Empowerment

Large, unlabeled datasets of prior experience have become increasingly available for agentic tasks in domains such as robotics and coding. A common recipe for these tasks is to train a policy using the prior data, and then further improve it with online rollouts. But while much work has studied how to use both the offline and online data for policy extraction, far less work has been done to understand how the prior data can be used to efficiently explore during the online learning phase. Previous work has attempted to formalize this idea by defining the empowerment, a measure of how many future states an agent can realize; states with higher empowerment require more exploration as there are more futures to explore. However, existing methods for estimating empowerment require online policy rollouts in the environment. We propose the first method for estimating empowerment from unlabeled prior data, without any environment interaction. By jointly learning an empowerment-maximizing policy together with its discounted state-occupancy measure, our estimator can be trained on unlabeled trajectories generated from any unknown policy. We demonstrate that our empowerment estimator qualitatively gives intuitive empowerment measures and show that the pretrained estimator can be used to improve exploration in the online goal-conditioned reinforcement learning setting. Code is available at https://github.com/ishirgarg/offline-empowerment.

Empowerment measures the capacity of an agent to actively control its environment. In this work, we explain the connection between skill learning and empowerment. While skill learning is not empowerment, we introduce a simple scalable recipe for empowerment maximization: empowerment corresponds to the number of executable skills from a state, so maximizing empowerment corresponds to reaching states that are good starting points for many skills. Our recipe applies to arbitrary underlying skill learning methods. Whereas most prior work on empowerment looks at tabular settings, this recipe enables us to study empowerment at a scale where we can realize theoretically-predicted but empirically-elusive properties of empowerment (e.g., gathering resources, environment modification, survival). Experiments show that empowerment maximization unlocks interesting emergent properties, such as building a house in Crafter. Website and code at this https url.

Empowerment captures the capacity for an agent to actively control its environment. While conceptually appealing as an information-theoretic quantity, the connection between empowerment and structurally central states that provide broad access to future outcomes has remained an open question. In this work, we link empowerment maximization and skill-learning methods to provide new geometries for interpreting and analyzing empowerment. Our analyses answer longstanding open questions on the connections between empowerment and structural centrality. Our analyses also reveal distinctions between information and reward geometries, highlighting important theoretical implications to build scalable empowerment-maximization methods. Website and code can be found at https://empowerment-geometry.github.io/.

Sampling-based model predictive control (MPC) is a powerful approach to trajectory optimization, but its performance depends on an informative cost function that often requires substantial domain knowledge to design. An alternative is to derive objectives directly from the system dynamics. Empowerment, defined as the channel capacity between an agent's inputs and its future state, provides such a goal-agnostic objective and has been shown to produce useful behaviors across a range of domains. However, existing empowerment-based controllers have two key limitations: empowerment is estimated using a virtual probing policy distinct from the executed control policy, obscuring its connection to the resulting behavior; and its computation typically requires second-order derivatives of the dynamics, limiting compatibility with standard MPC methods. We formulate empowerment using a single policy for both probing and acting, directly linking the empowerment objective to the executed behavior. The resulting objective requires only first-order derivatives and can be optimized with standard MPC solvers, either alone or in combination with a task-specific cost. We evaluate the proposed approach on classical control tasks and show that combining empowerment with task costs matches or exceeds the success rate achieved by either objective alone. Our formulation provides a practical bridge between standard MPC and intrinsically motivated control.

Language models increasingly assist people with power-related requests, so systematic differences in whom they help could shift the distribution of power at scale, or be exploited by users who learn which identities are refused less. We introduce PowerBench, an evaluation of power-shifting requests that distinguishes self-empowerment, disempowerment, and power grabbing, plus a control of refusal-inducing requests that shift no power. We build, curate, and open-source a dataset of such requests varying the power domain, the context, the scale of the affected party, and the prior power standing of the user, and evaluate 24 models (12 from US and 12 from Chinese developers) under three experimental conditions: reciprocal nationalities of user and affected party, an AI agent as the user, and 8 request languages. Models refuse power grabbing more than disempowerment, and disempowerment more than self-empowerment. Refusal of power grabbing rises with the scale of the affected party, from an individual to a society. Models are biased toward helping others take power from the US and against helping US users take power from others, but favor the US when it gains power and nobody loses it. When the user is an AI agent, refusal of power-shifting requests increases, especially in power grabbing against an individual. Finally, language biases refusal, but in model-specific ways that largely cancel on average. We release PowerBench to make these asymmetries measurable in current and future models.

In many practical reinforcement learning environments, observations are far higher-dimensional than the variables that matter for control. In this work, we ask: can we learn representations that capture only control-relevant features of the environment? We study this question through the empowerment objective, which maximizes an agent's influence over the environment and is widely used for unsupervised skill learning. We show that empowerment agents induce two distinct representations -- forward and backward -- that capture complementary aspects of the state, and both of which are invariant to control-irrelevant features. Thus, empowerment maximization leads agents to learn an implicit, control-centric model of the world. Our analysis highlights the importance of learning representations through interaction rather than from passive datasets: interaction aimed at maximizing control is essential for learning useful invariance properties, a perspective that aligns closely with the causal learning literature.

Automating scientific computing workflows requires more than generating executable code: autonomous systems must also select appropriate computational strategies, implement them faithfully, and ensure that the resulting outcomes remain causally attributable to the decisions that produced them. In multi-agent pipelines, this process is particularly fragile, as small inconsistencies between agent intentions and actions can lead to semantic drift, where the eventually executed procedure no longer reflects the originally selected strategy, thereby corrupting downstream evaluation and adaptation. In this work, motivated by the ATHENA framework (Toscano et al., 2025; Toscano et al., 2026) and the concept of empowerment (Yiu et al., 2025), we introduce a multi-agent framework that combines contextual bandits with structured inter-agent communication and, most importantly, semantic checkpoints that preserve action-outcome fidelity throughout the pipeline. The system integrates specialized large language model (LLM) agents, grounded code generation, and self-healing execution loops within an adaptive decision-making architecture. Interpreting the framework through the lens of empowerment, we show that reliable autonomous learning requires not only identifying high-quality actions, but also preserving the integrity of their propagation across agents. Using sensitivity analysis and uncertainty quantification workflows as representative case studies, we demonstrate that unchecked semantic drift degrades policy learning, whereas the proposed framework improves convergence, robustness, and adaptation to novel problem contexts. These results suggest a broader design principle for scientific multi-agent systems: adaptive decision-making must be coupled with explicit mechanisms that guarantee semantic consistency and reliable information flow across the computational pipeline.

We study agency under partial observability in deterministic physical or simulated worlds, where apparent randomness arises from uncertainty over initial conditions, fixed law bits, and unrolled exogenous noise. We model sensing and actuation as bridge interfaces split between agent-controlled parameters and environment-controlled channel state, inducing a deterministic POMDP through a prior over latent microstates and many-to-one observation coarsening. Within this framework, we prove a separation between prediction, compression, and empowerment. Perfect prediction can be achieved either by identifying the hidden quotient relevant to the target family or by overwrite control that makes the future target action-determined; high empowerment alone is insufficient. Under refinable interfaces and sufficient memory, action-conditioned observation-compression progress reduces posterior uncertainty about the latent quotient, and when refinement requires steering world-side channel conditions, this creates target-conditioned interface empowerment. A bit-string specialization with a conserved information budget makes the resulting tradeoff explicit: prediction by identification requires internal capacity at least the relevant latent entropy, whereas overwrite control requires terminal action capacity over the controlled quotient. For modern AI agents, the results suggest a design principle rather than a theorem of inevitability: objectives should distinguish hidden-state identification, interface refinement, task-relevant controllability, and mere overwrite or distractor control. Human--AI alignment is partly an interface-design problem, where the relevant bridge is between human intent, agent internal state, external tools, and world-side channel conditions. This is a working draft: feedback and criticism is most welcome.

The proliferation of agentic artificial intelligence has outpaced the conceptual tools needed to characterize agency in computational systems. Prevailing definitions mainly rely on autonomy and goal-directedness. Here, we argue for a minimal notion open to principled inspection given three criteria: intentionality as action grounded in beliefs and desires, rationality as normatively coherent action entailed by a world model, and explainability as action causally traceable to internal states; we subsequently instantiate these as a partially observable Markov decision process under a variational framework wherein posterior beliefs, prior preferences, and the minimization of expected free energy jointly constitute an agentic action chain. Using a canonical T-maze paradigm, we evidence how empowerment, formulated as the channel capacity between actions and anticipated observations, serves as an operational metric that distinguishes zero-, intermediate-, and high-agency phenotypes through structural manipulations of the generative model. We conclude by arguing that as agents engage in epistemic foraging to resolve ambiguity, the governance controls that remain effective must shift systematically from external constraints to the internal modulation of prior preferences, offering a principled, variational bridge from computational phenotyping to AI governance strategy

Intrinsic motivations are receiving increasing attention, i.e. behavioral incentives that are not engineered, but emerge from the interaction of an agent with its surroundings. In this work we study the emergence of behaviors driven by one such incentive, empowerment, specifically in the context of more than one agent. We formulate a principled extension of empowerment to the multi-agent setting, and demonstrate its efficient calculation. We observe that this intrinsic motivation gives rise to characteristic modes of group-organization in two qualitatively distinct environments: a pair of agents coupled by a tendon, and a controllable Vicsek flock. This demonstrates the potential of intrinsic motivations such as empowerment to not just drive behavior for only individual agents but also higher levels of behavioral organization at scale.