Diversity of Challenging Programming Puzzles with Autotelic Generative Models

NeurIPS 2024spotlight

The ability to invent novel and interesting problems is a remarkable feature of human intelligence that drives innovation, art, and science. We propose a method that aims to automate this process by harnessing the power of state-of-the-art generative models to produce a diversity of challenging yet…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Latent Learning Progress Drives Autonomous Goal Selection in Human Reinforcement Learning

NeurIPS 2024poster

Humans are autotelic agents who learn by setting and pursuing their own goals. However, the precise mechanisms guiding human goal selection remain unclear. Learning progress, typically measured as the observed change in performance, can provide a valuable signal for goal selection in both humans and…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2023

Guiding Pretraining in Reinforcement Learning with Large Language Models

ICML 2023poster

Reinforcement learning algorithms typically struggle in the absence of a dense, well-shaped reward function. Intrinsically motivated exploration methods address this limitation by rewarding agents for visiting novel states or transitions, but these methods offer limited benefits in large environment…

2021

Grounding Language to Autonomously-Acquired Skills via Goal Generation

ICLR 2021poster

We are interested in the autonomous acquisition of repertoires of skills. Language-conditioned reinforcement learning (LC-RL) approaches are great tools in this quest, as they allow to express abstract goals as sets of constraints on the states. However, most LC-RL agents are not autonomous and cann…

2020

Automatic Curriculum Learning For Deep RL: A Short Survey

IJCAI 2020poster

Automatic Curriculum Learning (ACL) has become a cornerstone of recent successes in Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). These methods shape the learning trajectories of agents by challenging them with tasks adapted to their capacities. In recent years, they have been used to improve sample efficiency…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2020

Language as a Cognitive Tool to Imagine Goals in Curiosity Driven Exploration

NeurIPS 2020poster

Developmental machine learning studies how artificial agents can model the way children learn open-ended repertoires of skills. Such agents need to create and represent goals, select which ones to pursue and learn to achieve them. Recent approaches have considered goal spaces that were either fixed…

2019

CURIOUS: Intrinsically Motivated Modular Multi-Goal Reinforcement Learning

ICML 2019oral

In open-ended environments, autonomous learning agents must set their own goals and build their own curriculum through an intrinsically motivated exploration. They may consider a large diversity of goals, aiming to discover what is controllable in their environments, and what is not. Because some go…

2019

Teacher algorithms for curriculum learning of Deep RL in continuously parameterized environments

CoRL 2019

We consider the problem of how a teacher algorithm can enable an unknown Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) student to become good at a skill over a wide range of diverse environments. To do so, we study how a teacher algorithm can learn to generate a learning curriculum, whereby it sequentially samp

2018

GEP-PG: Decoupling Exploration and Exploitation in Deep Reinforcement Learning Algorithms

ICML 2018oral

In continuous action domains, standard deep reinforcement learning algorithms like DDPG suffer from inefficient exploration when facing sparse or deceptive reward problems. Conversely, evolutionary and developmental methods focusing on exploration like Novelty Search, Quality-Diversity or Goal Explo…