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 Reinforcement Learning


BIDA: A Bi-level Interaction Decision-making Algorithm for Autonomous Vehicles in Dynamic Traffic Scenarios

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In complex real-world traffic environments, autonomous vehicles (AVs) need to interact with other traffic participants while making real-time and safety-critical decisions accordingly. The unpredictability of human behaviors poses significant challenges, particularly in dynamic scenarios, such as multi-lane highways and unsignalized T-intersections. To address this gap, we design a bi-level interaction decision-making algorithm (BIDA) that integrates interactive Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) with deep reinforcement learning (DRL), aiming to enhance interaction rationality, efficiency and safety of AVs in dynamic key traffic scenarios. Specifically, we adopt three types of DRL algorithms to construct a reliable value network and policy network, which guide the online deduction process of interactive MCTS by assisting in value update and node selection. Then, a dynamic trajectory planner and a trajectory tracking controller are designed and implemented in CARLA to ensure smooth execution of planned maneuvers. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that our BIDA not only enhances interactive deduction and reduces computational costs, but also outperforms other latest benchmarks, which exhibits superior safety, efficiency and interaction rationality under varying traffic conditions.


Agentic Personalisation of Cross-Channel Marketing Experiences

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Consumer applications provide ample opportunities to surface and communicate various forms of content to users. From promotional campaigns for new features or subscriptions, to evergreen nudges for engagement, or personalised recommendations; across e-mails, push notifications, and in-app surfaces. The conventional approach to orchestration for communication relies heavily on labour-intensive manual marketer work, and inhibits effective personalisation of content, timing, frequency, and copy-writing. We formulate this task under a sequential decision-making framework, where we aim to optimise a modular decision-making policy that maximises incremental engagement for any funnel event. Our approach leverages a Difference-in-Differences design for Individual Treatment Effect estimation, and Thompson sampling to balance the explore-exploit trade-off. We present results from a multi-service application, where our methodology has resulted in significant increases to a variety of goal events across several product features, and is currently deployed across 150 million users.


Data-Driven Policy Mapping for Safe RL-based Energy Management Systems

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Increasing global energy demand and renewable integration complexity have placed buildings at the center of sustainable energy management. We present a three-step reinforcement learning(RL)-based Building Energy Management System (BEMS) that combines clustering, forecasting, and constrained policy learning to address scalability, adaptability, and safety challenges. First, we cluster non-shiftable load profiles to identify common consumption patterns, enabling policy generalization and transfer without retraining for each new building. Next, we integrate an LSTM based forecasting module to anticipate future states, improving the RL agents' responsiveness to dynamic conditions. Lastly, domain-informed action masking ensures safe exploration and operation, preventing harmful decisions. Evaluated on real-world data, our approach reduces operating costs by up to 15% for certain building types, maintains stable environmental performance, and quickly classifies and optimizes new buildings with limited data. It also adapts to stochastic tariff changes without retraining. Overall, this framework delivers scalable, robust, and cost-effective building energy management.


Goal-conditioned Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for Sample-efficient and Safe Autonomous Driving at Intersections

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Reinforcement learning (RL) exhibits remarkable potential in addressing autonomous driving tasks. However, it is difficult to train a sample-efficient and safe policy in complex scenarios. In this article, we propose a novel hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL) framework with a goal-conditioned collision prediction (GCCP) module. In the hierarchical structure, the GCCP module predicts collision risks according to different potential subgoals of the ego vehicle. A high-level decision-maker choose the best safe subgoal. A low-level motion-planner interacts with the environment according to the subgoal. Compared to traditional RL methods, our algorithm is more sample-efficient, since its hierarchical structure allows reusing the policies of subgoals across similar tasks for various navigation scenarios. In additional, the GCCP module's ability to predict both the ego vehicle's and surrounding vehicles' future actions according to different subgoals, ensures the safety of the ego vehicle throughout the decision-making process. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method converges to an optimal policy faster and achieves higher safety than traditional RL methods.


Towards Emergency Scenarios: An Integrated Decision-making Framework of Multi-lane Platoon Reorganization

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

To enhance the ability for vehicle platoons to respond to emergency scenarios, a platoon distribution reorganization decision-making framework is proposed. This framework contains platoon distribution layer, vehicle cooperative decision-making layer and vehicle planning and control layer. Firstly, a reinforcement-learning-based platoon distribution model is presented, where a risk potential field is established to quantitatively assess driving risks, and a reward function tailored to the platoon reorganization process is constructed. Then, a coalition-game-based vehicle cooperative decision-making model is put forward, modeling the cooperative relationships among vehicles through dividing coalitions and generating the optimal decision results for each vehicle. Additionally, a novel graph-theory-based Platoon Disposition Index (PDI) is incorporated into the game reward function to measure the platoon's distribution state during the reorganization process, in order to accelerating the reorganization process. Finally, the validation of the proposed framework is conducted in two high-risk scenarios under random traffic flows. The results show that, compared to the baseline models, the proposed method can significantly reduce the collision rate and improve driving efficiency. Moreover, the model with PDI can significantly decrease the platoon formation reorganization time and improve the reorganization efficiency.


From Pixels to CSI: Distilling Latent Dynamics For Efficient Wireless Resource Management

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

In this work, we aim to optimize the radio resource management of a communication system between a remote controller and its device, whose state is represented through image frames, without compromising the performance of the control task. We propose a novel machine learning (ML) technique to jointly model and predict the dynamics of the control system as well as the wireless propagation environment in latent space. Our method leverages two coupled joint-embedding predictive architectures (JEP As): a control JEP A models the control dynamics and guides the predictions of a wireless JEP A, which captures the dynamics of the device's channel state information (CSI) through cross-modal conditioning. We then train a deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm to derive a control policy from latent control dynamics and a power predictor to estimate scheduling intervals with favorable channel conditions based on latent CSI representations. As such, the controller minimizes the usage of radio resources by utilizing the coupled JEP A networks to imagine the device's trajectory in latent space. We present simulation results on synthetic multimodal data and show that our proposed approach reduces transmit power by over 50% while maintaining control performance comparable to baseline methods that do not account for wireless optimization.


Adaptive Guidance Accelerates Reinforcement Learning of Reasoning Models

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

We study the process through which reasoning models trained with reinforcement learning on verifiable rewards (RLVR) can learn to solve new problems. We find that RLVR drives performance in two main ways: (1) by compressing pass@$k$ into pass@1 and (2) via "capability gain" in which models learn to solve new problems that they previously could not solve even at high $k$. We find that while capability gain exists across model scales, learning to solve new problems is primarily driven through self-distillation. We demonstrate these findings across model scales ranging from 0.5B to 72B parameters on >500,000 reasoning problems with prompts and verifiable final answers across math, science, and code domains. We further show that we can significantly improve pass@$k$ rates by leveraging natural language guidance for the model to consider within context while still requiring the model to derive a solution chain from scratch. Based of these insights, we derive $\text{Guide}$ -- a new class of online training algorithms. $\text{Guide}$ adaptively incorporates hints into the model's context on problems for which all rollouts were initially incorrect and adjusts the importance sampling ratio for the "off-policy" trajectories in order to optimize the policy for contexts in which the hints are no longer present. We describe variants of $\text{Guide}$ for GRPO and PPO and empirically show that Guide-GRPO on 7B and 32B parameter models improves generalization over its vanilla counterpart with up to 4$\%$ macro-average improvement across math benchmarks. We include careful ablations to analyze $\text{Guide}$'s components and theoretically analyze Guide's learning efficiency.


GRPO-CARE: Consistency-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Multimodal Reasoning

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Recent reinforcement learning approaches, such as outcome-supervised GRPO, have advanced Chain-of-Thought reasoning in large language models (LLMs), yet their adaptation to multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) is unexplored. To address the lack of rigorous evaluation for MLLM post-training methods, we introduce SEED-Bench-R1, a benchmark with complex real-world videos requiring balanced perception and reasoning. It offers a large training set and evaluates generalization across three escalating challenges: in-distribution, cross-environment, and cross-environment-task scenarios. Using SEED-Bench-R1, we find that standard GRPO, while improving answer accuracy, often reduces logical coherence between reasoning steps and answers, with only a 57.9% consistency rate. This stems from reward signals focusing solely on final answers, encouraging shortcuts, and strict KL penalties limiting exploration.To address this, we propose GRPO-CARE, a consistency-aware RL framework optimizing both answer correctness and reasoning coherence without explicit supervision. GRPO-CARE introduces a two-tiered reward: (1) a base reward for answer correctness, and (2) an adaptive consistency bonus, computed by comparing the model's reasoning-to-answer likelihood (via a slowly-evolving reference model) against group peers.This dual mechanism amplifies rewards for reasoning paths that are both correct and logically consistent. Replacing KL penalties with this adaptive bonus, GRPO-CARE outperforms standard GRPO on SEED-Bench-R1, achieving a 6.7% performance gain on the hardest evaluation level and a 24.5% improvement in consistency. It also shows strong transferability, improving model performance across diverse video understanding benchmarks. Our work contributes a systematically designed benchmark and a generalizable post-training framework, advancing the development of more interpretable and robust MLLMs.


Joint User Priority and Power Scheduling for QoS-Aware WMMSE Precoding: A Constrained-Actor Attentive-Critic Approach

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

6G wireless networks are expected to support diverse quality-of-service (QoS) demands while maintaining high energy efficiency. Weighted Minimum Mean Square Error (WMMSE) precoding with fixed user priorities and transmit power is widely recognized for enhancing overall system performance but lacks flexibility to adapt to user-specific QoS requirements and time-varying channel conditions. To address this, we propose a novel constrained reinforcement learning (CRL) algorithm, Constrained-Actor Attentive-Critic (CAAC), which uses a policy network to dynamically allocate user priorities and power for WMMSE precoding. Specifically, CAAC integrates a Constrained Stochastic Successive Convex Approximation (CSSCA) method to optimize the policy, enabling more effective handling of energy efficiency goals and satisfaction of stochastic non-convex QoS constraints compared to traditional and existing CRL methods. Moreover, CAAC employs lightweight attention-enhanced Q-networks to evaluate policy updates without prior environment model knowledge. The network architecture not only enhances representational capacity but also boosts learning efficiency. Simulation results show that CAAC outperforms baselines in both energy efficiency and QoS satisfaction.


Human-Centered Shared Autonomy for Motor Planning, Learning, and Control Applications

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

With recent advancements in AI and computational tools, intelligent paradigms have emerged to enhance fields like shared autonomy and human-machine teaming in healthcare. Advanced AI algorithms (e.g., reinforcement learning) can autonomously make decisions to achieve planning and motion goals. However, in healthcare, where human intent is crucial, fully independent machine decisions may not be ideal. This chapter presents a comprehensive review of human-centered shared autonomy AI frameworks, focusing on upper limb biosignal-based machine interfaces and associated motor control systems, including computer cursors, robotic arms, and planar platforms. We examine motor planning, learning (rehabilitation), and control, covering conceptual foundations of human-machine teaming in reach-and-grasp tasks and analyzing both theoretical and practical implementations. Each section explores how human and machine inputs can be blended for shared autonomy in healthcare applications. Topics include human factors, biosignal processing for intent detection, shared autonomy in brain-computer interfaces (BCI), rehabilitation, assistive robotics, and Large Language Models (LLMs) as the next frontier. We propose adaptive shared autonomy AI as a high-performance paradigm for collaborative human-AI systems, identify key implementation challenges, and outline future directions, particularly regarding AI reasoning agents. This analysis aims to bridge neuroscientific insights with robotics to create more intuitive, effective, and ethical human-machine teaming frameworks.