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RLJ 2025

Zero-Shot Reinforcement Learning Under Partial Observability

Journal Article Articles Artificial Intelligence · Machine Learning · Reinforcement Learning

Abstract

Recent work has shown that, under certain assumptions, zero-shot reinforcement learning (RL) methods can generalise to *any* unseen task in an environment after an offline, reward-free pre-training phase. Access to Markov states is one such assumption, yet, in many real-world applications, the Markov state is often only *partially observable*. Here, we explore how the performance of standard zero-shot RL methods degrades when subjected to partially observability, and show that, as in single-task RL, memory-based architectures are an effective remedy. We evaluate our *memory-based* zero-shot RL methods in domains where the states, rewards and a change in dynamics are partially observed, and show improved performance over memory-free baselines. Our code is open-sourced via the project page: https://enjeeneer.io/projects/bfms-with-memory/.

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Keywords

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Context

Venue
Reinforcement Learning Journal
Archive span
2024-2025
Indexed papers
228
Paper id
1152468165099085892
v2026.09.13