The One-Step Trap (In AI Research)

Ha, interesting. I wasn't aware of Sutton's blog post, but if I might make a shameless plug, we demonstrated [1] exactly this problem (see section 4.4.3), and how multi-step world models (using diffusion models as the substrate) could be one potential answer.

Since then, I have come to like temporally-abstract models more and more. Rolling out in time -- either step-by-step or many steps at once -- suffers from the tyranny of the specific. For long horizon planning with agents, I care (often only approximately) about where I can end up, and seldom about exactly when I end up there. Successor features, GVFs, Forward-Backward representations, and the like seem like they have an elegant approach for structuring thinking at a "high level", instead of generating exponentially large search trees by rolling out microscopic world models.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.05364 (funnily, from around the same time / few months after Sutton's blog post)

This is the same reasoning behind why Yann Lecun thought test-time scaling would not work for LLMs: compounding error.

Instead, the more tokens LLMs use, the better their performance on many tasks. LLMs can self-correct, evidenced by the power of getting models to question themselves by emitting "Wait," in S1. https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.19393

I'm not sure I follow what one step means exactly. Aren't all models some f(x) = y? Is the suggestion instead that we should be doing f(x) = g(h(x)) = y?

What would the difference be?

(2024)

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