提出新基准测试强化学习中记忆更新能力,发现旧模型反而更擅长动态记忆修改。
Memory Retention Is Not Enough to Master Memory Tasks in Reinforcement Learning
- 设计部分可观测环境下的持续记忆更新测试基准
- 传统循环模型在记忆重写任务中表现优于现代结构化记忆
- 适合关注可训练遗忘机制的强化学习研究者
真实世界中的有效决策依赖于既稳定又可适应的记忆:环境随时间变化,智能体需在长时程中保留关键信息,同时在情境改变时更新或覆盖过时内容。现有强化学习基准与记忆增强型智能体主要关注记忆保持,对记忆重写的重视不足。为此,我们引入一个在部分可观测条件下测试持续记忆更新的新基准,并对比循环模型、基于Transformer的模型与结构化记忆架构。实验表明,尽管结构简单,经典循环模型在记忆重写任务中表现出更强的灵活性和鲁棒性;而现代结构化记忆仅在狭窄条件下有效,Transformer模型则常在非平凡的保留任务外失败。这些发现揭示了当前方法的根本局限,强调了平衡稳定记忆保持与自适应更新能力的重要性。本工作指出了这一被忽视的挑战,提出了评估基准,并为未来具备显式可训练遗忘机制的强化学习智能体设计提供了洞见。代码:https://quartz-admirer.github.io/Memory-Rewriting/
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Effective decision-making in the real world depends on memory that is both stable and adaptive: environments change over time, and agents must retain relevant information over long horizons while also updating or overwriting outdated content when circumstances shift. Existing Reinforcement Learning (RL) benchmarks and memory-augmented agents focus primarily on retention, leaving the equally critical ability of memory rewriting largely unexplored. To address this gap, we introduce a benchmark that explicitly tests continual memory updating under partial observability, i.e. the natural setting where an agent must rely on memory rather than current observations, and use it to compare recurrent, transformer-based, and structured memory architectures. Our experiments reveal that classic recurrent models, despite their simplicity, demonstrate greater flexibility and robustness in memory rewriting tasks than modern structured memories, which succeed only under narrow conditions, and transformer-based agents, which often fail beyond trivial retention cases. These findings expose a fundamental limitation of current approaches and emphasize the necessity of memory mechanisms that balance stable retention with adaptive updating. Our work highlights this overlooked challenge, introduces benchmarks to evaluate it, and offers insights for designing future RL agents with explicit and trainable forgetting mechanisms. Code: https://quartz-admirer.github.io/Memory-Rewriting/
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