I am excited about continual reinforcement learning (RL). When I first learned about RL, I thought that it was too general for its own good. And yet, continual learning lies outside of the scope of current RL fundamental research. It’s an exciting time because very little is understood about how reinforcement learning methods work with neural networks on simple problems. Yet, many interesting problems require not only RL but continual learning (either because the environment is changing in some unknown way or the environment may include interaction with a human). We are still at the very early stages, but I expect there to be synergy with current developments like LLMs.
Not wholly surprising, and will be interesting to see what is developed to deal with this collpase.