# ARISE: Adaptive Reinforcement Integrated with Swarm Exploration

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.00693 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.00693/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 17 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [Soft Actor-Critic: Off-Policy Maximum Entropy Deep Reinforcement Learning with a Stochastic Actor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01290/) (2018)
- [Multi-Agent Actor-Critic for Mixed Cooperative-Competitive Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02275/) (2017)
- [Curiosity-driven Exploration by Self-supervised Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1705.05363/) (2017)
- [QMIX: Monotonic Value Function Factorisation for Deep Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.11485/) (2018)
- [Unifying Count-Based Exploration and Intrinsic Motivation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.01868/) (2016)
- [Evolution Strategies as a Scalable Alternative to Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.03864/) (2017)
- [Illuminating search spaces by mapping elites](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.04909/) (2015)
- [Population Based Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.09846/) (2017)
- [Robots that can adapt like animals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1407.3501/) (2014)
- [CEM-RL: Combining evolutionary and gradient-based methods for policy search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.01222/) (2018)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Effective exploration remains a key challenge in RL, especially with non-stationary rewards or high-dimensional policies. We introduce ARISE, a lightweight framework that enhances reinforcement learning by augmenting standard policy-gradient methods with a compact swarm-based exploration layer. ARISE blends policy actions with particle-driven proposals, where each particle represents a candidate policy trajectory sampled in the action space, and modulates exploration adaptively using reward-variance cues. While easy benchmarks exhibit only slight improvements (e.g., +0.7% on CartPole-v1), ARISE yields substantial gains on more challenging tasks, including +46% on LunarLander-v3 and +22% on Hopper-v4, while preserving stability on Walker2d and Ant. Under non-stationary reward shifts, ARISE provides marked robustness advantages, outperforming PPO by +75 points on CartPole and improving LunarLander accordingly. Ablation studies confirm that both the swarm component and the adaptive mechanism contribute to the performance. Overall, ARISE offers a simple, architecture-agnostic route to more exploratory and resilient RL agents without altering core algorithmic structures.