
Reinforcement learning agents are typically evaluated by expected episodic return, yet return can hide fragility: policies that appear strong in nominal conditions may degrade when constraints tighten, action semantics become unreliable, or reward feedback is adversarially inverted. We present ARCUS-H (Adaptive Reinforcement Coherence Under Stress Harness), an evaluation harness that measures behavioral stability under stress using five interpretable channels - competence, coherence, continuity, integrity, and meaning - combined into a composite stability score. A key calibration contribution is an adaptive per-run threshold derived from the pre-phase score distribution, which achieves a false positive rate of 2.0% (target α = 0.05) without any environment-specific tuning. We benchmark 7 algorithms across 9 environments (6 classic control, 2 MuJoCo, 1 Atari) under 4 stress schedules (concept drift, resource constraint, trust violation, valence inversion) with 10 seeds each. Three findings stand out. First, reward and stability diverge substantially: Pearson r = +0.14, p = 0.364 between normalized return and collapse rate under valence inversion, confirming that return alone does not capture stress fragility. Second, stressor effects are environment-class-dependent: MuJoCo agents collapse at rates of 66–84% compared to 33–69% for classic control under the same stressors, despite MuJoCo agents achieving higher absolute reward. Third, each stressor leaves a distinct signature across stability channels, supporting the interpretability of per-channel diagnostics.
reinforcement learning, evaluation, MuJoCo, deep reinforcement learning, behavioral stability, benchmarking, stress testing, policy robustness, concept drift, reward shaping
reinforcement learning, evaluation, MuJoCo, deep reinforcement learning, behavioral stability, benchmarking, stress testing, policy robustness, concept drift, reward shaping
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