arXiv Machine Learning

Uncertainty-Driven Replay Memory for Reinforcement Learning

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.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 18

Integrating Novelty and Surprise for Experience Prioritization and Exploration in Image-Based Reinforcement Learning

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 AI
Jun 29

Uncertainty-Aware Reward Discounting for Mitigating Reward Hacking

arXiv:2604. 26360v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) systems face a compounding alignment challenge: not only are learned reward models uncertain about unseen state-action pairs, but the human preference annotations they are trained on are themselves inconsistent, context-dependent, and noisy.

By Disha Singha
arXiv AI
Jun 8

Exploring Agentic Tool-Calling Decisions via Uncertainty-Aligned Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606. 06976v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language model (LLM)-based agents often make suboptimal tool-use decisions, including unsupported tool invocation and hallucinated direct responses, which may accumulate errors throughout multi-step interactions.

By Yijin Zhou, Linqian Zeng, Xiaoya Lu, Wenyuan Xie, Dongrui Liu, Junchi Yan, Jing Shao
arXiv AI
Aug 19

Integrating Novelty and Surprise for Experience Prioritization and Exploration in Image-Based Reinforcement Learning

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.

By Hoda Yamani, Henry Williams, Bruce A. MacDonald
arXiv AI
Sep 4

Headroom-Drift Replay: A Primitive for Principled Replay Control in GRPO

Headroom-Drift Replay is a replay control primitive designed for GRPO that separates reuse into two decisions: Headroom ranks stored groups by remaining learning value, while Drift gates them by compatibility with the current policy. The method keeps the fresh on‑policy stream unchanged and adds no auxiliary generation or training machinery. Across mathematical reasoning, multimodal reasoning, and Agentic Search benchmarks, it outperforms naive replay and matches or exceeds broader replay methods on Avg Mean@32, delivering comparable quality at materially lower wall‑clock time in Agentic Search.

By Hyun Bin Park, Du-Seong Chang
arXiv Machine Learning
1d ago

Space-sampled Value Decay: Forgetting Mechanisms for Non-stationary Reinforcement Learning

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.

By Felix St\"orck, Philipp Hartmann, Fabian Hinder, Klaus Neumann, Barbara Hammer
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 2

All Models are Wrong, Knowing Where is Useful: On Model Uncertainty in Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606. 01363v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) infers information about the environment from a learned dynamics model and bears the potential to address open problems such as data efficient and safe learning in robotics.

By Bernd Frauenknecht, Devdutt Subhasish, Artur Eisele, Friedrich Solowjow, Sebastian Trimpe
arXiv AI
Jun 2

Emergence of Exploration in Policy Gradient Reinforcement Learning via Retrying

arXiv:2606. 00151v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In reinforcement learning (RL), agents benefit from exploration only because they repeatedly encounter similar states: trying different actions can improve performance or reduce uncertainty; without such retries, a greedy policy is optimal.

By Soichiro Nishimori, Paavo Parmas, Sotetsu Koyamada, Tadashi Kozuno, Toshinori Kitamura, Shin Ishii, Yutaka Matsuo