Towards Flexible Inference in Sequential Decision Problems via Bidirectional Transformers
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Abstract (arXiv)
Randomly masking and predicting word tokens has been a successful approach in pre-training language models for a variety of downstream tasks. In this work, we observe that the same idea also applies naturally to sequential decision making, where many well-studied tasks like behavior cloning, offline RL, inverse dynamics, and waypoint conditioning correspond to different sequence maskings over a sequence of states, actions, and returns. We introduce the FlexiBiT framework, which provides a unified way to specify models which can be trained on many different sequential decision making tasks. We show that a single FlexiBiT model is simultaneously capable of carrying out many tasks with performance similar to or better than specialized models. Additionally, we show that performance can be further improved by fine-tuning our general model on specific tasks of interest.
Key facts. Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 26 of its 36 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 28 Apr 2022.
Builds on
26 of 36 references.
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Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2022: 2; 2023: 2; 2024: 2.
6 papers.
- 2022Deep Transformer Q-Networks for Partially Observable Reinforcement Learningcited by 35
- 2022On Transforming Reinforcement Learning by Transformer: The Development Trajectorycited by 35
- 2023Large Sequence Models for Sequential Decision-Making: A Surveycited by 19
- 2023Skill Transformer: A Monolithic Policy for Mobile Manipulationcited by 15
- 2024MobilityDL: A Review of Deep Learning From Trajectory Datacited by 6
- 2024Socialized Learning: A Survey of the Paradigm Shift for Edge Intelligence in Networked Systemscited by 2
- 2024Socialized Learning: A Survey of the Paradigm Shift for Edge Intelligence in Networked Systems20 Apr 2024
- 2024MobilityDL: A Review of Deep Learning From Trajectory Data1 Feb 2024
- 2023Skill Transformer: A Monolithic Policy for Mobile Manipulation19 Aug 2023
- 2023Large Sequence Models for Sequential Decision-Making: A Survey24 Jun 2023
- 2022On Transforming Reinforcement Learning by Transformer: The Development Trajectory29 Dec 2022
- 2022Deep Transformer Q-Networks for Partially Observable Reinforcement Learning2 Jun 2022
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2022UniMASK: Unified Inference in Sequential Decision Problems
- 2025On the Limits of Test-Time Compute: Sequential Reward Filtering for Better Inference
- 2024Efficient Sequential Decision Making with Large Language Models
- 2020Learning to Generalize for Sequential Decision Making
- 2026Reject, Resample, Repeat: Understanding Parallel Reasoning in Language Model Inference
- 2025From Next Token Prediction to (STRIPS) World Models
- 2026Distilling Sequential Computation in Transformer Language Models
- 2025Unified token representations for sequential decision models