From Pixels to Digital Agents: An Empirical Study on the Taxonomy and Technological Trends of Reinforcement Learning Environments

Researchers conducted a large-scale empirical study analyzing over 2,000 publications to map the evolution of reinforcement learning environments. The study reveals a paradigm shift toward two distinct ecosystems: LLM-driven 'Semantic Prior' agents and 'Domain-Specific Generalization' systems, providing a roadmap for next-generation AI simulators.