cs.LGJun 10, 2026

Space-sampled Value Decay: Forgetting Mechanisms for Non-stationary Deep Reinforcement Learning

Authors: Felix StörckFabian HinderBarbara Hammer

Organizations: CITEC, Faculty of Technology, Bielefeld University, Germany.

Abstract

Studies on rodents such as mice have shown the capabilities to adapt their behavior when dealing with changing parameters (drift'') of the environment even if no information about change is provided (uncertainty) -- a behavior that can be modeled by forgetting mechanisms. Non-stationary Reinforcement Learning (NSRL) deals with adapting state-of-the-art RL methods to deal with changing environments: these however usually require (partially) perfect information about the drift such as task IDs'' or ``context''. To mitigate the effects of drift, this work develops \emph{Space-sampled Value Decay} as an explicit forgetting mechanism for value-based deep RL architectures as a simple yet effective approach. In particular we demonstrate and discuss positive effects but also limitations in achieved returns for modifications of Deep Q-networks (DQN) and Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) when evaluated on non-stationary environments.

Explore similar work

CardsList
  1. Streaming Deep Reinforcement Learning Finally Works

    Oct 18, 2024Mohamed Elsayed, Elena Sorina Lupu, Gautham Vasan +1