In my essay “Just ask for Generalization”, I argued that some optimization capabilities, such as reinforcement learning from sub-optimal trajectories, might be better implemented by generalization than by construction. We have to generalize to unseen situations at deployment time anyway, so why not focus on generalization capability as the first class citizen, and then “just ask for optimality” as an unseen case? A corollary to this design philosophy is that we should discard inductiv...
