What Happens to the Goal? Distinct Failures of Policy Alignment in Goal Misgener
Overview
This research explores how agents fail to maintain goal alignment during distribution shift, identifying three distinct failure modes based on where the goal is lost within the agent's internal processing. The study shows that recovery methods vary depending on the depth of goal loss and demonstrates how steering and downstream wiring can improve goal reach in different scenarios.
From arXiv Robotics — research abstracts
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“etraining. We study this across eight visual navigation and manipulation tasks, including robot control. While tracing where goal information remains available internally, how strongly it influences the policy, and what role it plays in action selection, we uncover that the goal is lost at one of three different depths. This depth predicts which recovery works in each task. When the goal is followed, but outcompeted”
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- 2026-10-31T05:13:38.289Z · evidence updated · source revision 2. Evidence extraction was updated; current source attributions are shown above.
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- arXiv Robotics — research abstractsSignalWhat Happens to the Goal? Distinct Failures of Policy Alignment in Goal Misgeneralization
This research explores how agents fail to maintain goal alignment during distribution shift, identifying three distinct failure modes based on where the goal is lost within the agent's internal processing. The study shows that recovery methods vary depending on the depth of goal loss and demonstrates how steering and downstream wiring can improve goal reach in different scenarios.
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