Rich Sutton, The OaK Architecture: A Vision of SuperIntelligence from Experience - RLC 2025

Video Description

As AI has become a huge industry, to a large extent it has lost its way. What is needed to get us back on track to true intelligence? We need agents that learn continually. We need world models and planning. We need knowledge that is high-level and learnable. We need to meta-learn how to generalize. The Oak architecture is one answer to all these needs. In overall outline it is a model-based RL architecture with three special features: 1) all of its components learn continually, 2) each learned weight has a dedicated step-size parameter that is meta-learned using online cross-validation, and 3) abstractions in state and time are continually created in a five-step progression: Feature Construction, posing a SubTask based on the feature, learning an Option to solve the subtask, learning a Model of the option, and Planning using the option's model (the FC-STOMP progression). The Oak architecture is rather meaty; in this talk we give an outline and point to the many works, prior and co-temporaneous, that are contributing to its overall vision of how superintelligence can arise from an agent's experience.