Continual Knowledge Adaptation for Reinforcement Learning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Hu, Jinwu, Lian, Zihao, Wen, Zhiquan, Li, Chenghao, Chen, Guohao, Wen, Xutao, Xiao, Bin, Tan, Mingkui
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Hu, Jinwu
Lian, Zihao
Wen, Zhiquan
Li, Chenghao
Chen, Guohao
Wen, Xutao
Xiao, Bin
Tan, Mingkui
author_facet Hu, Jinwu
Lian, Zihao
Wen, Zhiquan
Li, Chenghao
Chen, Guohao
Wen, Xutao
Xiao, Bin
Tan, Mingkui
contents Reinforcement Learning enables agents to learn optimal behaviors through interactions with environments. However, real-world environments are typically non-stationary, requiring agents to continuously adapt to new tasks and changing conditions. Although Continual Reinforcement Learning facilitates learning across multiple tasks, existing methods often suffer from catastrophic forgetting and inefficient knowledge utilization. To address these challenges, we propose Continual Knowledge Adaptation for Reinforcement Learning (CKA-RL), which enables the accumulation and effective utilization of historical knowledge. Specifically, we introduce a Continual Knowledge Adaptation strategy, which involves maintaining a task-specific knowledge vector pool and dynamically using historical knowledge to adapt the agent to new tasks. This process mitigates catastrophic forgetting and enables efficient knowledge transfer across tasks by preserving and adapting critical model parameters. Additionally, we propose an Adaptive Knowledge Merging mechanism that combines similar knowledge vectors to address scalability challenges, reducing memory requirements while ensuring the retention of essential knowledge. Experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed CKA-RL outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving an improvement of 4.20% in overall performance and 8.02% in forward transfer. The source code is available at https://github.com/Fhujinwu/CKA-RL.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_19314
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Continual Knowledge Adaptation for Reinforcement Learning
Hu, Jinwu
Lian, Zihao
Wen, Zhiquan
Li, Chenghao
Chen, Guohao
Wen, Xutao
Xiao, Bin
Tan, Mingkui
Artificial Intelligence
Reinforcement Learning enables agents to learn optimal behaviors through interactions with environments. However, real-world environments are typically non-stationary, requiring agents to continuously adapt to new tasks and changing conditions. Although Continual Reinforcement Learning facilitates learning across multiple tasks, existing methods often suffer from catastrophic forgetting and inefficient knowledge utilization. To address these challenges, we propose Continual Knowledge Adaptation for Reinforcement Learning (CKA-RL), which enables the accumulation and effective utilization of historical knowledge. Specifically, we introduce a Continual Knowledge Adaptation strategy, which involves maintaining a task-specific knowledge vector pool and dynamically using historical knowledge to adapt the agent to new tasks. This process mitigates catastrophic forgetting and enables efficient knowledge transfer across tasks by preserving and adapting critical model parameters. Additionally, we propose an Adaptive Knowledge Merging mechanism that combines similar knowledge vectors to address scalability challenges, reducing memory requirements while ensuring the retention of essential knowledge. Experiments on three benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed CKA-RL outperforms state-of-the-art methods, achieving an improvement of 4.20% in overall performance and 8.02% in forward transfer. The source code is available at https://github.com/Fhujinwu/CKA-RL.
title Continual Knowledge Adaptation for Reinforcement Learning
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.19314