{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/cic-contrastive-intrinsic-control-for-1","title":"CIC: Contrastive Intrinsic Control for Unsupervised Skill Discovery","arxiv_id":"2202.00161","date":"2022-02-01","proceeding":null,"authors":["Michael Laskin","Hao liu","Xue Bin Peng","Denis Yarats","Aravind Rajeswaran","Pieter Abbeel"],"abstract":"We introduce Contrastive Intrinsic Control (CIC), an algorithm for unsupervised skill discovery that maximizes the mutual information between state-transitions and latent skill vectors. CIC utilizes contrastive learning between state-transitions and skills to learn behavior embeddings and maximizes the entropy of these embeddings as an intrinsic reward to encourage behavioral diversity. We evaluate our algorithm on the Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning Benchmark, which consists of a long reward-free pre-training phase followed by a short adaptation phase to downstream tasks with extrinsic rewards. CIC substantially improves over prior methods in terms of adaptation efficiency, outperforming prior unsupervised skill discovery methods by 1.79x and the next leading overall exploration algorithm by 1.18x.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2202.00161v3","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2202.00161v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"cic-contrastive-intrinsic-control-for-1","repo_url":"https://github.com/rll-research/cic","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"contrastive-learning","task_name":"Contrastive Learning"},{"task_slug":"diversity","task_name":"Diversity"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-1","task_name":"Reinforcement Learning (RL)"},{"task_slug":"unsupervised-reinforcement-learning","task_name":"Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning"},{"task_slug":"reinforcement-learning-2","task_name":"reinforcement-learning"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"contrastive-learning","method_name":"Contrastive Learning"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2202.00161","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2202.00161"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/rll-research/cic","reach":{"status":"ok"}}],"summary":{"ran_draft_wrong":1,"unverified":1},"by_repo_kind":{},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":2,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"ac6616507abf7f64","entry":"compute_apt_reward","repo":null,"repo_kind":null,"path":null,"file_url":null,"link_basis":"identical_code_first_harvested_elsewhere","language":"python","status":"ran_draft_wrong","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"MISDECLARED","metamorphic_tier":"invariant","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":null,"inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"ac6616507abf7f64"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"2a76dfe317adeb03","entry":"make_agent","repo":null,"repo_kind":null,"path":null,"file_url":null,"link_basis":"identical_code_first_harvested_elsewhere","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":null,"inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"2a76dfe317adeb03"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}