Mixture-of-Experts Meets In-Context Reinforcement Learning
Authors: name: Wenhao Wu; name: Fuhong Liu; name: Haoru Li; name: Zican Hu; name: Daoyi Dong; name: Chunlin Chen; name: Zhi Wang
Published: 2025-06-05 06:29:14

Abstract: In-context reinforcement learning (ICRL) has emerged as a promising paradigm
for adapting RL agents to downstream tasks through prompt conditioning.
However, two notable challenges remain in fully harnessing in-context learning
within RL domains: the intrinsic multi-modality of the state-action-reward data
and the diverse, heterogeneous nature of decision tasks. To tackle these
challenges, we propose T2MIR (Token- and Task-wise
MoE for In-context RL), an innovative framework that
introduces architectural advances of mixture-of-experts (MoE) into
transformer-based decision models. T2MIR substitutes the feedforward layer with
two parallel layers: a token-wise MoE that captures distinct semantics of input
tokens across multiple modalities, and a task-wise MoE that routes diverse
tasks to specialized experts for managing a broad task distribution with
alleviated gradient conflicts. To enhance task-wise routing, we introduce a
contrastive learning method that maximizes the mutual information between the
task and its router representation, enabling more precise capture of
task-relevant information. The outputs of two MoE components are concatenated
and fed into the next layer. Comprehensive experiments show that T2MIR
significantly facilitates in-context learning capacity and outperforms various
types of baselines. We bring the potential and promise of MoE to ICRL, offering
a simple and scalable architectural enhancement to advance ICRL one step closer
toward achievements in language and vision communities. Our code is available
at https://github.com/NJU-RL/T2MIR.