Emergence of In-Context Reinforcement Learning from Noise Distillation

Recently, extensive studies in Reinforcement Learning have been carried out on the ability of transformers to adapt in-context to various environments and tasks. Current in-context RL methods are limited by their strict require-ments for data, which needs to be generated by RL agents or labeled with actions from an optimal policy. In order to address this prevalent problem, we propose AD$^\varepsilon$, a new data acquisition approach that enables in-context Reinforcement Learning from noise-induced curriculum. We show that it is viable to construct a synthetic noise injection curriculum which helps to obtain learning histories. Moreover, we experimentally demonstrate that it is possible to alleviate the need for generation using optimal policies, with in-context RL still able to outperform the best suboptimal policy in a learning dataset by a 2x margin.