In-context reinforcement learning – Definition & Meaning

Definition of in-context reinforcement learning

: the ability of a sequence model or agent to improve its behavior during interaction by using earlier observations, actions, and rewards in its context, without updating the model's parameters
- The agent demonstrated in-context reinforcement learning when it changed strategy after seeing which earlier actions earned rewards.
- ICRL let one pretrained policy adapt to a new task from its interaction history instead of starting a new gradient-based training run.

Origin & history

first known use2022

The phrase was established by the 2022 paper In-context Reinforcement Learning with Algorithm Distillation. That work trained a causal sequence model on reinforcement-learning histories so it could reproduce policy improvement within its context at inference time, without changing its weights.

Editorial references

Sources & further reading

3 sources

In-context Reinforcement Learning with Algorithm Distillation Research Paper · arXiv · 2022-10-25
A Survey of In-Context Reinforcement Learning Research Survey · arXiv · 2025-02-12
In-Context Reinforcement Learning under Non-Stationarity: A Survey Research Survey · arXiv · 2026-07

Test yourself

Which of these is the meaning of in-context reinforcement learning?

Related terms

in-context learning a model's ability to pick up a new task from instructions or examples given in the prompt… reinforcement learning a way of training in which a model tries actions, receives rewards or penalties, and gradually… context window the maximum amount of text, measured in tokens, that a model can consider at one time… continual learning an approach in which a machine-learning system learns from a sequence or stream of changing… test-time adaptation a family of methods that adjust a trained model, its internal statistics, or its predictions… memory a feature that lets an AI keep information about a user or task across separate conversations…

Cite this entry

"In-context reinforcement learning." AI Dictionary, Dadgogo, https://dadgogo.com/dictionary/in-context-reinforcement-learning/. Accessed 15 Oct. 2026.