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arxiv_ml 95% Match Research Paper Reinforcement learning researchers,Robotics engineers,AI developers working with dynamic environments,Control theorists 3 weeks ago

Efficient Restarts in Non-Stationary Model-Free Reinforcement Learning

reinforcement-learning › robotics-rl
📄 Abstract

Abstract: In this work, we propose three efficient restart paradigms for model-free non-stationary reinforcement learning (RL). We identify two core issues with the restart design of Mao et al. (2022)'s RestartQ-UCB algorithm: (1) complete forgetting, where all the information learned about an environment is lost after a restart, and (2) scheduled restarts, in which restarts occur only at predefined timings, regardless of the incompatibility of the policy with the current environment dynamics. We introduce three approaches, which we call partial, adaptive, and selective restarts to modify the algorithms RestartQ-UCB and RANDOMIZEDQ (Wang et al., 2025). We find near-optimal empirical performance in multiple different environments, decreasing dynamic regret by up to $91$% relative to RestartQ-UCB.
Authors (5)
Hiroshi Nonaka
Simon Ambrozak
Sofia R. Miskala-Dinc
Amedeo Ercole
Aviva Prins
Submitted
October 13, 2025
arXiv Category
cs.LG
arXiv PDF

Key Contributions

This paper proposes three novel, efficient restart paradigms (partial, adaptive, selective) for model-free reinforcement learning in non-stationary environments. These methods address issues of complete forgetting and scheduled restarts in existing algorithms, achieving significant reductions in dynamic regret.

Business Value

Enables more robust and efficient learning for autonomous systems operating in dynamic environments, such as robots or self-driving cars, leading to improved performance and reliability.