arXiv AI

Transfer Learning Across Policy Regimes in Adaptive Multi-Agent Systems

arXiv:2607. 09685v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Policy models often assume that the relationship between a policy instrument and its outcome remains stable across institutional conditions.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

Transfer Learning for Evolving Domains

The paper introduces Transfer Learning for Evolving Domains (TrED), a framework that models how data availability changes over time in real-world applications. TrED treats the entire trajectory of model updates as a single learning problem, rather than isolated snapshots, and defines a data availability process, a flexible learning protocol, and an evaluation criterion that scores the whole trajectory. The authors review existing transfer learning methods, noting that most are tailored to specific regimes and do not optimize the full trajectory, and argue that TrED is a well‑posed, unsolved research direction.

By Ricardo Ribeiro Pereira, Jacopo Bono, Hugo Ferreira, Pedro Ribeiro, Pedro Saleiro, Pedro Bizarro, Carlos Soares
arXiv Machine Learning
5d ago

Offline Policy Evaluation as a decision support tool for designing Adaptive Experiments

The paper explores how data from fixed A/B tests can guide the deployment of adaptive experiments using contextual bandits. By combining off‑policy evaluation with a controlled warm‑start simulation, the authors rank pre‑specified adaptive and non‑adaptive policies using doubly robust estimators. Experiments on synthetic trials and real benchmarks show that adaptive, context‑aware policies outperform fixed allocations when heterogeneity exists, but offer little advantage otherwise.

By Jo\~ao Victor Ferreira Alves, Eduardo Rocha Laurentino, Gustavo de Oliveira Kanno, Thiago Costa Rizuti da Rocha
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 28

Shared Actors Need Not Share Critics: Effects of Value Mismatch in Parallel Reinforcement Learning

The paper investigates the problem of sharing a single critic across multiple parallel environments in reinforcement learning. It shows that when environments assign different expected returns to the same state, a shared critic must reconcile conflicting value targets, which can distort advantage estimates and misguide policy updates. The authors propose a simple fix—providing the critic with the environment index—demonstrating through bandit models and experiments on CartPole, MuJoCo, BipedalWalker, and 16 Procgen games that this conditional critic stabilizes learning and boosts returns, achieving a 40.8% improvement in aggregate normalized return on unseen levels.

By Zhenya Liu, Yang Meng, Zhuokai Zhao, Xuefeng Liu, Yuxin Chen
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 26

Sample-efficient Transfer Reinforcement Learning via Adaptive Reward Shaping and Policy-Ratio Reweighting Strategy

arXiv:2606. 26527v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Transfer learning improves policy learning efficiency by reusing knowledge from source tasks, providing a feasible paradigm for safe and efficient autonomous highway lane changing decision-making.

By Wenjie Huang, Yang Li, Jingjia Teng, Mingwei Jin, Kai Song, Yougang Bian, Yongfu Li, Qisong Yang, Helai Huang