Cheap RL tasks will waste compute | Mechanize Inc.

As RL training compute gets more expensive, AI labs will spend thousands of dollars per task on environment quality.

Cheap RL tasks will waste compute | Mechanize, Inc. Cheap RL tasks will waste compute Ege Erdil, Matthew Barnett, Tamay Besiroglu August 18, 2025 When creating RL tasks, one faces a choice between two different approaches. One can either spend a lot of engineering effort per task to make a small number of hand-crafted tasks that provide highly informative reward signals. Or one can employ various methods of procedural generation to create a much larger number of tasks, with less engineering effort per task, at the cost of reduced task diversity and weaker reward signals. This is essentially a

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