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Permanent and Transient Representations for Continual Reinforcement Learning

2026-11-05 02:11:47
Nishanth Anand, Doina Precup
arXiv_AI
       
Abstract

Continual Reinforcement Learning (CRL) agents struggle to adapt to new situations while retaining prior knowledge, leading to a stability-plasticity trade-off. One approach to solving this problem is by using complementary learning systems: one for slow, long-term learning and another for quick, transient adaptation. Anand & Precup (2023) instantiated this idea using permanent and transient value functions, but used the same features in both systems. Intuitively, long-term learning should rely more on parametric representations for broad generalization, while transient learning would be best served by non-parametric representations for situation-specific adaptation. In this paper, we explore this idea both theoretically and empirically. By introducing a novel non-parametric approximation for estimating the transient value function in complex tasks, we demonstrate that our method enables online learning and outperforms competitive baselines on image-based tasks and Craftax-Classic, underscoring the effectiveness of our system-level decomposition.

Abstract (translated)

URL

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.07327

PDF

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2611.07327.pdf

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