The gray agent consistently chooses the cyan object over the yellow object (a) . The same gray agent moves to the preferred cyan object (b).

In this supplementary material we provide additional details about: Video (with audio) for qualitative illustration of our task and qualitative evaluation of our model predictions (Sec. Evaluation of the impact of the query source location on our model's prediction quality for a fixed receiver (Sec. Moreover, we qualitatively demonstrate our model's prediction quality by comparing the predictions with the ground truths, both at the RIR level and in terms of perceptual similarity when the RIRs are convolved with real-world monaural sounds, like speech and music. We also analyze common failure cases for our model (Sec. Please use headphones to hear the spatial audio correctly.

Meta-Reinforcement Learning (Meta-RL) agents can struggle to operate across tasks with varying environmental features that require different optimal skills (i.e., different modes of behaviour). Using context encoders based on contrastive learning to enhance the generalisability of Meta-RL agents is now widely studied but faces challenges such as the requirement for a large sample size, also referred to as the $\log$-$K$ curse. To improve RL generalisation to different tasks, we first introduce Skill-aware Mutual Information (SaMI), an optimisation objective that aids in distinguishing context embeddings according to skills, thereby equipping RL agents with the ability to identify and execute different skills across tasks. We then propose Skill-aware Noise Contrastive Estimation (SaNCE), a $K$-sample estimator used to optimise the SaMI objective. We provide a framework for equipping an RL agent with SaNCE in practice and conduct experimental validation on modified MuJoCo and Panda-gym benchmarks. We empirically find that RL agents that learn by maximising SaMI achieve substantially improved zero-shot generalisation to unseen tasks. Additionally, the context encoder trained with SaNCE demonstrates greater robustness to a reduction in the number of available samples, thus possessing the potential to overcome the $\log$-$K$ curse.

Real-world decision-making tasks are usually partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs), where the state is not fully observable. Recent progress has demonstrated that recurrent reinforcement learning (RL), which consists of a context encoder based on recurrent neural networks (RNNs) for unobservable state prediction and a multilayer perceptron (MLP) policy for decision making, can mitigate partial observability and serve as a robust baseline for POMDP tasks. However, prior recurrent RL algorithms have faced issues with training instability. In this paper, we find that this instability stems from the autoregressive nature of RNNs, which causes even small changes in RNN parameters to produce large output variations over long trajectories.

Offline meta-reinforcement learning (OMRL) utilizes pre-collected offline datasets to enhance the agent's generalization ability on unseen tasks.