Reinforcement Learning Improves Traversal of Hierarchical Knowledge in LLMs

Reinforcement learning (RL) is often credited with improving language model reasoning and generalization at the expense of degrading memorized knowledge. We challenge this narrative by observing that RL-enhanced models consistently outperform their base and supervised fine-tuned (SFT) counterparts on pure knowledge recall tasks, particularly those requiring traversal of hierarchical, structured knowledge (e.g., medical codes). We hypothesize these gains stem not from newly acquired data, but from improved procedural skills in navigating and searching existing knowledge hierarchies within the model parameters. To support this hypothesis, we show that structured prompting, which explicitly guides SFTed models through hierarchical traversal, recovers most of the performance gap (reducing 24pp to 7pp on MedConceptsQA for DeepSeek-V3/R1). We further find that while prompting improves final-answer accuracy, RL-enhanced models retain superior ability to recall correct procedural paths on deep-retrieval tasks. Finally our layer-wise internal activation analysis reveals that while factual representations (e.g., activations for the statement "code 57.95 refers to urinary infection") maintain high cosine similarity between SFT and RL models, query representations (e.g., "what is code 57.95") diverge noticeably, indicating that RL primarily transforms how models traverse knowledge rather than the knowledge representation itself.

Single Neuromorphic Memristor closely Emulates Multiple Synaptic Mechanisms for Energy Efficient Neural Networks

Biological neural networks do not only include long-term memory and weight multiplication capabilities, as commonly assumed in artificial neural networks, but also more complex functions such as short-term memory, short-term plasticity, and meta-plasticity - all collocated within each synapse. Here, we demonstrate memristive nano-devices based on SrTiO3 that inherently emulate all these synaptic functions. These memristors operate in a non-filamentary, low conductance regime, which enables stable and energy efficient operation. They can act as multi-functional hardware synapses in a class of bio-inspired deep neural networks (DNN) that make use of both long- and short-term synaptic dynamics and are capable of meta-learning or "learning-to-learn". The resulting bio-inspired DNN is then trained to play the video game Atari Pong, a complex reinforcement learning task in a dynamic environment. Our analysis shows that the energy consumption of the DNN with multi-functional memristive synapses decreases by about two orders of magnitude as compared to a pure GPU implementation. Based on this finding, we infer that memristive devices with a better emulation of the synaptic functionalities do not only broaden the applicability of neuromorphic computing, but could also improve the performance and energy costs of certain artificial intelligence applications.