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Neuro-Inspired Inverse Learning for Planning and Control (arxiv.org)
3 points by kensai 64 days ago | hide | past | pdf | 1 comment on HN

In plain words: Instead of picking one action at a time or searching for a plan, this system runs its world model backwards to emit the full sequence in one pass. On nine maze tasks it beat or matched planners by 24% on average, 10-100 times faster.

Abstract

We present a neuro-inspired framework for embodied planning and control. Building on three principles that enable fast and highly effective goal-directed behavior in the mammalian brain - paired forward/inverse internal models, open-loop multi-step motor commands, and sequential, hierarchical organization of action - our Inverter framework uses learned components, trained end-to-end through Inverse Learning (IL) and supplemented where natural by analytic or algorithmic modules; we formalize IL and delineate it from supervised, reinforcement, and imitation learning. IL bridges Reinforcement Learning (RL)-style amortization, which runs in a single forward pass but emits only one action at a time, and Optimal Control (OC)-style sequence planning over whole trajectories, but with iterative test-time computation. Single Inverters or hierarchical n=2 Inverter stacks match or improve on offline-RL and diffusion-planner baselines on all 3 maze2d and 6 antmaze D4RL variants by an average of +24.2% (range -1.9% to +78.2%), at one-to-two orders of magnitude less inference compute time. Distinctively, optimizing through the Forward Model (FoM) over the entire T-step action sequence - rather than per step - lets Inverters produce smooth, goal-coherent, trajectory-wide structure and reach control policies closer to the analytic optimum than the policy underlying the training data itself. We also identify a failure mode of IL: FoM hacking under narrow training-data coverage, which we mitigate by using random training data with broader coverage. As an application example, a Pulse Inverter synthesizes arbitrary single-qubit quantum gates with fidelity matching the standard iterative numerical baseline (GRAPE), at more than 1000x lower per-gate compute time. In summary, we conclude that IL enables a versatile class of world-interfaces, especially for latency- and resource-critical embodied AI.

Maryna Kapitonova, Tonio Ball
arXiv:2605.24152 · cs.AI · submitted May 22, 2026 · updated May 26, 2026
abstract · pdf · html · Version 2, minor fix in online version of the abstract, pdf unchanged

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“The mammalian brain achieves fast, highly effective goal-directed behavior leveraging paired forward/inverse internal models, open-loop multi-step motor commands, and the hierarchical organization of action.

Our findings show that the Inverter framework, built on the same three principles, enables fast and effective planning and control through a feedforward, sequence-level FoM-and-IM core that emits entire action sequences in single forward passes. We find that Inverters offer consistently high task performance at a fraction of the inference compute time used by step-wise RL or iterative planners.”