Technology
Continual Knowledge Adaptation for Reinforcement Learning
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.
What did T. rex's breath smell like?
What did T. rex's breath smell like? More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. T. tex had the strongest bite of any land animal Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy . Imagine the world millions of years ago.
Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis is a vivid, high-pace remake of a classic
This time, her character is positioned between the Survivor trilogy of the last decade and her iconic debut in 1996. At Summer Game Fest 2026, Crystal Dynamics and Flying Wild Hog shared the first gameplay demo, with Unreal Engine 5 adding vivid detail and lushness to Lara's travails. The developers made a clever choice, centering the demo on an early part of the original game. Set in the Peruvian mountainside, my playthrough included a giant cog puzzle I remember from playing the original. There were also several shootouts with a herd of dinosaurs, the same vivid red velociraptor-adjacent creatures from 1996).
Mixture of Scope Experts at Test: Generalizing Deeper Graph Neural Networks with Shallow Variants
Heterophilous graphs, where dissimilar nodes tend to connect, pose a challenge for graph neural networks (GNNs). Increasing the GNN depth can expand the scope (i.e., receptive field), potentially finding homophily from the higher-order neighborhoods. However, GNNs suffer from performance degradation as depth increases. Despite having better expressivity, state-of-the-art deeper GNNs achieve only marginal improvements compared to their shallow variants. Through theoretical and empirical analysis, we systematically demonstrate a shift in GNN generalization preferences across nodes with different homophily levels as depth increases. This creates a disparity in generalization patterns between GNN models with varying depth. Based on these findings, we propose to improve deeper GNN generalization while maintaining high expressivity by Mixture of scope experts at test (Moscat). Experimental results show that Moscat works flexibly with various GNN architectures across a wide range of datasets while significantly improving accuracy.
Self-Verification Provably Prevents Model Collapse in Recursive Synthetic Training
Large generative models are increasingly trained on synthetic data from earlier generations, raising concerns about, a progressive performance decline consistently observed in empirical studies. However, theoretical understanding of recursive training dynamics and their failure modes remains limited. In this work, we theoretically show that recursive training inherently leads to exponential error growth unless mitigated by sufficient real data. Addressing the growing scarcity of real data, we introduce a self-verification mechanism enabling models to filter their outputs based on internal confidence scores without external validation. Through rigorous analysis, we derive finite-sample error bounds demonstrating that self-verification alone can prevent collapse, even in fully synthetic training regimes. Our theoretical framework extends to large language models (LLMs), characterizing the conditions under which recursive training can maintain stability without performance degradation.
Learning Individual Behavior in Agent-Based Models with Graph Diffusion Networks
Agent-Based Models (ABMs) are powerful tools for studying emergent properties in complex systems. In ABMs, agent behaviors are governed by local interactions and stochastic rules. However, these rules are ad hoc and, in general, non-differentiable, limiting the use of gradient-based methods for optimization, and thus integration with real-world data. We propose a novel framework to learn a differentiable surrogate of any ABM by observing its generated data. Our method combines diffusion models to capture behavioral stochasticity and graph neural networks to model agent interactions. Distinct from prior surrogate approaches, our method introduces a fundamental shift: rather than approximating system-level outputs, it models individual agent behavior directly, preserving the decentralized, bottom-up dynamics that define ABMs. We validate our approach on two ABMs (Schelling's segregation model and a Predator-Prey ecosystem) showing that it replicates individual-level patterns and accurately forecasts emergent dynamics beyond training. Our results demonstrate the potential of combining diffusion models and graph learning for data-driven ABM simulation.
DreamLight: Towards Harmonious and Consistent Image Relighting
We introduce a model named DreamLight for universal image relighting in this work, which can seamlessly composite subjects into a new background while maintaining aesthetic uniformity in terms of lighting and color tone. The background can be specified by natural images (image-based relighting) or generated from unlimited text prompts (text-based relighting). Existing studies primarily focus on image-based relighting, while with scant exploration into text-based scenarios. Some works employ intricate disentanglement pipeline designs relying on environment maps to provide relevant information, which grapples with the expensive data cost required for intrinsic decomposition and light source. Other methods take this task as an image translation problem and perform pixel-level transformation with autoencoder architecture.
Pruning Spurious Subgraphs for Graph Out-of-Distribution Generalization
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) often encounter significant performance degradation under distribution shifts between training and test data, hindering their applicability in real-world scenarios. Recent studies have proposed various methods to address the out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization challenge, with many methods in the graph domain focusing on directly identifying an invariant subgraph that is predictive of the target label. However, we argue that identifying the edges from the invariant subgraph directly is challenging and error-prone, especially when some spurious edges exhibit strong correlations with the targets. In this paper, we propose $\texttt{PrunE}$, the first pruning-based graph OOD method that eliminates spurious edges to improve OOD generalizability. By pruning spurious edges, $\texttt{PrunE}$ retains the invariant subgraph more comprehensively, which is critical for OOD generalization. Specifically, $\texttt{PrunE}$ employs two regularization terms to prune spurious edges: 1) _graph size constraint_ to exclude uninformative spurious edges, and 2) _$\epsilon$-probability alignment_ to further suppress the occurrence of spurious edges. Through theoretical analysis and extensive experiments, we show that $\texttt{PrunE}$ achieves superior OOD performance and outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods significantly.
Unveiling the Spatial-temporal Effective Receptive Fields of Spiking Neural Networks
Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) demonstrate significant potential for energy-efficient neuromorphic computing through an event-driven paradigm. While training methods and computational models have greatly advanced, SNNs struggle to achieve competitive performance in visual long-sequence modeling tasks. In artificial neural networks, the effective receptive field (ERF) serves as a valuable tool for analyzing feature extraction capabilities in visual long-sequence modeling. Inspired by this, we introduce the Spatio-Temporal Effective Receptive Field (ST-ERF) to analyze the ERF distributions across various Transformer-based SNNs. Based on the proposed ST-ERF, we reveal that these models suffer from establishing a robust global ST-ERF, thereby limiting their visual feature modeling capabilities.