arXiv:2509. 25582v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: In-context reinforcement learning (ICRL) is an emerging RL paradigm where an agent, after pretraining, can adapt to out-of-distribution test tasks without any parameter updates, instead relying on an expanding context of interaction history.
arXiv:2607. 11906v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The development of decision-pretrained transformers, algorithm distillation, long-context meta-RL, and retrieval-augmented agents has renewed interest in in-context reinforcement learning (ICRL): the ability of a pretrained or fine-tuned decision model to infer latent task rules and improve future behavior from interaction context, without test-time parameter updates.
arXiv:2604. 00830v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Test-Time Learning (TTL) enables language agents to iteratively refine their performance through repeated interactions with the environment at inference time.
METTA: Memory-Enhanced Test-Time Adaptation for Meta-Reinforcement Learning proposes a new approach that splits fast adaptation into two temporal scales: a causal neural memory for fine-grained within-episode adaptation with linear complexity, and compact episode-level summaries for long-range cross-episode inference. This design reduces the quadratic memory and computation costs of transformer-based agents while retaining expressive capacity for test-time training. Experiments on unseen Meta-World and PointMaze tasks show METTA achieves over 50% success on Meta-World and outperforms transformer baselines on long-context sparse-reward environments.
TextualRL is a gradient‑free reinforcement learning framework that updates the textual context guiding large language model agents without altering their parameters. It treats groups of rollouts from the same task as units of critique, contrasting successful and failed runs to generate context patches, and validates these patches using held‑out rewards. Experiments on six benchmarks show that TextualRL boosts test accuracy by 24.4 and 15.3 percentage points for GPT‑5.5 and Qwen3.8‑27B, respectively.
LLM agents increasingly improve at inference time by accumulating experience in context rather than by updating parameters. This process is often described as in-context reinforcement learning (ICRL)....
TextualRL is a gradient‑free reinforcement learning framework that updates the textual context guiding large language model agents without altering their parameters. It critiques groups of rollouts from the same task, contrasts successful and failed runs, and uses cross‑group evidence to propose and validate context edits. Across six benchmarks, TextualRL boosts test accuracy by 24.4 and 15.3 percentage points for GPT‑5.5 and Qwen3.8‑27B, respectively.
arXiv:2609.37591v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Test-time adaptation for vision-language navigation (TTA-VLN) enables pretrained policies to adapt online to unseen environments using only test-time...
arXiv:2507. 04221v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We introduce Context Tuning, a simple and effective method to significantly enhance few-shot adaptation of large language models (LLMs) without weight updates.
The paper investigates whether large language models (LLMs) can learn from rewards presented in context, a process termed in‑context reinforcement learning (ICRL). Through experiments on four benchmarks and six models, the authors find that while LLMs read reward signals, altering or removing these signals has little effect on performance, and that trajectory structure—rather than reward content—drives improvement. These results suggest that direct ICRL behaves more like standard in‑context learning (ICL) than true inference‑time reinforcement learning.
arXiv:2607. 18830v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Model-Agnostic Meta-Learning (MAML) is a widely used framework for reinforcement learning (RL) that enables efficient transfer by learning global policy parameters that can be rapidly adapted to new tasks.
arXiv:2610.20318v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement-learning policies for robot locomotion can fail at deployment when operating conditions shift (e.g., rough or slippery terrain, payload...