Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning

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4 papers in the last 28 days · 0.1% of indexed attention

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Period ending 2026-09-21

1 new paper

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning.

Period ending 2026-09-07

3 new papers

A weekly snapshot of new work published in Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning.

24 papers

Latest in Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning

Sep 16, 2026econ.GN

Multitask Reinforcement Learning for Assisting Choice Model Specification

Discrete choice model specification is a time-consuming task in which modellers often specify and estimate multiple models while balancing goodness-of-fit, parsimony, and behavioural plausibility. We present Delphos, a multitask reinforcement learning framework that learns transferable specification strategies across transport choice datasets. Delphos frames model specification as a sequential decision-making problem in which it applies a sequence of modelling actions and receives feedback from an estimation environment based on model performance and convergence. To transfer modelling decisions across datasets with different sets of variables, Delphos represents utility specifications as sets of modelling terms using a DeepSet-Q architecture, allowing a shared specification policy to learn across multiple datasets. Trained on nine transport choice datasets, Delphos consistently outperforms independently trained single-task agents, indicating that sharing modelling experience improves learning efficiency and helps identify promising sequences of modelling decisions with fewer unsuccessful estimation attempts. When applied without further training to the unseen Swissmetro and Decisions datasets, the same agent identifies competitive specifications in less than 20 minutes on a standard CPU. It achieves a higher log-likelihood per observation than the VNS metaheuristic on Swissmetro and performance comparable to a published MNL specification developed by expert modellers on Decisions. These findings show that accumulating and reusing modelling experience enables Delphos to function as an intelligent assistant for discrete choice model specification. It reduces manual trial-and-error while allowing modellers to retain control over model diagnosis, refinement, and final selection.
Gabriel Nova, Stephane Hess, Sander Van Cranenburgh
Aug 31, 2026cs.NI

WiSDoM: Wireless Sparse Decision Transformer with Mixture-of-Experts for Multi-Task Mobile Network Optimization

Emerging 6G wireless networks are expected to operate across diverse deployment scenarios, where variations in network topology, user mobility, traffic demand, and radio conditions challenge the scalability of conventional radio resource management (RRM). While offline reinforcement learning (RL) methods have demonstrated strong decision-making capabilities, learning a single policy that performs consistently across heterogeneous wireless environments remains difficult due to conflicting optimization objectives and limited model specialization. These challenges become particularly pronounced in coordinated multipoint (CoMP) transmission, where selecting the optimal serving-cell combination requires sequential decision-making under evolving network conditions. This paper presents the Wireless Sparse Decision Transformer with Mixture of Experts (WiSDoM), a sparse multi-task offline RL framework for adaptive multi-cell selection. WiSDoM combines Decision Transformers (DTs) with a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture that dynamically activates specialized experts according to task characteristics. This MoE mechanism improves model capacity without proportionally increasing inference cost, mitigates negative transfer, and enables expert specialization across tasks. WiSDoM is trained jointly on diverse network configurations spanning multiple base station and user equipment densities, mobility levels, and scheduler policies. Experimental results show that WiSDoM consistently outperforms heuristic methods, single-task models, and conventional multi-task DTs, improving quality of experience (QoE) by up to 55% while activating approximately one-third of the parameters of its dense counterpart during inference. Furthermore, WiSDoM exhibits strong task generalization and efficiently adapts to unseen wireless scenarios through few-shot prompting without retraining or fine-tuning.
Fatih Temiz, Shavbo Salehi, Melike Erol-Kantarci
Aug 31, 2026cs.LG

T3S: Improving Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning with Task-Specific Feature Selector and Scheduler

Multi-task reinforcement learning (MTRL) is a technique to train multiple tasks simultaneously, where previous works usually train a single model to solve different tasks by sharing parameters across various tasks. However, these methods are faced with inter-task interference since what parameters should be shared across tasks is not addressed, dramatically reducing learning efficiency. To solve these problems, we propose a novel MTRL framework called Task-Specific feature Selector and Scheduler (T3S), which consists of two components: a feature selector and a task scheduler. Specifically, the feature selectors employ hypernetworks to construct task-specific soft masks, which can be applied by globally shared representation to construct task-specific features. The task scheduler selects tasks for learning through two metrics, where the selection probability is inversely proportional to task progress (e.g., success rate) and task learning speed. Experimental results show that T3S consistently outperforms the state-of-the-art MTRL algorithms on various robotics manipulation tasks.
Yuanqiang Yu, Tianpei Yang, Yongliang Lv +2
Aug 31, 2026cs.LG

PAC: Progress-Augmented Advantage Curriculum for Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning of LLMs

Reinforcement learning (RL) is used to improve the reasoning abilities of LLMs, while training data span heterogeneous tasks. However, most RL post-training pipelines rely on fixed or manually designed task mixtures, even though task usefulness changes as training progresses. Online curriculum methods often define learnability by update magnitude, ignoring whether the update translates into reward gains, which can misallocate rollout budget toward tasks with large but ineffective updates. We propose PAC, a Progress-Augmented Advantage Curriculum for multi-task RL of LLMs that combines two task-level signals: advantage-derived learnability, which measures the magnitude of the policy update a task can induce, and recent reward gains, which show whether those updates have improved task performance. A Bayesian Thompson Sampling controller uses these signals to allocate rollouts across tasks during GRPO training. We evaluate PAC under two settings: a multi-level reasoning setting and a multi-domain reasoning setting. PAC improves sample efficiency and final performance: it reaches comparable validation scores with fewer rollout steps and achieves higher final averages than random sampling and advantage-based curriculum baselines in both settings. These results show that jointly tracking advantage signals and actual reward gains yields an effective online curriculum for LLM post-training.
Yuanqiang Yu, Yanzhao Zheng, Zhentao Zhang +8
Aug 4, 2026cs.CL

SFT Conflicts, RL Coexists: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis of Multi-Task Learning for LLMs

Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) exhibit fundamentally different behaviors in enhancing multi-task reasoning for large language models (LLMs). Our preliminary experiments revealed a phenomenon: SFT suffers from severe task conflicts under multi-stage training, whereas RL enables stable coexistence across diverse tasks. Empirically, we trace this to the parameter level, observing that RL induces sparse and approximately orthogonal updates across tasks. We provide a theoretical explanation for this mechanism by analyzing multi-task gradient interference. Our results reveal a distinction: interference in SFT is norm-limited, scaling with the absolute gradient magnitude, whereas interference in RL is variance-limited, bounded by the gradient variance induced by advantage normalization and on-policy optimization. This small variance bound yields near-orthogonal optimization directions across tasks. Leveraging this insight, we propose Parallel-RL, a paradigm that decouples multi-task training, significantly improving efficiency and flexibility.
Kejian Zhu, Zhuoran Jin, Shangqing Tu +5
Aug 4, 2026cs.LG

SMOPD: Multi-Reward Reinforcement Learning via Specialize-and-Merge Online Policy Distillation

We aim to improve model performance in multi-reward reinforcement learning training process. Existing Group reward-Decoupled Normalization Policy Optimization (GDPO) has mitigated the issue of reward signals masking one another during direct scalarization by normalizing each reward dimension separately before aggregation. However, our experiments show that GDPO still struggles to balance reward signals with different granularities. Specifically, in some particular training tasks, the model may receive a dense reward that assigns fine-grained scores ranging from 0.1 to 1.0, together with a sparse reward that provides only binary feedback of either 0 or 1. In such cases, we find that the sparse reward may provide an insufficient optimization signal, preventing its corresponding capability from being effectively reinforced. Therefore, how can we strengthen the optimization signal from the sparse reward without sacrificing the capability already learned from the fine-grained reward? To overcome this limitation, we propose Specialize-and-Merge Online Policy Distillation (SMOPD), a two-stage training method for multi-reward optimization. Stage1-Specialize: SMOPD first employs reward-priority configurations to train multiple reward-specialized teachers, allowing each reward to be learned under conditions where its signal can effectively drive optimization. Stage2-Merge: SMOPD then utilizes online policy distillation to combine the reward-specialized capabilities of these teachers into a single student policy, while maintaining balanced task-level optimization. To validate our method, we conduct experiments on two multi-reward settings: complementary rewards(tool-calling accuracy and format) and conflicting rewards (helpful and harmless rewards). Based on above settings, SMOPD outperforms GDPO across 1.5B, 3B and 7B backbones.
Wen Wang, Jiahua Bao, Tu Yongsiqi +8
Jul 27, 2026cs.RO

Learning Adaptive Multi-Task Guidance, Navigation, and Control via Hypernetworks

Autonomous free-flying robots in orbital environments require controllers that are both versatile and resource-efficient, yet maintaining a separate, task-specific policy for each mission profile is architecturally brittle and limits operational flexibility as requirements evolve. We introduce HYPER-GNC, a multi-task reinforcement learning framework in which a hypernetwork maps physics-informed task embeddings to the weights of a shared actor-critic policy, enabling a single compact controller to master four distinct GNC tasks: velocity tracking, docking, inspection, and navigation with obstacle avoidance. The continuous embedding space allows the controller to generalize to novel mission configurations at deployment time without any retraining. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HYPER-GNC achieves sample efficiency comparable to single-task specialists while maintaining stability under significant inertial perturbations and external body wrenches. We further validate the framework on a physical satellite emulator, successfully bridging the simulation-to-reality gap across all mission profiles. Code, trained models, and deployment scripts are made publicly available to support reproducibility.
Ricard Marsal I Castan, Aman Arora, Antoine Richard +3
Jul 24, 2026cs.CL

Enough is as good as a feast: A Comprehensive Analysis of How Reinforcement Learning Mitigates Task Conflicts in LLMs

Model merging plays a crucial role in consolidating multiple specialized models into a single, unified model, especially in the era of large language models (LLMs). Recent research has primarily focused on developing strategies to enhance merging performance with the trained models, while the impact of training paradigms, such as supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL), on the effectiveness of model merging remains underexplored. In this study, we systematically explore the merging behavior of RL-trained LLMs compared to those trained with traditional SFT. Through comprehensive evaluations across five representative tasks, we find that RL significantly reduces task conflicts and results in less performance degradation after merging, making RL-trained models particularly well-suited for this process. To unearth the reasons behind the superior suitability of RL for model merging, we conduct extensive empirical experiments and theoretical analyses. Our findings highlight three key factors: (1) On-policy training data in RL control the gradient updates in a smaller magnitude, reducing the risk of overwriting existing knowledge for other tasks in the model. (2) The RL optimization objective, which favors ``\textit{enough is as good as a feast}", progressively reduces the magnitude and the number of conflict parameter updates as the model converges. (3) Joint optimization of positive and negative examples in RL steers the model towards an unbiased task-specific parameter subspace, ensuring robust performance while further preventing parameter conflicts.
Zixuan Ren, Jinliang Lu, Junhong Wu +5
Jul 17, 2026cs.LG

When Model Merging Rivals Joint Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning: A Task-Vector Geometry Analysis

Model merging is promoted as a substitute for joint multi-task training, yet in the reinforcement-learning setting this substitution is essentially never tested against the baseline it claims to replace: methods merge independently released agents precisely because a joint model is unavailable. We build the missing comparison. Training difficulty-1 and difficulty-2 Qwen3-8B specialists on the AppWorld agent benchmark with LOOP, we merge them (TIES, RAM+) and pit the result against a jointly trained model on the same data. On task-goal completion, merging matches joint RL -- and every merge variant is statistically indistinguishable. To explain why merge method does not matter here, we measure the geometry of the specialists' task vectors, which carries no task-sampling noise: they are near-orthogonal (cosine 0.06 - 0.10) despite ~65% support overlap, a small, shared direction that grows over training and that we calibrate against a random-init floor and a same-run ceiling to confirm it reflects learning, not the low-rank parameterization. Because direction and support are decoupled, support and sign-based merging (RAM, TIES) collapse to near-uniform averaging. We release all code and statistics.
S. Aaron McClendon
Jul 8, 2026cs.AI

Infinity-Parser2 Technical Report

We present Infinity-Parser2, a large multimodal model that couples a controllable data-synthesis pipeline with multi-task reinforcement learning for end-to-end document parsing, addressing the persistent scarcity of faithfully annotated parsing corpora. Our contributions are threefold. First, we build a scalable synthesis engine, pairing a controllable rendering framework with an iterative refinement loop, and use it to construct and open-source Infinity-Doc2-5M: a 5-million-sample bilingual (Chinese/English) corpus spanning diverse document types, annotated with element bounding boxes, canonical content forms (Markdown, HTML, LaTeX, SMILES, structured charts), and full-page reading order. Second, we introduce a verifiable, multi-task reward system that enables Joint Reinforcement Learning across eight co-trained objectives (document parsing, layout analysis, table parsing, math formula parsing, chart parsing, chemical formula parsing, document VQA, and general multimodal understanding), unifying perception, structure, and reasoning in a single optimization signal. Third, we release two variants under a shared architecture: Infinity-Parser2-Flash, optimized for low-latency inference with a 3.68x throughput gain over Infinity-Parser-7B, and Infinity-Parser2-Pro, engineered for precision-critical settings. Infinity-Parser2-Pro reaches state-of-the-art 87.6% on olmOCR-Bench and 74.3% on ParseBench, surpassing DeepSeek-OCR-2, PaddleOCR-VL-1.5, and MinerU2.5, with strong generalization to charts, chemical formulas, and document VQA.
Zuming Huang, Jun Huang, Kexuan Ren +12
Jul 8, 2026cs.LG

Entropy Pacing Policy Optimization for Multi-Task Agentic Reinforcement Learning

Recent breakthroughs of Reinforcement Learning (RL) have highlighted its potential for complex agentic Large Language Model (LLM) tasks. However, existing efforts largely focus on single-task settings, whereas real-world deployment necessitates a generalist agent capable of solving multiple tasks simultaneously. In this work, we identify a critical yet underexplored phenomenon in multi-task agentic RL: different tasks can exhibit exploration-exploitation pace mismatch. Specifically, easier tasks may converge early to low-entropy policies that hinder learning on harder tasks, while harder tasks can, in turn, push easier tasks back toward high-entropy exploration. This back-and-forth interaction creates inter-task entropy crossovers and frequent entropy spikes. Inspired by this observation, we introduce Entropy Pacing Policy Optimization (EPPO) for multi-task agentic LLMs, which coordinates entropy across tasks to stabilize multi-task optimization. At the core of EPPO is a task-wise dynamic clipping mechanism that replaces the fixed clipping threshold in Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) with a task entropy-aware adaptive bound, tightening updates for over-confident tasks while relaxing them for under-explored ones. Experiments on the multi-task agentic benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed EPPO yields results superior to its counterparts.
Zetian Hu, Shunyu Liu, Junjie Zhang +4
Jun 23, 2026cs.LG

Towards Scalable Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning with Large Decision Models

Recent progress in large-scale sequence modeling has shown that a single model can learn useful representations across highly diverse data distributions. Inspired by these advances, we investigate whether a unified transformer policy can be trained across large collections of heterogeneous reinforcement learning environments. We introduce LDM-v0, a Large Decision Model trained offline on trajectories collected from thousands of environments spanning multiple domains and modalities. LDM-v0 is a multi-task, multi-modal transformer policy conditioned on histories of observations, actions, rewards, and termination signals, and trained through supervised next-action prediction over offline trajectories. We describe the environment infrastructure, automated data generation pipeline, model architecture, and training methodology used to build LDM-v0, and evaluate its performance across diverse environments. We show that a single pretrained model matches the performance of independently trained task-specific reference policies on approximately 1,000 environments including robotics, autonomous driving, inventory management, cybersecurity, trading, and video games. These results demonstrate the feasibility of large-scale offline pretraining across heterogeneous reinforcement learning environments using a single transformer policy.
Thibaut Kulak
Jun 17, 2026cs.RO

CTS-MoE: Implicit Terrain Adaptation via Mixture-of-Experts for Perceptive Locomotion

Perceptive legged locomotion over discontinuous terrain (e.g., stairs, gaps, and obstacles) requires adaptive behavior, as a single conservative gait cannot produce the anticipatory maneuvers needed for abrupt topology changes. Cast as multi-task reinforcement learning, this problem introduces a tension between sharing and separation. Tasks use a common locomotion base but have conflicting rewards, so a policy must share behavior while avoiding value interference. Prior work addresses only one side, with monolithic policies sacrificing specialization and hierarchical sub-policies sacrificing generalization across transitions and unseen terrain. We propose CTS-MoE, which combines a dense mixture-of-experts actor with perception-based gating to compose shared behaviors and a multi-critic with task-specific value heads to prevent interference. The model is trained end-to-end in a single-stage concurrent teacher-student setup that handles partial observability and avoids sequential distillation, with task labels used only during training. At deployment, routing depends solely on perception, allowing terrain adaptation without a high-level selector or terrain classifier. Experiments on a Unitree Go1 in simulation and on hardware across seen and unseen terrains show task-aware specialization, with lower tracking error and higher success rates than monolithic baselines. Project Website: https://cts-moe.github.io/ .
Francisco Affonso, Matheus P. Angarola, Ana Luiza Mineiro +3
Jun 16, 2026cs.AI

Knowledge Reutilization in Meta-Reinforcement Learning

Meta-reinforcement learning enables fast adaptation by extracting shared structure from related tasks, but existing end-to-end methods often couple task inference with embodiment-specific control. This coupling can obscure non-parametric task semantics, reduce sample efficiency, and limit cross-agent reuse. We propose a meta-knowledge reutilization framework that learns task-level knowledge on a dynamics-simplified agent and transfers it to heterogeneous agents. The framework uses a Bayesian non-parametric prior to organize latent task modes and a high-level policy to generate task-level magnitude guidance. To bridge reusable task knowledge with different embodiments, we introduce a semantic-magnitude interface and a lightweight temporal adaptor, which convert frozen meta-knowledge into temporally aligned subgoals for embodiment-specific low-level controllers. Experiments on multiple locomotion agents show that our framework reduces final-step tracking error by 94.75% -- 99.79% compared with recent state-of-the-art baselines and achieves comparable deployment performance with about 23.8% of their interaction data.
Yuan Meng, Bo Wang, Juan de los Rios Ruiz +4
Jun 14, 2026cs.RO

Energy-Efficient Arm Reaching for a Humanoid Robot via Deep Reinforcement Learning with Identified Power Models

Humanoid robots performing in-field manipulation tasks, such as robotic apple harvesting, face severe energy constraints that directly limit the number of reaching motions that can be executed per battery charge. This paper presents an end-to-end, energy-aware reinforcement learning framework for the 7-degree-of-freedom left arm of the UnitreeG1 humanoid robot, combining a physics-based, experimentally identified electrical power model with a Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) policy trained in a Pinocchio-based rigid-body dynamics simulator. The RL policy operates on an incremental joint-position action space and is trained with a Hybrid Constellation Reward that combines a four-point end-effector constellation distance with a torque-norm energy proxy; after % 5×1065\times10^6 training it reaches a 69.9%69.9\% success rate over 10001\,000 random targets in kinematic simulation, at a mean energy of \SI{98.16}{\joule} on successful episodes. Finally, on the physical UnitreeG1, the policy is validated over three independent 10-target batches, achieving a mean energy of 71.5±48.371.5 \pm 48.3,J, an end-effector position error of 2.64±1.042.64 \pm 1.04,cm, and an orientation error of 6.92±1.336.92 \pm 1.33^\circ -- within the \SI{4}{\centi\metre}/8.68.6^\circ training tolerance. These results constitute a first step toward energy-aware reinforcement-learning-based arm reaching for humanoid robots.
Nestor N. Deniz, Simon Parsons, Fernando Auat Cheein
Jun 11, 2026cs.RO

Learning to Adapt: Representation-Based Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Task Skill Transfer

Reinforcement learning has achieved remarkable success in learning complex control policies, yet its applicability remains limited due to sample inefficiency and poor generalization across tasks. In this work, we propose RepMT-SAC, a framework for multi-task RL that enables efficient knowledge sharing and robust transfer to new tasks. RepMT-SAC uses spectral MDP decomposition to capture transferable dynamics, structuring the value function into a task-agnostic core with a minimal task-specific adjustment. This design allows for strong zero-shot performance on in-distribution tasks and rapid few-shot adaptation to out-of-distribution tasks. We evaluate RepMT-SAC on quadcopter trajectory-following tasks across in-distribution and out-of-distribution contexts, demonstrating that it outperforms baselines by up to 30%.
Aryan Naveen, Haitong Ma, Haldun Balim +1
Jun 4, 2026cs.LG

Representation Learning Enables Scalable Multitask Deep Reinforcement Learning

Scaling reinforcement learning (RL) to diverse multitask settings remains a central challenge. While recent advances in model-based RL achieve strong performance, they rely on planning and complex training pipelines, making it unclear which components are essential for scalability. We revisit this question and argue that the primary driver of scalable multitask RL is not model-based control, but \emph{representation learning}. In particular, we show that combining predictive, model-based representations with high-capacity value function approximation is sufficient to achieve strong performance, even without planning. We evaluate a simple model-free algorithm, MR.Q, coupled with auxiliary predictive objectives into a scalable actor-critic architecture. This approach outperforms a recent world-model-based method and a range of deep RL baselines across a diverse suite of multitask continuous control tasks, while significantly reducing computational overhead and improving wall-clock efficiency. We observe consistent improvements with increased model capacity and show through ablations that predictive representation learning is critical for performance.
Johan Obando-Ceron, Lu Li, Scott Fujimoto +3
Jun 2, 2026cs.RO

GPU-Parallel Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning with Demonstration Guided Policy Optimization

Large scale GPU-parallel reinforcement learning has changed what can be trained in robot simulation, yet most systems still optimize one specialist policy per task. We propose a construction methodology for turning structured manipulation task families into GPU-parallel multi-task RL benchmarks, and instantiate it as MT-Libero using LIBERO assets and task predicates in Isaac Lab. The resulting benchmark supports simultaneous reinforcement learning over heterogeneous task suites with parallel rendering, physics randomization, and state-input or visual-input policies. To make such training practical under sparse success signals and limited prior data, we further propose DGPO, an on-policy demonstration guided method that combines importance weighted PPO with adaptive behavior cloning on matched demonstration actions. DGPO enables a tunable preference toward demonstrated task distributions, outperforming both prior-free RL and existing demonstration-based methods while preserving the stability and online improvement benefits of on-policy PPO.
Rui Zhang, Qiwei Wu, Zhengyu Zhang +5
May 14, 2026cs.LG

Distributionally Robust Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning via Adaptive Task Sampling

Multi-task reinforcement learning (MTRL) aims to train a single agent to efficiently optimize performance across multiple tasks simultaneously. However, jointly optimizing all tasks often yields imbalanced learning: agents quickly solve easy tasks but learn slowly on harder ones. While prior work primarily attributes this imbalance to conflicting task gradients and proposes gradient manipulation or specialized architectures to address it, we instead focus on a distinct and under-explored challenge: imbalanced data allocation. Standard MTRL allocates an equal number of environment interactions to each task, which over-allocates data to easy tasks that require relatively few interactions to solve and under-allocates data to hard tasks that require substantially more experience to solve. To address this challenge, we introduce Distributionally Robust Adaptive Task Sampling (DRATS), an algorithm that adaptively prioritizes sampling tasks furthest from being solved. We derive DRATS by formalizing MTRL as a feasibility problem from which we derive a minimax objective for minimizing the worst-case return gap, the difference between a desired target return and the agent's return on a task. In benchmarks like MetaWorld-MT10 and MT50, DRATS improves data efficiency and increases worst-task performance compared to existing task sampling algorithms.
Nicholas E. Corrado, Wenyuan Huang, Josiah P. Hanna
May 12, 2026cs.AI

TOPPO: Rethinking PPO for Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning with Critic Balancing

Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) and its variants dominate Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning (MTRL) due to their off-policy sample efficiency, while on-policy methods such as Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) remain underexplored. We diagnose that PPO in MTRL suffers from a previously overlooked issue: critic-side gradient ill-conditioning, which may cause tail tasks to stall while easy tasks dominate the value function's updates. To address this, we propose TOPPO (Tail-Optimized PPO), a reformulation of PPO via Critic Balancing -- a set of modules that improve gradient conditioning and balance learning dynamics across tasks. Unlike prior approaches that rely on modular architectures or large models, TOPPO targets the optimization bottleneck within PPO itself. Empirically, TOPPO achieves stronger mean and tail-task performance than published SAC-family and ARS-family baselines while using substantially fewer parameters and environment steps on Meta-World+ benchmark. Notably, TOPPO matches or surpasses strong SAC baselines early in training and maintains superior performance at full budget. Ablations confirm the effectiveness of each module in TOPPO and provide insights into their interactions. Our results demonstrate that, with proper optimization, on-policy methods can rival or exceed off-policy approaches in MTRL, challenging the prevailing reliance on SAC and highlighting critic-side gradient conditioning as the central bottleneck.
Yuanpeng Li, Gefei Lin, Annie Qu +1
May 7, 2026cs.SE

Schedule-and-Calibrate: Utility-Guided Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning for Code LLMs

Reinforcement learning (RL) with verifiable rewards has proven effective at post-training LLMs for coding, yet deploying separate task-specific specialists incurs costs that scale with the number of tasks, motivating a unified multi-task RL (MTRL) approach. However, existing MTRL methods treat all coding tasks uniformly, relying on fixed data curricula under a shared optimization strategy, ultimately limiting the effectiveness of multi-task training. To address these limitations, we propose ASTOR, a multi-tASk code reinforcement learning framework via uTility-driven coORdination. Centered on task utility, a signal capturing each task learning potential and cross-task synergy, ASTOR comprises two coupled modules: 1) Hierarchical Utility-Routed Data Scheduling module hierarchically allocates training budget and prioritizes informative prompts, steering training toward the most valuable data and 2) Adaptive Utility-Calibrated Policy Optimization module dynamically scales per-task KL regularization, matching update constraints to each tasks current training state. Experiments on two widely-used LLMs across four representative coding tasks demonstrate that ASTOR consistently improves a single model across all tasks, outperforming the best task-specific specialist by 9.0%-9.5% and surpassing the strongest MTRL baseline by 7.5%-12.8%.
Yujia Chen, Yang Ye, Xiao Chu +2
Apr 28, 2026cs.AI

Multi-action Tangled Program Graphs for Multi-task Reinforcement Learning with Continuous Control

Over the past few decades, machine learning has been widely used to learn complex tasks. Reinforcement Learning (RL), inspired by human behavior, is a great example, as it involves developing specific behaviours for specific tasks. To further challenge algorithms, Multi-Task RL (MTRL) environments have been introduced, requiring a single model to learn multiple behaviors. The Tangled Program Graph (TPG) algorithm is a Genetic Programming (GP) algorithm designed for discrete MTRL environments. Recently, the MAPLE algorithm has been proposed, as another GP algorithm that achieves high results in single task continuous RL environments. A variation of the TPG is proposed alongside MAPLE, named Multi-Action TPG (MATPG) that aggregates MAPLE agents, and creates a control flow to activate them. Initially tested on single task RL environments only, MATPG achieved similar results to MAPLE. In this work, we present a new benchmark based on the MuJoCo Half Cheetah from Gymnasium. This benchmark features five distinct obstacles that are randomly positioned in front of the agent, each of which demands a unique behavior. This benchmark serves as a use case for MATPG, to prove its ability as a GP solution for continuous MTRL environments. Our experiments demonstrate its superiority in this multi-task use case when combined with lexicase selection. Furthermore, we examine the interpretability of the evolved graph, revealing that the decision flow of the model is fully interpretable.
Quentin Vacher, Nicolas Beuve, Mickaël Dardaillon +1
Apr 23, 2026cs.LG

Task-specific Subnetwork Discovery in Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Underwater Navigation

Autonomous underwater vehicles are required to perform multiple tasks adaptively and in an explainable manner under dynamic, uncertain conditions and limited sensing, challenges that classical controllers struggle to address. This demands robust, generalizable, and inherently interpretable control policies for reliable long-term monitoring. Reinforcement learning, particularly multi-task RL, overcomes these limitations by leveraging shared representations to enable efficient adaptation across tasks and environments. However, while such policies show promising results in simulation and controlled experiments, they yet remain opaque and offer limited insight into the agent's internal decision-making, creating gaps in transparency, trust, and safety that hinder real-world deployment. The internal policy structure and task-specific specialization remain poorly understood. To address these gaps, we analyze the internal structure of a pretrained multi-task reinforcement learning network in the HoloOcean simulator for underwater navigation by identifying and comparing task-specific subnetworks responsible for navigating toward different species. We find that in a contextual multi-task reinforcement learning setting with related tasks, the network uses only about 1.5% of its weights to differentiate between tasks. Of these, approximately 85% connect the context-variable nodes in the input layer to the next hidden layer, highlighting the importance of context variables in such settings. Our approach provides insights into shared and specialized network components, useful for efficient model editing, transfer learning, and continual learning for underwater monitoring through a contextual multi-task reinforcement learning method.
Yi-Ling Liu, Melvin Laux, Mariela De Lucas Alvarez +2
Dec 6, 2024cs.NE

Enabling Energy-Efficient Simultaneous Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning through Spiking Neural Networks with Active Dendrites for Bio-inspired Generalist Agents

Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated remarkable capabilities in training agents to solve complex tasks autonomously, such as mobile robots, UAVs/UGVs, and game-playing agents). However, scaling RL to master multiple tasks simultaneously (i.e., so-called multi-task RL) remains a significant challenge. Such a multi-task RL capability especially is important for agents to adapt to changes in real-world operational environments. State-of-the-art works show that, training agents with neural networks and shared structures across tasks promises improved generalization in simultaneous multi-task RL. However, they still suffer from task interference and incur high energy consumption due to intensive computation. To address this, we propose MTSpark, a novel methodology that enables energy-efficient simultaneous multi-task RL using spiking neural networks (SNNs) equipped with active dendrites for bio-inspired generalist agents. Specifically, MTSpark enhances a Deep Spiking Q-Network (DSQN) with active dendrites, a dueling structure, and task-specific context signals to dynamically form specialized sub-networks for individual tasks, while exploiting sparse operations for energy-efficient network processing. Experimental results demonstrate that MTSpark achieves higher performance and efficiency compared to state-of-the-art by obtaining high scores across three Atari games (i.e., Pong: -5.4, Breakout: 0.6, and Enduro: 371.2), approaching human-level performance (i.e., Pong: -3, Breakout: 31, Enduro: 368), while incurring similar memory and about 2x lower energy than state-of-the-art. These results show that our MTSpark potentially advances the frontiers toward energy-efficient generalist agents by combining RL and SNNs.
Rachmad Vidya Wicaksana Putra, Avaneesh Devkota, Muhammad Shafique