Feedback-driven loops support iterative improvement in large language models, reinforcement learning, and autonomous discovery, yet their gains often diminish under repeated internal feedback. We study why closed-loop knowledge systems saturate and what external information can move them beyond their current attractors.
arXiv:2607. 04470v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a natural interface for translating human objectives into reward signals for cooperative multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), yet the training-time dynamics of this integration remain poorly understood.
By Faid Keddouri, Sohaib Houhou, Aissa Boulmerka, Nadir Farhi
arXiv:2607. 16858v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Across environments with mixed sources of uncertainty, unsupervised reinforcement learning requires intrinsic motivation that does not precommit to a particular direction of surprise.
By Alireza Furutanpey, Schahram Dustdar
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.
By A Run, Ziluo Ding
arXiv:2605. 25582v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reinforcement learning for large language models faces a fundamental trade-off between sample efficiency and asymptotic performance: strictly on-policy methods discard trajectories after a single update, while off-policy reuse introduces distribution mismatch that existing trust-region techniques mitigate primarily by enforcing conservative optimization, often leaving rich training signals underutilized.
By Changyu Chen, Xiting Wang, Rui Yan
arXiv:2606. 09929v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Physical reservoir computing harnesses nonlinear mechanical dynamics but, by convention, freezes the substrate and trains only a linear readout, presuming the substrate is not usefully trainable.
By Caleb Munigety
arXiv:2605. 15219v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Can AI systems discover new knowledge through iterative self-improvement, and at what cost?
By Salman Avestimehr, Ken Duffy, Muriel M\'edard
arXiv:2606. 30789v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) has become a standard tool for improving the reasoning ability of large language models, yet its training dynamics are still described empirically: reward trajectories are fit with low-parameter functional forms whose constants carry no mechanistic meaning, and hyperparameter choices remain a matter of trial and error.
By Rajat Ghosh, Datta Nimmaturi, Aryan Singhal, Vaishnavi Bhargava, Henry Wong, Johnu George, Debojyoti Dutta
arXiv:2606. 19476v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Effective machine learning depends not only on how we model data, but also on what data we choose to collect.
By Eric Elmoznino, Sangnie Bhardwaj, Johannes von Oswald, Rajai Nasser, Blaise Ag\"uera y Arcas, Jo\~ao Sacramento, Rif A. Saurous, Guillaume Lajoie
arXiv:2606. 16933v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) systems often degrade when operating conditions differ from those previously encountered, reflecting distributional shifts in the underlying data-generating process.
By Ardianto Wibowo, Paulo E Santos, Amer Baghdadi, Matthew Stephenson, Karl Sammut, Jean-Philippe Diguet
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:2606. 18844v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Self-distillation improves reasoning in large language models by using the model's own rollouts as training signal, typically through implicit logit-level alignment that minimizes KL divergence toward a privileged target distribution.
By Zhilin Huang, Hang Gao, Ziqiang Dong, Yuan Chen, Yifeng Luo, Chujun Qin, Jingyi Wang, Yang Yang, Guanjun Jiang