Sample-Efficiency of Kolmogorov–Arnold Networks

Sat, 12 Dec 2026 00:00:00 +0000

40th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2026), Representations for the Physical Sciences Workshop, Paris, France, December 9-13, 2026.

Deep reinforcement learning has achieved substantial performance gains over classical control approaches. Yet, a central challenge to learning in real-world applications is acquiring costly samples. Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks are a recently proposed architecture that can learn physical relationships in control problems effectively, with significantly higher parameter efficiency and interpretability when compared to Multi-Layer-Perceptron architectures. In this work, we systematically study sample-efficiency using computational experiments, covering the Feynman dataset and the Gymnasium RL benchmark. The results show that similar performance can be achieved with 40% fewer samples using the Kolmogorov-Arnold architecture, and that relative performance improvements up to 50% occur during the training process. The observed gains are robust to varying levels of noise in rewards. These results highlight the potential of the Kolmogorov-Arnold architectures for more sample-efficient reinforcement learning.

Source code on GitHub.

Physical Sciences | Kevin Riehl

Sample-Efficiency of Kolmogorov–Arnold Networks