arXiv:2603. 16842v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Stochastic resetting -- intermittently returning a process to a fixed reference state -- has emerged as an effective mechanism for optimizing first-passage properties.
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.
REVERSAL-BENCH is a benchmark that introduces a continuous reversibility parameter ρ∈[0,1] and a reset oracle to evaluate how well reinforcement learning agents can recover from irreversible states across eight manipulation tasks in five physics engines. Experiments show a sharp reversibility cliff: reset‑free agents become trapped in irrecoverable states as ρ increases, while episodic agents continue learning steadily. The benchmark also provides a large multi‑simulator dataset and demonstrates that safety shields can predict recoverability but only succeed when the agent can avoid the trap.
arXiv:2606. 15247v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The asymptotic behaviour of Monte Carlo Exploring Starts (MCES) is a long-standing open question in reinforcement learning, even in the tabular setting.
arXiv:2512.08463v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study how privileged information about a physical system affects the discovery of high-performing policies when training a reinforcement learnin...
arXiv:2505. 18347v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continual reinforcement learning (RL) concerns agents that are expected to learn continually, rather than converge to a policy that is then fixed for evaluation.
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. 24996v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural networks are hindered by accumulating dormant neurons and loss of expressivity throughout training, particularly in non-stationary data settings, such as continual supervised and reinforcement learning.
The paper introduces On‑Policy Warmup (OPW), a teacher‑guided training stage where a student agent learns from a teacher on its own interaction trajectories before switching to reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). OPW differs from traditional imitation by focusing on states generated by the student’s own decisions, including imperfect actions and recovery situations. The authors provide a theoretical link between on‑policy reverse‑KL distillation and trajectory‑level distribution matching, showing that, under a competent teacher and low distillation loss, OPW can lower bound initial verifier success and reduce reward‑discovery complexity, thereby accelerating RLVR performance.
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:2609.21108v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has achieved strong performance across a wide range of continuous-control problems. These continuous-control policies...
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.
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.