Invited Talk Wed, Dec 3, 2025 • 8:30 AM – 9:30 AM PST

The Oak Architecture: A Vision of SuperIntelligence from Experience

Rich Sutton

Abstract

As AI has become a huge industry, to an extent it has lost its way. What is needed to get us back on track to true intelligence? We need agents that learn continually. We need world models and planning. We need knowledge that is high-level and learnable. We need to meta-learn how to generalize. The Oak architecture is one answer to all these needs. It is a model-based RL architecture with three special features: 1) all of its components learn continually, 2) each learned weight has a dedicated step-size parameter that is meta-learned using online cross-validation, and 3) abstractions in state and time are continually created in a five-step progression: Feature Construction, posing a SubTask based on the feature, learning an Option to solve the subtask, learning a Model of the option, and Planning using the option’s model (the FC-STOMP progression). The Oak architecture is rather meaty; in this talk we give an outline and point to the many works, prior and contemporaneous, that are contributing to its overall vision of how superintelligence can arise from an agent’s experience.

Speaker

Rich Sutton

Research Scientist, Keen Technologies; Professor, University of Alberta; Chief Scientific Advisor, Amii; Chief Scientific Officer, ExperienceFlow.ai. Sutton co-developed temporal difference learning and policy gradient methods in reinforcement learning. He received the 2024 Turing Award with Andrew Barto for foundational contributions to reinforcement learning. He is co-author of the textbook "Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction" and is a Fellow of the Royal Society and the Royal Society of Canada. His research focuses on computational principles underlying learning and decision-making.

Video

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