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arXiv · 2608.13600

Continual Evolution Strategies in Control Tasks

Nicola Pitzalis·Eleni Nisioti·Antonio Carta·Davide Bacciu·Andrea Cossu
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Abstract

We study Evolution Strategies (ES) for continual control, where agents must adapt to changing tasks without forgetting previous ones. On sequential MuJoCo locomotion tasks, naive ES suffers from severe catastrophic forgetting. Replay substantially improves retention and can induce positive transfer, while larger replay budgets reduce plasticity. Overall, these results show that ES can support continual adaptation in control and that replay is an effective mechanism for mitigating forgetting.

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Nicola Pitzalis, Eleni Nisioti, Antonio Carta, Davide Bacciu, Andrea Cossu. 2026-08-03. Continual Evolution Strategies in Control Tasks. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.13600

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