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

Felix Störck; Fabian Hinder; Barbara Hammer

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arXiv · 2606.11797

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

Felix Störck·Fabian Hinder·Barbara Hammer

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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.

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BibTeX RIS

Felix Störck, Fabian Hinder, Barbara Hammer. 2026-06-10. Space-sampled Value Decay: Forgetting Mechanisms for Non-stationary Deep Reinforcement Learning. https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.11797

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