When Does Continual Learning Require Learning
arXiv:2607. 07847v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly capable, the next question is how can we enable models to continually learn?
The paper presents a finite‑model synthesis that integrates operational state abstraction with optimal control within a stability‑evidence‑revision (SER) framework, termed "Poincaré meets Bellman." It distinguishes qualitative dynamics for reusable action‑response structures from dynamic programming that governs acquisition, retention, reuse, merging, and forgetting, and introduces a Bellman recursion over the joint law of hidden state and deployed memory. The authors derive explicit retention rules, demonstrate how factor sharing and informative observations improve identification, and verify coding and retention calculations through finite enumerations.
arXiv:2607. 07847v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As large language models (LLMs) become increasingly capable, the next question is how can we enable models to continually learn?
The paper introduces Harness Continual Learning (HCL), a paradigm where an agent’s state evolves through prompts, memories, tools, skills, and routing rules while keeping the underlying foundation model frozen. HCL defines harness-level forgetting and proposes a guarded evolution process involving a Continual Optimizer and Evaluator to ensure improvements without losing prior behavior. Experiments across textual reasoning, multimodal perception, and open‑world interaction show over 10% performance gains and demonstrate how the stability–plasticity trade‑off can be explicitly tuned.
Revelation Control studies how to price interventions that reveal hidden state only when the revealed distinctions can alter a consequential decision, while separately accounting for any useful progress the intervention itself creates. The authors develop a framework for learning systems that defines decision‑sufficient revelation, revelation depth, and a cost‑adjusted factorization criterion, and they provide a target‑independent protocol for model‑specific instantiation. Experiments on Qwen2.5‑7B and Mistral‑7B‑v0.3 show that deeper future‑learning probes have positive decision value and that productive reuse yields strict equal‑compute utility advantages, supporting a structural transfer of the decision theory and evaluation protocol across architectures.
arXiv:2609.38911v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Learning must acquire new capabilities while preserving both prior responsibilities and the capacity to learn again. We introduce Generalized Residual...
arXiv:2605. 02405v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Closed-loop management of geological CO2 storage requires control policies that adapt to uncertain reservoir behavior while relying on observations that are realistically available during operation.
arXiv:2609.21108v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has achieved strong performance across a wide range of continuous-control problems. These continuous-control policies...
arXiv:2608. 11690v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continual learning must absorb new tasks without erasing old ones, and replay---mixing a small buffer of past examples into current training---is among the most effective remedies for catastrophic forgetting.
arXiv:2606. 10616v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-horizon language agents accumulate observations, reasoning traces, and retrieved facts that exceed their finite context windows, making memory retention a fundamental resource-allocation problem.
arXiv:2609.14138v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As LLM agents become integrated into increasingly complex workflows, they must continually acquire new capabilities while retaining competence on pre...
The paper investigates how small action errors evolve when using action chunking in behavioural cloning. By injecting errors at each state and observing their growth under open‑loop (no replanning) and closed‑loop (replanning) regimes, the authors classify states as contracting, expanding, or unresolved. Across twelve manipulation tasks, they find that stable states are rare, error amplification is common, and that short‑horizon fitting can overestimate long‑horizon propagation. Predictors trained on camera and proprioceptive data can recover open‑loop stability but only partially capture closed‑loop dynamics, indicating that standard imitation learning does not reliably produce policies that contract errors when perturbed.
arXiv:2603. 11395v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continual reinforcement learning challenges agents to acquire new skills while retaining previously learned ones with the goal of improving performance in both past and future tasks.
arXiv:2605.12978v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learning from past experience benefits from two complementary forms of memory: episodic traces -- raw trajectories of what happened -- and consolid...