Conceptual Belief-Informed Reinforcement Learning

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission20346 Authors

Keywords: Reinforcement Learning, Conceptual Learning, Belief Representation

Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved significant success but is hindered by inefficiency and instability, relying on large amounts of trial-and-error data and failing to efficiently use past experiences to guide decisions. However, humans achieve remarkably efficient learning from experience, attributed to abstracting concepts and updating associated probabilistic beliefs by integrating both uncertainty and prior knowledge, as observed by cognitive science. Inspired by this, we introduce Conceptual Belief-Informed Reinforcement Learning to emulate human intelligence (HI-RL), an efficient experience utilization paradigm that can be directly integrated into existing RL frameworks. HI-RL forms concepts by extracting high-level categories of critical environmental information and then constructs adaptive concept-associated probabilistic beliefs as experience priors to guide value or policy updates. We evaluate HI-RL by integrating it into various existing value- and policy-based algorithms (DQN, PPO, SAC, and TD3) and demonstrate consistent improvements in sample efficiency and performance across both discrete and continuous control benchmarks.

Primary Area: reinforcement learning

Submission Number: 20346