Heuristic Learning: A New Reinforcement Learning Paradigm for Continual Learning

The article proposes Heuristic Learning (HL) as a way to tackle continual learning’s catastrophic forgetting by using coding agents that iteratively refine rule‑based policies, showing empirical gains on Atari, MuJoCo, and VizDoom tasks and outlining HL’s benefits, challenges, and future integration with neural networks.

LLMcoding agentscontinual learning

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Heuristic Learning: A New Reinforcement Learning Paradigm for Continual Learning

Machine Learning Algorithms & Natural Language Processing

May 9, 2026 · Artificial Intelligence

Heuristic Learning: Reinforcement Without Parameter Updates via .py File

OpenAI researcher Yong Jiayi introduces Heuristic Learning, a reinforcement paradigm that replaces gradient‑based neural network updates with code‑editing driven by GPT‑5.4, achieving the theoretical 864‑point Atari Breakout score and matching or surpassing PPO on multiple Atari and robot tasks.

Atari BenchmarkGPT-5.4Robot Control

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Heuristic Learning: Reinforcement Without Parameter Updates via .py File