Indonesian Journal of Machine Learning and Intelligent Systems
Vol. 1 No. 1 (2026)

Memory-Augmented AI for Autonomous UAV Search and Rescue: Deep Reinforcement Learning in Complex, Partially Observable Environments

Hina Javed (Preston University)
Hameed Affifa (Barani Institute of Management Sciences)
Imran Ahmad Khan (Shaheed Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto Institute of Science and Technology)



Article Info

Publish Date
31 Jan 2026

Abstract

Unknown, partially observable environments The search of autonomous targets remains one of the basic problems of embodied artificial intelligence. We also present RecurrentPPO-LSTM, an agent of memory-based deep reinforcement learning, which not only attains best-in-class state-of-the-art search efficiency on standard Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) benchmarks, but also trains 3.4x faster than other memory-augmented agents. As compared to existing schemes that rely on the bidirectional recurrence (orpruing causality) or complex offline pretraining, our agent can be trained using sparse success signals using unidirectional LSTM to guarantee compact belief states. Our implementation on MiniGrid DoorKey-8x8 has 82.4 percent, which corresponds with higher performance than memoryless Proximal Policy Optimization (65.1 percent) and Deep Q-Networks (58.2 percent). We demonstrate that we have 34 steps-to-target reduction and improved resistance to observation noise (sigma = 0.2), arbitrary dropout sporadically (50 percent), and stochastic transitions (slip probability = 0.3). The transfer learning when trained on photorealistic Habitat Matterport 3D has a 68 percent success with 10,000 fine-tuning steps only. It is relatively compared to five stateof-the-art designs (20252026) to confirm that simple causal memory designs are much better than complex bidirectional designs or modular ones when considering real-time autonomous search. We demonstrate in theory that LSTM augmentation causes minimized anticipated regret of finite-memory POMDPs and we can formally ensure empirical excellence.

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Journal Info

Abbrev

ijmlis

Publisher

Subject

Description

Indonesian Journal of Machine Learning and Intelligent Systems (IJMLIS, Indones. J. Mach. Learn. Intell. Syst., e-ISSN 3164-2756) is a peer-reviewed international journal dedicated to advancing research on theoretical developments and practical implementations in the dynamic fields of machine ...