AdaKP: Online Adaptive Knowledge-Point Selection for Reasoning-Oriented Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards is a powerful paradigm for eliciting reasoning in large language models, yet it suffers from severe reward sparsity on competition-level mathematics. A common remedy injects atomic knowledge points (KPs) - short natural-language hints distilled from gold solutions - into the prompt. Existing methods, however, either fix this selection once offline or merely scale the monolithic quantity of injected text, leaving untouched the most informative axis of choice: which subset of atomic KPs to inject, and when. We introduce AdaKP, an online selector that re-chooses each problem's KP subset over the course of RL training. At its core is an entropy proxy that scores a KP by the reduction in next-token entropy it induces - a single inexpensive forward pass, with a provable bound on its truncation bias - in place of expensive rollout-based estimation. Three lightweight mechanisms make this signal usable online: a momentum smoother that absorbs per-step noise, a retirement-and-revival manager that prunes weak KPs while preserving exploration, and an adaptive scheduler that front-loads re-evaluations into early training. AdaKP further contributes a pre-flight validation gate that certifies the proxy against a leave-one-out ground truth before any expensive run is launched, turning method-level risk into a falsifiable check. Realized as a fully additive fork of a standard DAPO+GRPO trainer with no optimizer changes, AdaKP improves over a strong static-selection baseline on all eight competition-mathematics benchmarks at negligible added cost, positioning online, validated KP-subset selection as a practical and as-yet under-explored axis for reasoning-oriented reinforcement learning.

Episodic Memory Temporal Consistency for Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Cooperative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) frequently suffers from severe reward sparsity and exploration bottlenecks. While episodic memory mechanisms mitigate these issues by reusing high-return trajectories, they often trap agents in local optima due to unconstrained incentive distribution and semantic representation collapse. To address this, we propose Episodic Memory Temporal Consistency (EMTC), a framework that robustly constructs and selectively leverages historical experiences. EMTC introduces two synergistic components: (1) a Temporally Consistent Semantic Embedder that integrates contrastive learning with time-conditioned state reconstruction, preventing representation collapse and enabling precise memory retrieval; and (2) a Temporal Consistency Gating Mechanism that dynamically modulates episodic incentives based on temporal consistency error. This adaptive gate filters misleading signals from pseudo-successful trajectories, effectively mitigating Q-value overestimation. We provide theoretical guarantees, establishing a strict error bound that directly links the observable temporal consistency error to the underlying trajectory optimality and representation quality. Extensive evaluations on the SMAC and GRF benchmarks demonstrate that EMTC consistently outperforms state-of-the-art baselines. Notably, compared to the strongest episodic baseline, EMTC achieves absolute win-rate improvements of up to 24% in super-hard SMAC scenarios and an average improvement of 28% across GRF tasks.