The paper investigates continual reinforcement learning using neuroevolution, comparing evolution strategies (ES) and genetic algorithms (GAs) across diverse environments and network sizes. ES consistently achieves a better balance between stability and plasticity, while GAs are more plastic but forget more. The authors attribute this to ES finding wider neighborhoods in weight space, with overlap between consecutive tasks correlating with the stability-plasticity trade‑off, and note that common RL plasticity issues do not transfer to neuroevolution.
By Eleni Nisioti, Andrea Cossu, Kathrin Korte, Sebastian Risi
arXiv:2507.11482v5 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Artificial learning systems are graduating from passive learners to increasingly autonomous agents, lending pragmatic urgency to the question of wh...
By Mani Hamidi, Terrence W. Deacon
arXiv:2608. 05111v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In partially observable reinforcement learning, agents face a dual bottleneck: they must explore to encounter rewarding states and retain that experience in memory to optimize their policies.
By Jai Malegaonkar, Rohan Patil, Henrik I. Christensen
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
The paper introduces Feedback‑Enriched Environments (FEEs) as a new approach to training large language models as autonomous agents for long‑horizon tasks. By shifting from action guidance to observation enrichment during later stages of exploration, FEEs improve performance across SciWorld and BFCL benchmarks with various Qwen3 model scales and RL algorithms. The study shows that FEEs stabilize training, promote proactive exploration, embed environmental guidance into policy weights, and highlight intra‑group feedback consistency as key for stable optimization.
By Hongbang Yuan, Zhuoran Jin, Yixin Cao
The paper introduces Reinforcement Learning with Decomposed Subtasks (RLDS), a method that splits trajectory rewards into per‑subtask shares before policy updates, replacing the scalar advantage used in Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). RLDS employs Subtask‑Decomposed Advantage Estimation (SDAE) to compute group‑relative advantages and distribute credit to tokens based on subtask importance, focusing on steps where a reflection marks a subtask as consequential. Experiments on four benchmarks—FrozenLake, HotpotQA, ScienceWorld, and DeepResearch—show that RLDS improves performance on high‑heterogeneity tasks (ScienceWorld and FrozenLake) and is more compute‑efficient than scalar GRPO for long rollouts.
By Mattie Terzolo, Mikolaj Sacha, Ayan Sinha, Andrew Rabinovich
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 investigates whether artificial evolution can replicate biological neuromodulation and diverse neuron types in indirectly encoded substrates. Experiments show that neuromodulation alone cannot overcome a 75% performance ceiling on parity tasks, but combining neuromodulation with per‑task activation function selection allows a single evolving genotype to achieve 100% success across five tasks. This demonstrates that both neuromodulation and evolvable computational primitives are necessary for multi‑behavioral open‑ended evolution.
By Romain Claret, Michael O'Neill, Paul Cotofrei, Kilian Stoffel
arXiv:2608. 03929v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Aligning diffusion models with human preferences usually relies on a sparse terminal reward evaluated on the final generated samples, presenting a severe temporal credit-assignment challenge across the multi-step denoising process.
By Yuanshen Guan, Zipeng Feng, Zhiwei Xiong, Peiqin Sun
arXiv:2609.17325v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Biological cells can be viewed as individual, interacting agents whose collective dynamics give rise to adaptive behaviour at multiple levels of organi...
By Anatoly Belikov
arXiv:2607. 21971v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Test-time scaling through iterative self-evolution with environment feedback, as demonstrated by AlphaEvolve, shows remarkable performance gains.
By Shujin Wu, Cheng Qian, Xiusi Chen, Heng Ji
The paper introduces ELEMENT, a framework that combines episodic and lifelong entropy maximization to drive reward-free exploration in reinforcement learning. It addresses two key limitations of existing entropy-based methods: the vanishing intrinsic reward after a state is visited and the computational cost of estimating entropy over large datasets. ELEMENT achieves this by deriving an average episodic state entropy reward and employing a k‑NN graph‑based estimator for lifelong entropy, leading to superior state coverage and unsupervised pre‑training performance compared to current baselines.
By Hongming Li, Zhao Yang, Xiaoxuan Liang, Shujian Yu, Jose C. Principe