Undirected Networks
Safe and Economical UAV Trajectory Planning in Low-Altitude Airspace: A Hybrid DRL-LLM Approach with Compliance Awareness
Gong, Yanwei, Fan, Junchao, Zhang, Ruichen, Niyato, Dusit, Yao, Yingying, Chang, Xiaolin
The rapid growth of the low-altitude economy has driven the widespread adoption of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). This growing deployment presents new challenges for UAV trajectory planning in complex urban environments. However, existing studies often overlook key factors, such as urban airspace constraints and economic efficiency, which are essential in low-altitude economy contexts. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is regarded as a promising solution to these issues, while its practical adoption remains limited by low learning efficiency. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel UAV trajectory planning framework that combines DRL with large language model (LLM) reasoning to enable safe, compliant, and economically viable path planning. Experimental results demonstrate that our method significantly outperforms existing baselines across multiple metrics, including data collection rate, collision avoidance, successful landing, regulatory compliance, and energy efficiency. These results validate the effectiveness of our approach in addressing UAV trajectory planning key challenges under constraints of the low-altitude economy networking.
Deep Actor-Critics with Tight Risk Certificates
Tasdighi, Bahareh, Haussmann, Manuel, Wu, Yi-Shan, Masegosa, Andres R., Kandemir, Melih
Deep actor-critic algorithms have reached a level where they influence everyday life. They are a driving force behind continual improvement of large language models through user feedback. However, their deployment in physical systems is not yet widely adopted, mainly because no validation scheme fully quantifies their risk of malfunction. We demonstrate that it is possible to develop tight risk certificates for deep actor-critic algorithms that predict generalization performance from validation-time observations. Our key insight centers on the effectiveness of minimal evaluation data. A small feasible set of evaluation roll-outs collected from a pretrained policy suffices to produce accurate risk certificates when combined with a simple adaptation of PAC-Bayes theory. Specifically, we adopt a recently introduced recursive PAC-Bayes approach, which splits validation data into portions and recursively builds PAC-Bayes bounds on the excess loss of each portion's predictor, using the predictor from the previous portion as a data-informed prior. Our empirical results across multiple locomotion tasks, actor-critic methods, and policy expertise levels demonstrate risk certificates tight enough to be considered for practical use.
Web-Shepherd: Advancing PRMs for Reinforcing Web Agents
Chae, Hyungjoo, Kim, Sunghwan, Cho, Junhee, Kim, Seungone, Moon, Seungjun, Hwangbo, Gyeom, Lim, Dongha, Kim, Minjin, Hwang, Yeonjun, Gwak, Minju, Choi, Dongwook, Kang, Minseok, Im, Gwanhoon, Cho, ByeongUng, Kim, Hyojun, Han, Jun Hee, Kwon, Taeyoon, Kim, Minju, Kwak, Beong-woo, Kang, Dongjin, Yeo, Jinyoung
Web navigation is a unique domain that can automate many repetitive real-life tasks and is challenging as it requires long-horizon sequential decision making beyond typical multimodal large language model (MLLM) tasks. Yet, specialized reward models for web navigation that can be utilized during both training and test-time have been absent until now. Despite the importance of speed and cost-effectiveness, prior works have utilized MLLMs as reward models, which poses significant constraints for real-world deployment. To address this, in this work, we propose the first process reward model (PRM) called Web-Shepherd which could assess web navigation trajectories in a step-level. To achieve this, we first construct the WebPRM Collection, a large-scale dataset with 40K step-level preference pairs and annotated checklists spanning diverse domains and difficulty levels. Next, we also introduce the WebRewardBench, the first meta-evaluation benchmark for evaluating PRMs. In our experiments, we observe that our Web-Shepherd achieves about 30 points better accuracy compared to using GPT-4o on WebRewardBench. Furthermore, when testing on WebArena-lite by using GPT-4o-mini as the policy and Web-Shepherd as the verifier, we achieve 10.9 points better performance, in 10 less cost compared to using GPT-4o-mini as the verifier. Our model, dataset, and code are publicly available at LINK.
Model-Based Learning of Whittle indices
Charles-Rebuffรฉ, Joรซl, Gast, Nicolas, Gaujal, Bruno
We present BLINQ, a new model-based algorithm that learns the Whittle indices of an indexable, communicating and unichain Markov Decision Process (MDP). Our approach relies on building an empirical estimate of the MDP and then computing its Whittle indices using an extended version of a state-of-the-art existing algorithm. We provide a proof of convergence to the Whittle indices we want to learn as well as a bound on the time needed to learn them with arbitrary precision. Moreover, we investigate its computational complexity. Our numerical experiments suggest that BLINQ significantly outperforms existing Q-learning approaches in terms of the number of samples needed to get an accurate approximation. In addition, it has a total computational cost even lower than Q-learning for any reasonably high number of samples. These observations persist even when the Q-learning algorithms are speeded up using pre-trained neural networks to predict Q-values.
Learning Degenerate Manifolds of Frustrated Magnets with Boltzmann Machines
Glass, Jackson C., Chern, Gia-Wei
We show that Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs) provide a flexible generative framework for modeling spin configurations in disordered yet strongly correlated phases of frustrated magnets. As a benchmark, we first demonstrate that an RBM can learn the zero-temperature ground-state manifold of the one-dimensional ANNNI model at its multiphase point, accurately reproducing its characteristic oscillatory and exponentially decaying correlations. We then apply RBMs to kagome spin ice and show that they successfully learn the local ice rules and short-range correlations of the extensively degenerate ice-I manifold. Correlation functions computed from RBM-generated configurations closely match those from direct Monte Carlo simulations. For the partially ordered ice-II phase -- featuring long-range charge order and broken time-reversal symmetry -- accurate modeling requires RBMs with uniform-sign bias fields, mirroring the underlying symmetry breaking. These results highlight the utility of RBMs as generative models for learning constrained and highly frustrated magnetic states.
Scaling Agentic Reinforcement Learning for Tool-Integrated Reasoning in VLMs
Lu, Meng, Xu, Ran, Fang, Yi, Zhang, Wenxuan, Yu, Yue, Srivastava, Gaurav, Zhuang, Yuchen, Elhoseiny, Mohamed, Fleming, Charles, Yang, Carl, Tu, Zhengzhong, Xie, Yang, Xiao, Guanghua, Wang, Hanrui, Jin, Di, Shi, Wenqi, Wang, Xuan
While recent vision-language models (VLMs) demonstrate strong image understanding, their ability to "think with images", i.e., to reason through multi-step visual interactions, remains limited. We introduce VISTA-Gym, a scalable training environment for incentivizing tool-integrated visual reasoning capabilities in VLMs. VISTA-Gym unifies diverse real-world multimodal reasoning tasks (7 tasks from 13 datasets in total) with a standardized interface for visual tools (e.g., grounding, parsing), executable interaction loops, verifiable feedback signals, and efficient trajectory logging, enabling visual agentic reinforcement learning at scale. While recent VLMs exhibit strong text-only reasoning, both proprietary and open-source models still struggle with tool selection, invocation, and coordination. With VISTA-Gym, we train VISTA-R1 to interleave tool-use with agentic reasoning via multi-turn trajectory sampling and end-to-end reinforcement learning. Extensive experiments across 11 public reasoning-intensive VQA benchmarks show that VISTA-R1-8B outperforms state-of-the-art baselines with similar sizes by 9.51%-18.72%, demonstrating VISTA-Gym as an effective training ground to unlock the tool-integrated reasoning capabilities for VLMs.
Hidden markov model to predict tourists visited place
Demessance, Theo, Bi, Chongke, Djebali, Sonia, Guerard, Guillaume
Nowadays, social networks are becoming a popular way of analyzing tourist behavior, thanks to the digital traces left by travelers during their stays on these networks. The massive amount of data generated; by the propensity of tourists to share comments and photos during their trip; makes it possible to model their journeys and analyze their behavior. Predicting the next movement of tourists plays a key role in tourism marketing to understand demand and improve decision support. In this paper, we propose a method to understand and to learn tourists' movements based on social network data analysis to predict future movements. The method relies on a machine learning grammatical inference algorithm. A major contribution in this paper is to adapt the grammatical inference algorithm to the context of big data. Our method produces a hidden Markov model representing the movements of a group of tourists. The hidden Markov model is flexible and editable with new data. The capital city of France, Paris is selected to demonstrate the efficiency of the proposed methodology.
VIL2C: Value-of-Information Aware Low-Latency Communication for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Zhang, Qian, Sun, Zhuo, Zhang, Yao, Yu, Zhiwen, Guo, Bin, Zhang, Jun
Inter-agent communication serves as an effective mechanism for enhancing performance in collaborative multi-agent reinforcement learning(MARL) systems. However, the inherent communication latency in practical systems induces both action decision delays and outdated information sharing, impeding MARL performance gains, particularly in time-critical applications like autonomous driving. In this work, we propose a V alue-of-Information aware Low-latency Communication(VIL2C) scheme that proactively adjusts the latency distribution to mitigate its effects in MARL systems. Specifically, we define a V alue of Information (VOI) metric to quantify the importance of delayed message transmission based on each delayed message's importance. Moreover, we propose a progressive message reception mechanism to adap-tively adjust the reception duration based on received messages. We derive the optimized V oI aware resource allocation and theoretically prove the performance advantage of the proposed VIL2C scheme. Extensive experiments demonstrate that VIL2C outperforms existing approaches under various communication conditions. These gains are attributed to the low-latency transmission of high-V oI messages via resource allocation and the elimination of unnecessary waiting periods via adaptive reception duration.
DecNefLab: A Modular and Interpretable Simulation Framework for Decoded Neurofeedback
Olza, Alexander, Santana, Roberto, Soto, David
Decoded Neurofeedback (DecNef) is a flourishing non-invasive approach to brain modulation with wide-ranging applications in neuromedicine and cognitive neuroscience. However, progress in DecNef research remains constrained by subject-dependent learning variability, reliance on indirect measures to quantify progress, and the high cost and time demands of experimentation. We present DecNefLab, a modular and interpretable simulation framework that formalizes DecNef as a machine learning problem. Beyond providing a virtual laboratory, DecNefLab enables researchers to model, analyze and understand neurofeedback dynamics. Using latent variable generative models as simulated participants, DecNefLab allows direct observation of internal cognitive states and systematic evaluation of how different protocol designs and subject characteristics influence learning. We demonstrate how this approach can (i) reproduce empirical phenomena of DecNef learning, (ii) identify conditions under which DecNef feedback fails to induce learning, and (iii) guide the design of more robust and reliable DecNef protocols in silico before human implementation. In summary, DecNefLab bridges computational modeling and cognitive neuroscience, offering a principled foundation for methodological innovation, robust protocol design, and ultimately, a deeper understanding of DecNef-based brain modulation.
Aspiration-based Perturbed Learning Automata in Games with Noisy Utility Measurements. Part A: Stochastic Stability in Non-zero-Sum Games
Reinforcement-based learning has attracted considerable attention both in modeling human behavior as well as in engineering, for designing measurement- or payoff-based optimization schemes. Such learning schemes exhibit several advantages, especially in relation to filtering out noisy observations. However, they may exhibit several limitations when applied in a distributed setup. In multi-player weakly-acyclic games, and when each player applies an independent copy of the learning dynamics, convergence to (usually desirable) pure Nash equilibria cannot be guaranteed. Prior work has only focused on a small class of games, namely potential and coordination games. To address this main limitation, this paper introduces a novel payoff-based learning scheme for distributed optimization, namely aspiration-based perturbed learning automata (APLA). In this class of dynamics, and contrary to standard reinforcement-based learning schemes, each player's probability distribution for selecting actions is reinforced both by repeated selection and an aspiration factor that captures the player's satisfaction level. We provide a stochastic stability analysis of APLA in multi-player positive-utility games under the presence of noisy observations. This is the first part of the paper that characterizes stochastic stability in generic non-zero-sum games by establishing equivalence of the induced infinite-dimensional Markov chain with a finite dimensional one. In the second part, stochastic stability is further specialized to weakly acyclic games.