arXiv AI By Seyed Mahdi B. Azad, Jasper Hoffmann, Iman Nematollahi, Hao Zhu, Abhinav Valada, Joschka Boedecker

Spectral Alignment in Forward-Backward Representations via Temporal Abstraction

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arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 31

Shift Before You Learn: Enabling Low-Rank Representations in Reinforcement Learning

The paper challenges the common assumption that the successor measure in reinforcement learning is approximately low-rank, showing instead that a low-rank structure emerges in a shifted successor measure that ignores initial transitions. It provides finite-sample guarantees for estimating this low-rank approximation, introduces Type II Poincaré inequalities to bound spectral recoverability, and links the necessary shift to the decay of high-order singular values and local mixing properties. Experiments confirm that shifting the successor measure improves goal-conditioned RL performance.

By Bastien Dubail, Stefan Stojanovic, Alexandre Prouti\`ere
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 24

SPARCL: Spectral Partitioned Analytic Continual Learning

SPARCL introduces a spectral partitioned analytic continual learning method that addresses forgetting in analytic class‑incremental learning. By decomposing the running autocorrelation into a high‑energy core and a residual complement, SPARCL freezes core components for old classes and updates only the residual block, ensuring closed‑form updates with an invariance guarantee. Experiments on CIFAR‑100, CUB‑200, ImageNet‑R, and ImageNet‑A with a frozen ViT‑B/16 protocol show that SPARCL narrows the performance gap between classical analytic learners and strong representation matchers while complementing sparse feature‑decorrelation approaches.

By James Hartley, Zeropy Surio, Daniel Whitmore, Hannah Clarke, Thomas Reed