Temporal credit assignment is central to both biological and artificial intelligence, yet its interaction with non-linear function approximation is poorly understood. We identify a systematic failure mode in deep reinforcement learning (RL) termed Trace-Mediated Peak Bias (TMPB).
arXiv:2606. 04492v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) frequently suffers from severe reward sparsity and exploration bottlenecks.
By Zicheng Zhao, Yu Lan, Chengzhengxu Li, Zhaohan Zhang, Xiaoming Liu
arXiv:2608. 08158v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Sparse, delayed, and weakly informative rewards remain central obstacles to efficient reinforcement learning.
By Fouad Bahrpeyma
The paper presents a framework that uses saliency maps to create hierarchical attention profiles, tracking how deep reinforcement learning agents allocate attention over time. By comparing these attention trajectories across different conditions and linking them to behavioral metrics, the study reveals algorithm‑specific biases, unintended reward‑driven strategies, and overfitting to redundant sensory inputs. Experiments on Atari 2600 games, custom Pong environments, and biomechanical visuomotor simulations demonstrate that these attention patterns correspond to measurable behavioral differences, establishing attention trajectories as a diagnostic tool beyond traditional performance metrics.
By Charlotte Beylier, Hannah Selder, Arthur Fleig, Simon M. Hofmann, Nico Scherf
arXiv:2602. 05459v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Offline goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) is typically benchmarked by the best tuned success rate of each method.
By Jan Malte T\"opperwien, Aditya Mohan, Marius Lindauer
arXiv:2607. 16999v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The Credit Assignment Problem (CAP) is fundamental to developing efficient and explainable Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents.
By Mingxuan Li, Kaizhan-Lee, Elias Bareinboim
arXiv:2606. 10129v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While deep Reinforcement Learning (deep-RL) has been increasingly applied to parameter control in evolutionary algorithms, rigorous theoretical analysis of parameter control remains largely restricted to single-parameter settings, owing to the difficulty of deriving effective, interpretable multi-parameter policies amenable to formal study.
By Tai Nguyen, Phong Le, Carola Doerr, Nguyen Dang
arXiv:2606. 20858v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: The temporal structure of reward composition in reinforcement learning (RL) is typically hand-designed and held fixed throughout training, leaving the progression of motivational priorities largely unexplored.
By Alan Nadelsticher Ruvalcaba
arXiv:2603.02935v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Offline meta-reinforcement learning seeks to learn a policy that generalizes to new related tasks online. Context-based methods infer a task repres...
By Mohammadreza Nakheai, Aidan Scannell, Kevin Luck, Joni Pajarinen
arXiv:2608.23664v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Reward fine-tuning is becoming an important tool for adapting diffusion models to human preferences and task-specific objectives, but existing method...
By Jaemoo Choi, Wei Guo, Yuchen Zhu, Arash Vahdat, Molei Tao, Julius Berner, Yongxin Chen
arXiv:2602. 08335v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) with external tools via multi-agent systems offers a promising new paradigm for decomposing and solving complex problems.
By Yanming Li, Xuelin Zhang, WenJie Lu, Ziye Tang, Maodong Wu, Haotian Luo, Tongtong Wu, Zijie Peng, Hongze Mi, Yibo Feng, Naiqiang Tan, Chao Huang, Lian Peng, Li Shen
arXiv:2608.21830v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Graphical User Interface (GUI) agents powered by Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown strong potential for automating tasks across diver...
By Chengyang Gu, Le Zhang, Jingbo Zhou, Yize Chen, Yu Shi, Siqi Bao, Zheng-Fan Wu, Hua Wu, Hui Xiong