Reinforcement Learning
A Service-Oriented Adaptive Hierarchical Incentive Mechanism for Federated Learning
Cao, Jiaxing, Gao, Yuzhou, Huang, Jiwei
Recently, federated learning (FL) has emerged as a novel framework for distributed model training. In FL, the task publisher (TP) releases tasks, and local model owners (LMOs) use their local data to train models. Sometimes, FL suffers from the lack of training data, and thus workers are recruited for gathering data. To this end, this paper proposes an adaptive incentive mechanism from a service-oriented perspective, with the objective of maximizing the utilities of TP, LMOs and workers. Specifically, a Stackelberg game is theoretically established between the LMOs and TP, positioning TP as the leader and the LMOs as followers. An analytical Nash equilibrium solution is derived to maximize their utilities. The interaction between LMOs and workers is formulated by a multi-agent Markov decision process (MAMDP), with the optimal strategy identified via deep reinforcement learning (DRL). Additionally, an Adaptively Searching the Optimal Strategy Algorithm (ASOSA) is designed to stabilize the strategies of each participant and solve the coupling problems. Extensive numerical experiments are conducted to validate the efficacy of the proposed method.
SABR: A Stable Adaptive Bitrate Framework Using Behavior Cloning Pretraining and Reinforcement Learning Fine-Tuning
Luo, Pengcheng, Zhao, Yunyang, Zhang, Bowen, Yang, Genke, Soong, Boon-Hee, Yuen, Chau
With the advent of 5G, the internet has entered a new video-centric era. From short-video platforms like TikTok to long-video platforms like Bilibili, online video services are reshaping user consumption habits. Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) control is widely recognized as a critical factor influencing Quality of Experience (QoE). Recent learning-based ABR methods have attracted increasing attention. However, most of them rely on limited network trace sets during training and overlook the wide-distribution characteristics of real-world network conditions, resulting in poor generalization in out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios. To address this limitation, we propose SABR, a training framework that combines behavior cloning (BC) pretraining with reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning. We also introduce benchmarks, ABRBench-3G and ABRBench-4G+, which provide wide-coverage training traces and dedicated OOD test sets for assessing robustness to unseen network conditions. Experimental results demonstrate that SABR achieves the best average rank compared with Pensieve, Comyco, and NetLLM across the proposed benchmarks. These results indicate that SABR enables more stable learning across wide distributions and improves generalization to unseen network conditions.
Acrobotics: A Generalist Approach to Quadrupedal Robots' Parkour
Gagné-Labelle, Guillaume, Atanassov, Vassil, Havoutis, Ioannis
Climbing, crouching, bridging gaps, and walking up stairs are just a few of the advantages that quadruped robots have over wheeled robots, making them more suitable for navigating rough and unstructured terrain. However, executing such manoeuvres requires precise temporal coordination and complex agent-environment interactions. Moreover, legged locomotion is inherently more prone to slippage and tripping, and the classical approach of modeling such cases to design a robust controller thus quickly becomes impractical. In contrast, reinforcement learning offers a compelling solution by enabling optimal control through trial and error. We present a generalist reinforcement learning algorithm for quadrupedal agents in dynamic motion scenarios. The learned policy rivals state-of-the-art specialist policies trained using a mixture of experts approach, while using only 25% as many agents during training. Our experiments also highlight the key components of the generalist locomotion policy and the primary factors contributing to its success.
A Convolution and Attention Based Encoder for Reinforcement Learning under Partial Observability
B. Observation History The core contribution of this work is a novel history encoder for processing historical observations, which integrates two key operations: depthwise separable convolution and multi-head attention. The background of these operations is briefly reviewed below. Depthwise separable convolution [33] is a streamlined variant of standard convolution that reduces both parameter count and computational cost. It decomposes the operation into two steps: (1) a depthwise convolution, which applies a single filter to each input channel, and (2) a pointwise convolution, which uses a 1 1 convolution to linearly combine the outputs of the depthwise stage. This factorization enables efficient extraction of spatial and cross-channel features while maintaining strong representational capacity. It has been widely adopted in lightweight neural architectures such as MobileNet [34] and is particularly well suited to real-time and resource-constrained applications. Multi-head attention [9] is a fundamental component of Transformer architectures, enabling the model to capture diverse patterns across different representation subspaces.
ConvSearch-R1: Enhancing Query Reformulation for Conversational Search with Reasoning via Reinforcement Learning
Zhu, Changtai, Wang, Siyin, Feng, Ruijun, Song, Kai, Qiu, Xipeng
Conversational search systems require effective handling of context-dependent queries that often contain ambiguity, omission, and coreference. Conversational Query Reformulation (CQR) addresses this challenge by transforming these queries into self-contained forms suitable for off-the-shelf retrievers. However, existing CQR approaches suffer from two critical constraints: high dependency on costly external supervision from human annotations or large language models, and insufficient alignment between the rewriting model and downstream retrievers. We present ConvSearch-R1, the first self-driven framework that completely eliminates dependency on external rewrite supervision by leveraging reinforcement learning to optimize reformulation directly through retrieval signals. Our novel two-stage approach combines Self-Driven Policy Warm-Up to address the cold-start problem through retrieval-guided self-distillation, followed by Retrieval-Guided Reinforcement Learning with a specially designed rank-incentive reward shaping mechanism that addresses the sparsity issue in conventional retrieval metrics. Extensive experiments on TopiOCQA and QReCC datasets demonstrate that ConvSearch-R1 significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods, achieving over 10% improvement on the challenging TopiOCQA dataset while using smaller 3B parameter models without any external supervision.
Composing Dextrous Grasping and In-hand Manipulation via Scoring with a Reinforcement Learning Critic
Röstel, Lennart, Winkelbauer, Dominik, Pitz, Johannes, Sievers, Leon, Bäuml, Berthold
In-hand manipulation and grasping are fundamental yet often separately addressed tasks in robotics. For deriving in-hand manipulation policies, reinforcement learning has recently shown great success. However, the derived controllers are not yet useful in real-world scenarios because they often require a human operator to place the objects in suitable initial (grasping) states. Finding stable grasps that also promote the desired in-hand manipulation goal is an open problem. In this work, we propose a method for bridging this gap by leveraging the critic network of a reinforcement learning agent trained for in-hand manipulation to score and select initial grasps. Our experiments show that this method significantly increases the success rate of in-hand manipulation without requiring additional training. We also present an implementation of a full grasp manipulation pipeline on a real-world system, enabling autonomous grasping and reorientation even of unwieldy objects.
HiLight: A Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning Framework with Global Adversarial Guidance for Large-Scale Traffic Signal Control
Zhu, Yaqiao, Wen, Hongkai, Min, Geyong, Luo, Man
Efficient traffic signal control (TSC) is essential for mitigating urban congestion, yet existing reinforcement learning (RL) methods face challenges in scaling to large networks while maintaining global coordination. Centralized RL suffers from scalability issues, while decentralized approaches often lack unified objectives, resulting in limited network-level efficiency. In this paper, we propose HiLight, a hierarchical reinforcement learning framework with global adversarial guidance for large-scale TSC. HiLight consists of a high-level Meta-Policy, which partitions the traffic network into subregions and generates sub-goals using a Transformer-LSTM architecture, and a low-level Sub-Policy, which controls individual intersections with global awareness. To improve the alignment between global planning and local execution, we introduce an adversarial training mechanism, where the Meta-Policy generates challenging yet informative sub-goals, and the Sub-Policy learns to surpass these targets, leading to more effective coordination. We evaluate HiLight across both synthetic and real-world benchmarks, and additionally construct a large-scale Manhattan network with diverse traffic conditions, including peak transitions, adverse weather, and holiday surges. Experimental results show that HiLight exhibits significant advantages in large-scale scenarios and remains competitive across standard benchmarks of varying sizes.
DiffAero: A GPU-Accelerated Differentiable Simulation Framework for Efficient Quadrotor Policy Learning
Zhang, Xinhong, Wang, Runqing, Ren, Yunfan, Sun, Jian, Fang, Hao, Chen, Jie, Wang, Gang
Abstract-- This letter introduces DiffAero, a lightweight, GPU-accelerated, and fully differentiable simulation framework designed for efficient quadrotor control policy learning. Dif-fAero supports both environment-level and agent-level parallelism and integrates multiple dynamics models, customizable sensor stacks (IMU, depth camera, and LiDAR), and diverse flight tasks within a unified, GPU-native training interface. By fully parallelizing both physics and rendering on the GPU, DiffAero eliminates CPU-GPU data transfer bottlenecks and delivers orders-of-magnitude improvements in simulation throughput. In contrast to existing simulators, DiffAero not only provides high-performance simulation but also serves as a research platform for exploring differentiable and hybrid learning algorithms. Extensive benchmarks and real-world flight experiments demonstrate that DiffAero and hybrid learning algorithms combined can learn robust flight policies in hours on consumer-grade hardware. Quadrotors--and swarms of quadrotors thereof--are increasingly deployed in complex environments for aerial inspection, environmental monitoring, and high-speed racing, owing to their agile maneuverability and onboard sensing capabilities. End-to-end learning addresses these limitations by training neural flight policies that map raw sensor observations directly to control commands, thereby streamlining the autonomy stack and enabling tighter feedback loops [4].
Federated Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Privacy-Preserving and Energy-Aware Resource Management in 6G Edge Networks
Andong, Francisco Javier Esono Nkulu, Min, Qi
Abstract--As sixth-generation (6G) networks move toward ultra-dense, intelligent edge environments, efficient resource management under stringent privacy, mobility, and energy constraints becomes critical. This paper introduces a novel Federated Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (Fed-MARL) framework that incorporates cross-layer orchestration of both the MAC layer and application layer for energy-efficient, privacy-preserving, and real-time resource management across heterogeneous edge devices. Each agent uses a Deep Recurrent Q-Network (DRQN) to learn decentralized policies for task offloading, spectrum access, and CPU energy adaptation based on local observations (e.g., queue length, energy, CPU usage, and mobility). T o protect privacy, we introduce a secure aggregation protocol based on elliptic-curve Diffie-Hellman key exchange, which ensures accurate model updates without exposing raw data to semi-honest adversaries. We formulate the resource management problem as a partially observable multi-agent Markov decision process (POMMDP) with a multi-objective reward function that jointly optimizes latency, energy efficiency, spectral efficiency, fairness, and reliability under 6G-specific service requirements such as URLLC, eMBB, and mMTC. Simulation results demonstrate that Fed-MARL outperforms centralized MARL and heuristic baselines in task success rate, latency, energy efficiency, and fairness, while ensuring robust privacy protection and scalability in dynamic, resource-constrained 6G edge networks. Sixth-generation (6G) wireless networks are poised to transform communication systems by enabling ultra-dense connectivity, low-latency services, and intelligent edge processing capabilities [1]. These advances are critical for emerging applications such as autonomous driving, augmented reality, and massive Internet of Things (IoT) deployments, each imposing diverse and stringent quality-of-service (QoS) requirements [2], [3]. Efficiently meeting these demands requires decentralized, real-time resource management frameworks capable of operating in highly dynamic, interference-prone, and energy-constrained environments under strict privacy conditions. Traditional centralized resource management architectures, which depend on global network knowledge for task offload-ing, spectrum allocation, and computational scheduling, face significant limitations in 6G contexts [4], [5]. These include scalability bottlenecks, latency, communication overhead, and privacy concerns, particularly when raw user data must be aggregated [6].
Reinforcement learning for spin torque oscillator tasks
Mojsiejuk, Jakub, Ziętek, Sławomir, Skowroński, Witold
We address the problem of automatic synchronisation of the spintronic oscillator (STO) by means of reinforcement learning (RL). A numerical solution of the macrospin Landau-Lifschitz-Gilbert-Slonczewski equation is used to simulate the STO and we train the two types of RL agents to synchronise with a target frequency within a fixed number of steps. We explore modifications to this base task and show an improvement in both convergence and energy efficiency of the synchronisation that can be easily achieved in the simulated environment.