Learning to Perceive the World Through Control: Empowerment-Based Representation Learning

Abstract

In many practical reinforcement learning (RL) environments, observations are far higher-dimensional than the variables that matter for control. In this work, we ask: can we learn representations that capture only control-relevant features of the environment? We study this question through the \emph{empowerment} objective, which maximizes an agent’s influence over the environment and is widely used for unsupervised skill learning. We show that empowerment agents induce two distinct representations --- forward and backward --- that capture complementary aspects of the state, and both of which are invariant to control-irrelevant features. Thus, empowerment maximization leads agents to learn an implicit, \emph{control-centric} model of the world. Our analysis highlights the importance of learning representations through interaction rather than from passive datasets: interaction aimed at maximizing control is essential for learning useful invariance properties, a perspective that aligns closely with the causal learning literature.