Definition
Plain language
When an AI agent acts on what it thinks it knows before checking how the world actually works.
As stated in the literature
A characterized agent failure mode in which a model applies prior knowledge to a task before acquiring sufficient environment-specific information, often after task-only RL training has narrowed its exploratory behavior.
Why it matters: It explains why task-reward RL can make agents worse at unfamiliar environments by shrinking the exploration that uncovers local quirks.
For example, an agent uses its memorized SQL knowledge to query a custom database before checking which tables actually exist there.
Heard on the show
“They call it premature exploitation.”Episode 052 — An Old Reinforcement Learning Tradeoff Sneaks Back Into LLM Agents