The paper introduces Space-sampled Value Decay (SsVD), a forgetting mechanism designed for non-stationary reinforcement learning where the environment can drift at every timestep. SsVD selectively pulls value estimates of randomly chosen state-space elements toward a baseline, discarding outdated information without requiring reset or change-point detection. Integrated into Soft Actor Critic and Deep Q-Networks, SsVD outperforms its base algorithms across six non-stationary environments and can also promote optimism in hard-exploration tasks.
arXiv:2606. 11797v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Studies on rodents such as mice have shown the capabilities to adapt their behavior when dealing with changing parameters (``drift'') of the environment even if no information about change is provided (uncertainty) -- a behavior that can be modeled by forgetting mechanisms.
The paper investigates how to balance retaining past experience versus learning from new data when robot dynamics change. It introduces two metrics—change magnitude and age‑staleness AUC—to quantify when older transitions are helpful or harmful. Experiments on locomotion tasks and real‑world perturbations show that the optimal replay strategy depends on the size of the dynamics shift and the evolution of the system over time.
arXiv:2511. 03836v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Deep Q-Networks (DQNs) estimate future returns by learning from transitions sampled from a replay buffer.
arXiv:2606. 08452v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In many real-world settings, data streams are nonstationary and arrive sequentially, requiring learning systems to adapt continuously without retraining from scratch.
arXiv:2607. 04364v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continual post-training is becoming a central paradigm for adapting vision-language models to evolving tasks.
arXiv:2410.14606v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Learning from a stream of experience as it arrives, also known as streaming learning, is a core part of natural learning. However, reliable streami...
The paper tackles sample efficiency in image-based reinforcement learning by combining novelty and surprise signals to prioritize experiences. It proposes Novelty and Surprise Prioritized Experience Replay (NSPER) and an extended version, NSPER+R, which also uses these signals as intrinsic rewards. Experiments on DeepMind Control Suite tasks demonstrate that both methods accelerate training and improve convergence compared to existing techniques.
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?
arXiv:2606. 00350v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Offline reinforcement learning requires improving a policy from fixed data while avoiding out-of-distribution actions with unreliable value estimates.
The paper introduces Uncertainty-Driven Replay Memory (UDRM), a new experience replay buffer for reinforcement learning that prioritizes storing transitions with high uncertainty estimates. Unlike traditional buffers that rely on temporal difference error or transition distributions, UDRM updates its contents based on uncertainty derived from the RL model during training. Experiments show that this uncertainty-aware buffer leads to higher rewards during training compared to other uncertainty-aware RL frameworks.
The paper proposes Novelty and Surprise Prioritized Experience Replay (NSPER) for image-based reinforcement learning, combining novelty to highlight underrepresented states and surprise to reveal gaps in the agent’s knowledge. An extended version, NSPER+R, also uses these signals as intrinsic rewards to enhance both replay quality and exploration. Experiments on DeepMind Control Suite tasks demonstrate that NSPER and NSPER+R accelerate training and improve convergence compared to existing methods.
arXiv:2606. 05888v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Retry-based objectives such as pass@K and max@K optimize the best return obtained from multiple sampled trajectories, and recent work has shown that they can promote exploration without explicit exploration bonuses.