Principled Fast and Meta Knowledge Learners for Continual Reinforcement LearningKe Sun, Hongming Zhang, Jun Jin et al.
Inspired by the human learning and memory system, particularly the interplay between the hippocampus and cerebral cortex, this study proposes a dual-learner framework comprising a fast learner and a meta learner to address continual Reinforcement Learning~(RL) problems. These two learners are coupled to perform distinct yet complementary roles: the fast learner focuses on knowledge transfer, while the meta learner ensures knowledge integration. In contrast to traditional multi-task RL approaches that share knowledge through average return maximization, our meta learner incrementally integrates new experiences by explicitly minimizing catastrophic forgetting, thereby supporting efficient cumulative knowledge transfer for the fast learner. To facilitate rapid adaptation in new environments, we introduce an adaptive meta warm-up mechanism that selectively harnesses past knowledge. We conduct experiments in various pixel-based and continuous control benchmarks, revealing the superior performance of continual learning for our proposed dual-learner approach relative to baseline methods. The code is released in https://github.com/datake/FAME.
RAISE: Requirement-Adaptive Evolutionary Refinement for Training-Free Text-to-Image AlignmentLiyao Jiang, Ruichen Chen, Chao Gao et al.
Recent text-to-image (T2I) diffusion models achieve remarkable realism, yet faithful prompt-image alignment remains challenging, particularly for complex prompts with multiple objects, relations, and fine-grained attributes. Existing training-free inference-time scaling methods rely on fixed iteration budgets that cannot adapt to prompt difficulty, while reflection-tuned models require carefully curated reflection datasets and extensive joint fine-tuning of diffusion and vision-language models, often overfitting to reflection paths data and lacking transferability across models. We introduce RAISE (Requirement-Adaptive Self-Improving Evolution), a training-free, requirement-driven evolutionary framework for adaptive T2I generation. RAISE formulates image generation as a requirement-driven adaptive scaling process, evolving a population of candidates at inference time through a diverse set of refinement actions-including prompt rewriting, noise resampling, and instructional editing. Each generation is verified against a structured checklist of requirements, enabling the system to dynamically identify unsatisfied items and allocate further computation only where needed. This achieves adaptive test-time scaling that aligns computational effort with semantic query complexity. On GenEval and DrawBench, RAISE attains state-of-the-art alignment (0.94 overall GenEval) while incurring fewer generated samples (reduced by 30-40%) and VLM calls (reduced by 80%) than prior scaling and reflection-tuned baselines, demonstrating efficient, generalizable, and model-agnostic multi-round self-improvement. Code is available at https://github.com/LiyaoJiang1998/RAISE.