{"schema_version":"onlylabs.public_signal.v1","title":"OpenAI Writing: Variational option discovery algorithms","description":"OpenAI writing signal with public source context, captured evidence pages, related signals, and data-business radar classification.","url":"https://onlylabs.fyi/signals/2903927c-0d8a-40dd-8703-b433ac2aa868","json_url":"https://onlylabs.fyi/signals/2903927c-0d8a-40dd-8703-b433ac2aa868/signal.json","generated_at":"2026-06-08T15:47:03.988+00:00","org":{"slug":"openai","name":"OpenAI","category":"frontier-lab","category_label":"Frontier lab","dossier_url":"https://onlylabs.fyi/labs/openai","dossier_json_url":"https://onlylabs.fyi/labs/openai/dossier.json"},"related_urls":{"signal":"https://onlylabs.fyi/signals/2903927c-0d8a-40dd-8703-b433ac2aa868","signal_json":"https://onlylabs.fyi/signals/2903927c-0d8a-40dd-8703-b433ac2aa868/signal.json","source":"https://openai.com/index/variational-option-discovery-algorithms","lab_dossier":"https://onlylabs.fyi/labs/openai","lab_dossier_json":"https://onlylabs.fyi/labs/openai/dossier.json","analysis":"https://onlylabs.fyi/analysis/openai","analysis_json":"https://onlylabs.fyi/analysis/openai/analysis.json","analysis_evidence_json":"https://onlylabs.fyi/analysis/openai/evidence.json","category":"https://onlylabs.fyi/frontier","category_json":"https://onlylabs.fyi/frontier.json","category_feed":"https://onlylabs.fyi/frontier/feed.xml","category_signals_json":"https://onlylabs.fyi/signals.json","topic":"https://onlylabs.fyi/topics/talking","topic_signals_json":"https://onlylabs.fyi/topics/talking/signals.json","topic_feed":"https://onlylabs.fyi/topics/talking/feed.xml","data_business":null},"answer_pack":{"answer":"OpenAI published Variational option discovery algorithms. 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High-signal details: Variational option discovery algorithms | OpenAI July 26, 2018 Publication Variational option discovery algorithms Read paper Loading… Share Abstract We explore methods.... onlylabs links this event to 1 captured evidence page and 6 related writing signals.","signal_desk":"talking","source_context":{"source_url":"https://openai.com/index/variational-option-discovery-algorithms","source_host":"openai.com","occurred_at":"2018-07-26T07:00:00+00:00","first_seen_at":"2026-06-05T05:42:57.832854+00:00","date_source":"rss.item_date","context":null},"context_markers":[{"label":"Lab","value":"OpenAI","source":"signal"},{"label":"Signal desk","value":"talking","source":"signal"},{"label":"Source host","value":"openai.com","source":"source"},{"label":"Watch term","value":"RL environments","source":"evidence"},{"label":"Watch term","value":"Infrastructure","source":"evidence"},{"label":"Watch term","value":"Safety and alignment","source":"evidence"},{"label":"Watch 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This talking signal gives public context for research themes, product direction, policy, or launch framing. 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First: we highlight a tight connection between variational option discovery methods and variational autoencoders, and introduce Variational Autoencoding Learning of Options by Reinforcement (VALOR), a new method derived from the connection. In VALOR, the policy encodes contexts from a noise distribution into trajectories, and the decoder recovers the contexts from the complete trajectories. Second: we propose a curriculum learning approach where the number of contexts seen by the agent increases whenever the agent's performance is strong enough (as measured by the decoder) on the current set of contexts. We show that this simple trick stabilizes training for VALOR and prior variational option discovery methods, allowing a single agent to learn many more modes of behavior than it could with a fixed context distribution. 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First: we highlight a tight connection between variational option discovery methods and variational autoencoders, and introduce Variational Autoencoding Learning of Options by Reinforcement (VALOR), a new method derived from the connection. In VALOR, the policy encodes contexts from a noise distribution into trajectories, and the decoder recovers the contexts from the complete trajectories. Second: we propose a curriculum learning approach where the number of contexts seen by the agent increases whenever the agent's performance is strong enough (as measured by the decoder) on the current set of contexts. We show that this simple trick stabilizes training for VALOR and prior variational option discovery methods, allowing a single agent to learn many more modes of behavior than it could with a fixed context distribution. 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