Continual Reinforcement Learning by Planning with Online World Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Liu, Zichen, Fu, Guoji, Du, Chao, Lee, Wee Sun, Lin, Min
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Liu, Zichen
Fu, Guoji
Du, Chao
Lee, Wee Sun
Lin, Min
author_facet Liu, Zichen
Fu, Guoji
Du, Chao
Lee, Wee Sun
Lin, Min
contents Continual reinforcement learning (CRL) refers to a naturalistic setting where an agent needs to endlessly evolve, by trial and error, to solve multiple tasks that are presented sequentially. One of the largest obstacles to CRL is that the agent may forget how to solve previous tasks when learning a new task, known as catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, we propose to address this challenge by planning with online world models. Specifically, we learn a Follow-The-Leader shallow model online to capture the world dynamics, in which we plan using model predictive control to solve a set of tasks specified by any reward functions. The online world model is immune to forgetting by construction with a proven regret bound of $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{K^2D\log(T)})$ under mild assumptions. The planner searches actions solely based on the latest online model, thus forming a FTL Online Agent (OA) that updates incrementally. To assess OA, we further design Continual Bench, a dedicated environment for CRL, and compare with several strong baselines under the same model-planning algorithmic framework. The empirical results show that OA learns continuously to solve new tasks while not forgetting old skills, outperforming agents built on deep world models with various continual learning techniques.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_09177
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Continual Reinforcement Learning by Planning with Online World Models
Liu, Zichen
Fu, Guoji
Du, Chao
Lee, Wee Sun
Lin, Min
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Continual reinforcement learning (CRL) refers to a naturalistic setting where an agent needs to endlessly evolve, by trial and error, to solve multiple tasks that are presented sequentially. One of the largest obstacles to CRL is that the agent may forget how to solve previous tasks when learning a new task, known as catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, we propose to address this challenge by planning with online world models. Specifically, we learn a Follow-The-Leader shallow model online to capture the world dynamics, in which we plan using model predictive control to solve a set of tasks specified by any reward functions. The online world model is immune to forgetting by construction with a proven regret bound of $\mathcal{O}(\sqrt{K^2D\log(T)})$ under mild assumptions. The planner searches actions solely based on the latest online model, thus forming a FTL Online Agent (OA) that updates incrementally. To assess OA, we further design Continual Bench, a dedicated environment for CRL, and compare with several strong baselines under the same model-planning algorithmic framework. The empirical results show that OA learns continuously to solve new tasks while not forgetting old skills, outperforming agents built on deep world models with various continual learning techniques.
title Continual Reinforcement Learning by Planning with Online World Models
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.09177