A Reinforcement Learning Inspired Latent Yield Based Adaptive Algorithm Switching Mechanism

Contemporary model-free reinforcement learning algorithms can achieve very high performance, but have low sample efficiency and are not robust to changes in the environment. Model-based algorithms have much higher sample efficiency, but still fail when the environment shifts. This paper introduces Adaptive Topological Learning with Abstract Successors (ATLAS) to combat these challenges. ATLAS uses a Grow When Required network with Successor Features in order to achieve high sample efficiency while also robustly tackling catastrophic forgetting. We evaluate ATLAS in spatial navigation tasks, benchmarking its performance against common on-policy and off-policy algorithms. Our empirical results demonstrate that by structurally decoupling transition dynamics from the reward signal, ATLAS achieves near-instantaneous adaptation to new goals and can exhibit positive backward transfer, significantly outperforming baseline methods in non-stationary environments.

The exploration-exploitation dilemma in reinforcement learning (RL) is a fundamental challenge to efficient RL algorithms. Existing algorithms for finite state and action discounted RL problems address this by assuming sufficient exploration over both state and action spaces. However, this yields non-implementable algorithms and sub-optimal performance. To resolve these limitations, we introduce a new class of methods with auto-exploration, or methods that automatically explore both state and action spaces. Auto-exploration can be applied in both the tabular and linear function approximation setting. Under algorithm-independent assumptions on the existence of an exploring optimal policy, both settings attain $O(ε^{-2})$ sample complexity to solve to $ε$ error. These complexities are novel since they avoid algorithm-dependent parameters seen in prior works, which may be arbitrarily large. The methods are also simple to implement because they are parameter-free. We achieve these results by integrating auto-exploration into policy mirror descent to avoid the (unknown) stationary distribution seen in prior art. In the tabular setting, we introduce a dynamic exploration time with a data-driven stopping time, while for linear function approximation we propose a new sampling distribution based on the discounted visitation distribution that covers a more general class of Markov chains.

Offline-to-online reinforcement learning harnesses the stability of offline pretraining and the flexibility of online fine-tuning. A key challenge lies in the non-stationary distribution shift between offline datasets and the evolving online policy. Common approaches often rely on static mixing ratios or heuristic-based replay strategies, which lack adaptability to different environments and varying training dynamics, resulting in suboptimal tradeoff between stability and asymptotic performance. In this work, we propose Reinforcement Learning with Optimized Adaptive Data-mixing (ROAD), a dynamic plug-and-play framework that automates the data replay process. We identify a fundamental objective misalignment in existing approaches. To tackle this, we formulate the data selection problem as a bi-level optimization process, interpreting the data mixing strategy as a meta-decision governing the policy performance (outer-level) during online fine-tuning, while the conventional Q-learning updates operate at the inner level. To make it tractable, we propose a practical algorithm using a multi-armed bandit mechanism. This is guided by a surrogate objective approximating the bi-level gradient, which simultaneously maintains offline priors and prevents value overestimation. Our empirical results demonstrate that this approach consistently outperforms existing data replay methods across various datasets, eliminating the need for manual, context-specific adjustments while achieving superior stability and asymptotic performance.