With increasing numbers of vulnerabilities exposed on the internet, autonomous penetration testing (pentesting) has emerged as an emerging research area, while reinforcement learning (RL) is a natural fit for studying autonomous pentesting. Previous research in RL-based autonomous pentesting mainly focused on enhancing agents' learning efficacy within abstract simulated training environments. They overlooked the applicability and generalization requirements of deploying agents' policies in real-world environments that differ substantially from their training settings. In contrast, for the first time, we shift focus to the pentesting agents' ability to generalize across unseen real environments. For this purpose, we propose a Generalizable Autonomous Pentesting framework (namely GAP) for training agents capable of drawing inferences from one to another -- a key requirement for the broad application of autonomous pentesting and a hallmark of human intelligence. GAP introduces a Real-to-Sim-to-Real pipeline with two key methods: domain randomization and meta-RL learning. Specifically, we are among the first to apply domain randomization in autonomous pentesting and propose a large language model-powered domain randomization method for synthetic environment generation. We further apply meta-RL to improve the agents' generalization ability in unseen environments by leveraging the synthetic environments. The combination of these two methods can effectively bridge the generalization gap and improve policy adaptation performance. Experiments are conducted on various vulnerable virtual machines, with results showing that GAP can (a) enable policy learning in unknown real environments, (b) achieve zero-shot policy transfer in similar environments, and (c) realize rapid policy adaptation in dissimilar environments.

Robotic grasping in densely cluttered environments is challenging due to scarce collision-free grasp affordances. Non-prehensile actions can increase feasible grasps in cluttered environments, but most research focuses on single-arm rather than dual-arm manipulation. Policies from single-arm systems fail to fully leverage the advantages of dual-arm coordination. We propose a target-oriented hierarchical deep reinforcement learning (DRL) framework that learns dual-arm push-grasp synergy for grasping objects to enhance dexterous manipulation in dense clutter. Our framework maps visual observations to actions via a pre-trained deep learning backbone and a novel CNN-based DRL model, trained with Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), to develop a dual-arm push-grasp strategy. The backbone enhances feature mapping in densely cluttered environments. A novel fuzzy-based reward function is introduced to accelerate efficient strategy learning. Our system is developed and trained in Isaac Gym and then tested in simulations and on a real robot. Experimental results show that our framework effectively maps visual data to dual push-grasp motions, enabling the dual-arm system to grasp target objects in complex environments. Compared to other methods, our approach generates 6-DoF grasp candidates and enables dual-arm push actions, mimicking human behavior. Results show that our method efficiently completes tasks in densely cluttered environments. https://sites.google.com/view/pg4da/home

Abstract--Diversity in demonstration selection is crucial for enhancing model generalization, as it enables a broader coverage of structures and concepts. However, constructing an appropriate set of demonstrations has remained a focal point of research. This paper presents the Relevance-Diversity Enhanced Selection (RDES), an innovative approach that leverages reinforcement learning to optimize the selection of diverse reference demonstrations for text classification tasks using Large Language Models (LLMs), especially in few-shot prompting scenarios. RDES employs a Q-learning framework to dynamically identify demonstrations that maximize both diversity and relevance to the classification objective by calculating a diversity score based on label distribution among selected demonstrations. This method ensures a balanced representation of reference data, leading to improved classification accuracy. This methodology allows LLMs to leverage their inherent LLMs have demonstrated exceptional capabilities across capabilities for understanding and processing text, making a wide array of NLP tasks, including text annotation [1], them particularly suitable for tasks with limited labeled data. These However, the effectiveness of ICL is contingent upon the models leverage extensive corpora of textual data to learn rich selection of appropriate and representative demonstrations representations, which empower them to perform reasoning from the knowledge base to serve as contextual references with high accuracy [4]-[6]. This critical aspect of fewshot of these models continue to expand, enhancing their learning is often overlooked in existing literature [12], reasoning capabilities becomes increasingly crucial.

Federated Learning (FL) is a privacy-preserving distributed learning paradigm designed to build a highly accurate global model. In Mobile Edge IoT (MEIoT), the training and communication processes can significantly deplete the limited battery resources of devices. Existing research primarily focuses on reducing overall energy consumption, but this may inadvertently create energy consumption imbalances, leading to the premature dropout of energy-sensitive devices.To address these challenges, we propose BEFL, a joint optimization framework aimed at balancing three objectives: enhancing global model accuracy, minimizing total energy consumption, and reducing energy usage disparities among devices. First, taking into account the communication constraints of MEIoT and the heterogeneity of devices, we employed the Sequential Least Squares Programming (SLSQP) algorithm for the rational allocation of communication resources. Based on this, we introduce a heuristic client selection algorithm that combines cluster partitioning with utility-driven approaches to alleviate both the total energy consumption of all devices and the discrepancies in energy usage.Furthermore, we utilize the proposed heuristic client selection algorithm as a template for offline imitation learning during pre-training, while adopting a ranking-based reinforcement learning approach online to further boost training efficiency. Our experiments reveal that BEFL improves global model accuracy by 1.6\%, reduces energy consumption variance by 72.7\%, and lowers total energy consumption by 28.2\% compared to existing methods. The relevant code can be found at \href{URL}{https://github.com/juzehao/BEFL}.

Traffic simulations are commonly used to optimize traffic flow, with reinforcement learning (RL) showing promising potential for automated traffic signal control. Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) is particularly effective for learning control strategies for traffic lights in a network using iterative simulations. However, existing methods often assume perfect vehicle detection, which overlooks real-world limitations related to infrastructure availability and sensor reliability. This study proposes a co-simulation framework integrating CARLA and SUMO, which combines high-fidelity 3D modeling with large-scale traffic flow simulation. Cameras mounted on traffic light poles within the CARLA environment use a YOLO-based computer vision system to detect and count vehicles, providing real-time traffic data as input for adaptive signal control in SUMO. MARL agents, trained with four different reward structures, leverage this visual feedback to optimize signal timings and improve network-wide traffic flow. Experiments in the test-bed demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed MARL approach in enhancing traffic conditions using real-time camera-based detection. The framework also evaluates the robustness of MARL under faulty or sparse sensing and compares the performance of YOLOv5 and YOLOv8 for vehicle detection. Results show that while better accuracy improves performance, MARL agents can still achieve significant improvements with imperfect detection, demonstrating adaptability for real-world scenarios.

Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated compelling performance in robotic tasks, but its success often hinges on the design of complex, ad hoc reward functions. Researchers have explored how Large Language Models (LLMs) could enable non-expert users to specify reward functions more easily. However, LLMs struggle to balance the importance of different features, generalize poorly to out-of-distribution robotic tasks, and cannot represent the problem properly with only text-based descriptions. To address these challenges, we propose ELEMENTAL (intEractive LEarning froM dEmoNstraTion And Language), a novel framework that combines natural language guidance with visual user demonstrations to align robot behavior with user intentions better. By incorporating visual inputs, ELEMENTAL overcomes the limitations of text-only task specifications, while leveraging inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) to balance feature weights and match the demonstrated behaviors optimally. ELEMENTAL also introduces an iterative feedback-loop through self-reflection to improve feature, reward, and policy learning. Our experiment results demonstrate that ELEMENTAL outperforms prior work by 42.3% on task success, and achieves 41.3% better generalization in out-of-distribution tasks, highlighting its robustness in LfD.

Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning has gathered significant interest in recent years due to its ability to model scenarios involving interacting agents. Notable successes have been achieved in domains such as autonomous driving (Shalev-Shwartz et al., 2016; Zhou et al., 2020), internet marketing (Jin et al., 2018), multi-robot control (Dawood et al., 2023), traffic control (Wang et al., 2019), and multi-player games (Baker et al., 2019; Samvelyan et al., 2019). All these applications require carefully designed reward functions, which is challenging even in single-agent settings (Amodei et al., 2016; Hadfield-Menell et al., 2017) and becomes more complex in multi-agent environments where each agent's reward function must be tailored to their specific, potentially different, goals. In many scenarios, it is possible to observe an expert demonstrating optimal behavior, yet the underlying reward function guiding this behavior remains unknown. This is where IRL (Ng and Russell, 2000) becomes crucial. IRL aims to recover feasible reward functions that can rationalize the observed behavior as optimal. However, the initial work in IRL revealed a fundamental challenge: the problem is ill-posed because multiple reward functions can potentially explain the same behavior. To address this, subsequent research has focused on reformulating the IRL problem to make it more practical and applicable in real-world settings (Abbeel and Ng, 2004; Ziebart et al., 2008; Ramachandran and Amir, 2007; Ratliff et al., 2006; Levine et al., 2011). Translating IRL to the multi-agent setting introduces new challenges, particularly regarding the concept of optimality, as each agent's strategy depends on the strategies of all other agents.

The reliable deployment of deep reinforcement learning in real-world settings requires the ability to generalize across a variety of conditions, including both in-distribution scenarios seen during training as well as novel out-of-distribution scenarios. In this work, we present a framework for dynamics generalization in deep reinforcement learning that unifies these two distinct types of generalization within a single architecture. We introduce a robust adaptation module that provides a mechanism for identifying and reacting to both in-distribution and outof-distribution environment dynamics, along with a joint training pipeline that combines the goals of in-distribution adaptation and out-of-distribution robustness. Our algorithm GRAM achieves strong generalization performance across indistribution and out-of-distribution scenarios upon deployment, which we demonstrate on a variety of realistic simulated locomotion tasks with a quadruped robot. Due to the diverse and uncertain nature of real-world settings, generalization is an important capability for the reliable deployment of data-driven, learning-based frameworks such as deep reinforcement learning (RL). Policies trained with deep RL must be capable of generalizing to a variety of different environment dynamics at deployment time, including both familiar training conditions and novel unseen scenarios, as the complex nature of real-world environments makes it difficult to capture all possible variations in the training process. Existing approaches to zero-shot dynamics generalization in deep RL have focused on two complementary concepts: adaptation and robustness. Contextual RL techniques (Hallak et al., 2015) learn to identify and adapt to the current environment dynamics to achieve the best performance, but this adaptation is only reliable for the range of in-distribution (ID) scenarios seen during training. Robust RL methods (Nilim & Ghaoui, 2005; Iyengar, 2005), on the other hand, maximize the worst-case performance across a range of possible environment dynamics, providing generalization to out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios at the cost of conservative performance in ID environments.

Multi-connectivity involves dynamic cluster formation among distributed access points (APs) and coordinated resource allocation from these APs, highlighting the need for efficient mobility management strategies for users with multi-connectivity. In this paper, we propose a novel mobility management scheme for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that uses dynamic cluster reconfiguration with energy-efficient power allocation in a wireless interference network. Our objective encompasses meeting stringent reliability demands, minimizing joint power consumption, and reducing the frequency of cluster reconfiguration. To achieve these objectives, we propose a hierarchical multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (H-MADRL) framework, specifically tailored for dynamic clustering and power allocation. The edge cloud connected with a set of APs through low latency optical back-haul links hosts the high-level agent responsible for the optimal clustering policy, while low-level agents reside in the APs and are responsible for the power allocation policy. To further improve the learning efficiency, we propose a novel action-observation transition-driven learning algorithm that allows the low-level agents to use the action space from the high-level agent as part of the local observation space. This allows the lower-level agents to share partial information about the clustering policy and allocate the power more efficiently. The simulation results demonstrate that our proposed distributed algorithm achieves comparable performance to the centralized algorithm. Additionally, it offers better scalability, as the decision time for clustering and power allocation increases by only 10% when doubling the number of APs, compared to a 90% increase observed with the centralized approach.

The exploration \& exploitation dilemma poses significant challenges in reinforcement learning (RL). Recently, curiosity-based exploration methods achieved great success in tackling hard-exploration problems. However, they necessitate extensive hyperparameter tuning on different environments, which heavily limits the applicability and accessibility of this line of methods. In this paper, we characterize this problem via analysis of the agent behavior, concluding the fundamental difficulty of choosing a proper hyperparameter. We then identify the difficulty and the instability of the optimization when the agent learns with curiosity. We propose our method, hyperparameter robust exploration (\textbf{Hyper}), which extensively mitigates the problem by effectively regularizing the visitation of the exploration and decoupling the exploitation to ensure stable training. We theoretically justify that \textbf{Hyper} is provably efficient under function approximation setting and empirically demonstrate its appealing performance and robustness in various environments.