awakening

Definition

A metaphor for a latent capability surfacing after some intervention — a behaviour like self-correction appearing partway through reinforcement learning, where continuous training seems to produce a discontinuous change. It is evocative rather than precise, and close kin to the emergence debate, in which apparent jumps have sometimes turned out to be artefacts of the chosen metric. Go back to the measured quantity before taking the word literally.

Explainers using this term

• Paper Explained: EnvHarness — Reshaping an Agent's Training World Without Rebuilding ItEnvHarness: Awakening Static Worlds for Agent Learning