arXiv Machine Learning

Emergent Sparsity in Frozen Random CNN Feature Extractors for Deep Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2607. 26059v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We report a striking phenomenon: deep reinforcement learning agents trained with frozen, randomly initialized CNN feature extractors spontaneously develop extremely sparse fully-connected representations, without any sparsity-inducing objective.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 5

Expand Neurons, Not Parameters

arXiv:2510. 04500v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This work demonstrates how increasing the number of neurons in a network without increasing its total number of non-zero parameters improves performance.

By Linghao Kong, Inimai Subramanian, Yonadav Shavit, Micah Adler, Dan Alistarh, Nir Shavit
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Explore More, Drift Less: Outcome-Only Reinforcement Learning Can Suffice for Long-Horizon Interactive Agents

The paper proposes CANOPY, a minimalist reinforcement learning protocol that addresses two common pitfalls—signal starvation and policy drift—in outcome‑only RL for long‑horizon interactive tasks. By scaling same‑task exploration, keeping updates on‑policy, and anchoring updates with KL divergence, CANOPY enables a Qwen3‑14B agent to achieve top leaderboard results on the AppWorld coding benchmark without auxiliary supervision or elaborate scaffolding. The approach also improves performance on SWE‑bench for a Qwen3.5‑9B model.

By Liming Pu, Xiaoxia Li, Yifu Liu, Teng Cao, Bin Yang