Towards bandit-based prompt-tuning for in-the-wild foundation agents

Abstract: Prompting has emerged as the dominant paradigm for adapting large, pre-trained transformer-based models to downstream tasks. The Prompting Decision Transformer (PDT) enables large-scale, multi-task offline reinforcement learning pre-training by leveraging stochastic trajectory prompts to identify the target task. However, these prompts are sampled uniformly from expert demonstrations, overlooking a critical limitation: Not all prompts are equally informative for differentiating between tasks. To address this, we propose an inference time bandit-based prompt-tuning framework that explores and optimizes trajectory prompt selection to enhance task performance. Our experiments indicate not only clear performance gains due to bandit-based prompt-tuning, but also better sample complexity, scalability, and prompt space exploration compared to prompt-tuning baselines.