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Enhancing Interpretability in Deep Reinforcement Learning through Semantic Clustering

Neural Information Processing Systems

In this paper, we explore semantic clustering properties of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to improve its interpretability and deepen our understanding of its internal semantic organization. In this context, semantic clustering refers to the ability of neural networks to cluster inputs based on their semantic similarity in the feature space. We propose a DRL architecture that incorporates a novel semantic clustering module that combines feature dimensionality reduction with online clustering.


Kernel conditional tests from learning-theoretic bounds

Neural Information Processing Systems

We propose a framework for hypothesis testing on conditional probability distributions, which we then use to construct statistical tests of functionals of conditional distributions. These tests identify the inputs where the functionals differ with high probability, and include tests of conditional moments or two-sample tests. Our key idea is to transform confidence bounds of a learning method into a test of conditional expectations.


OrbitZoo: Real Orbital Systems Challenges for Reinforcement Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

The increasing number of satellites and orbital debris has made space congestion a critical issue, threatening satellite safety and sustainability. Challenges such as collision avoidance, station-keeping, and orbital maneuvering require advanced techniques to handle dynamic uncertainties and multi-agent interactions. Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise in this domain, enabling adaptive, autonomous policies for space operations; however, many existing RL frameworks rely on custom-built environments developed from scratch, which often use simplified models and require significant time to implement and validate the orbital dynamics, limiting their ability to fully capture real-world complexities. To address this, we introduce OrbitZoo, a versatile multi-agent RL environment built on a highfidelity industry standard library, that enables realistic data generation, supports scenarios like collision avoidance and cooperative maneuvers, and ensures robust and accurate orbital dynamics. The environment is validated against various real satellite constellations, including Starlink, achieving a Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) of 0.16% compared to real-world data. This validation ensures reliability for generating high-fidelity simulations and enabling autonomous and independent satellite operations. This project is open source1 and has a dedicated project page2.


Generating Creative Chess Puzzles

Neural Information Processing Systems

While Generative AI rapidly advances in various domains, generating truly creative, aesthetic, and counter-intuitive outputs remains a challenge. This paper presents an approach to tackle these difficulties in the domain of chess puzzles. We start by benchmarking Generative AI architectures, and then introduce an RL framework with novel rewards based on chess engine search statistics to overcome some of those shortcomings. The rewards are designed to enhance a puzzle's uniqueness, counter-intuitiveness, diversity, and realism. Our RL approach dramatically increases counter-intuitive puzzle generation by 10x, from 0.22% (supervised) to 2.5%, surpassing existing dataset rates (2.1%) and the best Lichess-trained model (0.4%).


GyroSwin: 5DSurrogates for Gyrokinetic Plasma Turbulence Simulations

Neural Information Processing Systems

Nuclear fusion plays a pivotal role in the quest for reliable and sustainable energy production. A major roadblock to viable fusion power is understanding plasma turbulence, which significantly impairs plasma confinement, and is vital for nextgeneration reactor design. Plasma turbulence is governed by the nonlinear gyrokinetic equation, which evolves a 5D distribution function over time. Due to its high computational cost, reduced-order models are often employed in practice to approximate turbulent transport of energy. However, they omit nonlinear effects unique to the full 5D dynamics. To tackle this, we introduce GyroSwin, the first scalable 5D neural surrogate that can model 5D nonlinear gyrokinetic simulations, thereby capturing the physical phenomena neglected by reduced models, while providing accurate estimates of turbulent heat transport. GyroSwin (i) extends hierarchical Vision Transformers to 5D, (ii) introduces cross-attention and integration modules for latent 3D 5D interactions between electrostatic potential fields and the distribution function, and (iii) performs channelwise mode separation inspired by nonlinear physics. We demonstrate that GyroSwin outperforms widely used reduced numerics on heat flux prediction, captures the turbulent energy cascade, and reduces the cost of fully resolved nonlinear gyrokinetics by three orders of magnitude while remaining physically verifiable. GyroSwin shows promising scaling laws, tested up to one billion parameters, paving the way for scalable neural surrogates for gyrokinetic simulations of plasma turbulence.


Cadbury chocolate-owner Mondelez defends staying in Russia

BBC News

The boss of Cadbury chocolate-maker Mondelez has defended its decision to continue doing business in Russia but admitted he is not pleased the firm's taxes are funding the war with Ukraine. Chief executive Dirk Van de Put said it was the right decision to stay after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, saying pulling out would risk thousands of jobs and leave Mondelez vulnerable to the Kremlin taking control of its local operations. Many Western companies such as McDonald's exited Russia after it launched a full-scale assault on its neighbour. Others remained but Mondelez said it had discontinued new investment in its Russian business and suspended spending on advertising. In an in-depth discussion as part of the BBC's Big Boss Interview series, Van de Put said: I think over time you try to be neutral in the whole conflict.


Can Agents Fix Agent Issues?

Neural Information Processing Systems

LLM-based agent systems are emerging as a new software paradigm and have been widely adopted across diverse domains such as medicine, robotics, and programming. However, maintaining these systems requires substantial effort, as they are inevitably prone to bugs and continually evolve to meet changing external requirements. Therefore, automatically resolving agent issues (i.e., bug reports or feature requests) is a crucial and challenging task. While recent software engineering (SE) agents (e.g., SWE-agent) have shown promise in addressing issues in traditional software systems, it remains unclear how effectively they can resolve real-world issues in agent systems, which differ significantly from traditional software. To fill this gap, we first manually analyze 201 real-world agent issues and identify common categories of agent issues. We then spend 500 person-hours constructing AGENTISSUE-BENCH, a reproducible benchmark comprising 50 agent issue resolution tasks (each with an executable environment and failure-triggering tests). We further evaluate state-of-the-art SE agents on AGENTISSUE-BENCH and reveal their limited effectiveness (i.e., with only 0.67% - 4.67% resolution rates). These results underscore the unique challenges of maintaining agent systems compared to traditional software, highlighting the need for further research to develop advanced SE agents for resolving agent issues.


Equilibrium Policy Generalization: AReinforcement Learning Framework for Cross-Graph Zero-Shot Generalization in Pursuit-Evasion Games

Neural Information Processing Systems

Equilibrium learning in adversarial games is an important topic widely examined in the fields of game theory and reinforcement learning (RL). Pursuit-evasion game (PEG), as an important class of real-world games from the fields of robotics and security, requires exponential time to be accurately solved. When the underlying graph structure varies, even the state-of-the-art RL methods require recomputation or at least fine-tuning, which can be time-consuming and impair real-time applicability. This paper proposes an Equilibrium Policy Generalization (EPG) framework to effectively learn a generalized policy with robust cross-graph zeroshot performance. In the context of PEGs, our framework is generally applicable to both pursuer and evader sides in both no-exit and multi-exit scenarios.


BEDLAM2.0: Synthetic Humans and Cameras in Motion

Neural Information Processing Systems

Inferring 3D human motion from video remains a challenging problem with many applications. While traditional methods estimate the human in image coordinates, many applications require human motion to be estimated in world coordinates. This is particularly challenging when there is both human and camera motion. Progress on this topic has been limited by the lack of rich video data with ground truth human and camera movement. We address this with BEDLAM2.0, a new dataset that goes beyond the popular BEDLAM dataset in important ways.


Masked Diffusion Models as Energy Minimization

Neural Information Processing Systems

We present a systematic theoretical framework that interprets masked diffusion models (MDMs) as solutions to energy minimization problems in discrete optimal transport. Specifically, we prove that three distinct energy formulationskinetic, conditional kinetic, and geodesic energyare mathematically equivalent under the structure of MDMs, and that MDMs minimize all three when the mask schedule satisfies a closed-form optimality condition. This unification not only clarifies the theoretical foundations of MDMs, but also motivates practical improvements in sampling. By parameterizing interpolation schedules via Beta distributions, we reduce the schedule design space to a tractable 2D search, enabling efficient post-training tuning without model modification. Experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that our energy-inspired schedules outperform hand-crafted baselines, particularly in low-step sampling settings.