Changepoint-Aware World Models (CAWM) is a DreamerV3 agent that detects abrupt dynamics shifts in a robot’s environment using an online CUSUM test on internal prediction error. Upon detection, CAWM selectively forgets stale replay data while preserving the learned representation, enabling rapid recovery from shifts such as doubled gravity or halved actuator gain. Experiments on simulated locomotion show CAWM recovers faster than passive retraining and outperforms a baseline that respawns a fresh dynamics model, achieving significant return gains in the first 30k post‑shift frames.
By Everest Yang
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 SsVD selectively pulls value estimates of randomly chosen state-space elements toward a baseline, discarding outdated information without requiring reset or change-point detection.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:2608. 13600v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We study Evolution Strategies (ES) for continual control, where agents must adapt to changing tasks without forgetting previous ones.
By Nicola Pitzalis, Eleni Nisioti, Antonio Carta, Davide Bacciu, Andrea Cossu
The paper introduces a compositional continual learning benchmark for world models in robot manipulation, designed to isolate knowledge reuse from learning speed and capacity. Tasks are curated to combine previously seen action and perception components, allowing analysis of how different modalities affect reuse. Experiments show that modular world models better balance reuse and forgetting than conventional methods, yet none fully solve the challenge, highlighting the need for models explicitly built to reuse knowledge without forgetting.
By Haoyu Zhou, Joe Watson, Anson Lei, Ingmar Posner
arXiv:2607. 01111v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robot policies inevitably encounter failures when deployed in real environments.
By Haoran Hao, Shahram Najam Syed, Jeffrey Ichnowski, Jeff Schneider
arXiv:2603. 11395v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Continual reinforcement learning challenges agents to acquire new skills while retaining previously learned ones with the goal of improving performance in both past and future tasks.
By Abdulaziz Alyahya, Abdallah Al Siyabi, Markus R. Ernst, Luke Yang, Levin Kuhlmann, Gideon Kowadlo