Reinforcement Learning
Approximation to Deep Q-Network by Stochastic Delay Differential Equations
Despite the significant breakthroughs that the Deep Q-Network (DQN) has brought to reinforcement learning, its theoretical analysis remains limited. In this paper, we construct a stochastic differential delay equation (SDDE) based on the DQN algorithm and estimate the Wasserstein-1 distance between them. We provide an upper bound for the distance and prove that the distance between the two converges to zero as the step size approaches zero. This result allows us to understand DQN's two key techniques, the experience replay and the target network, from the perspective of continuous systems. Specifically, the delay term in the equation, corresponding to the target network, contributes to the stability of the system. Our approach leverages a refined Lindeberg principle and an operator comparison to establish these results.
Intelligent Task Scheduling for Microservices via A3C-Based Reinforcement Learning
Wang, Yang, Tang, Tengda, Fang, Zhou, Deng, Yingnan, Duan, Yifei
To address the challenges of high resource dynamism and intensive task concurrency in microservice systems, this paper proposes an adaptive resource scheduling method based on the A3C reinforcement learning algorithm. The scheduling problem is modeled as a Markov Decision Process, where policy and value networks are jointly optimized to enable fine-grained resource allocation under varying load conditions. The method incorporates an asynchronous multi-threaded learning mechanism, allowing multiple agents to perform parallel sampling and synchronize updates to the global network parameters. This design improves both policy convergence efficiency and model stability. In the experimental section, a real-world dataset is used to construct a scheduling scenario. The proposed method is compared with several typical approaches across multiple evaluation metrics, including task delay, scheduling success rate, resource utilization, and convergence speed. The results show that the proposed method delivers high scheduling performance and system stability in multi-task concurrent environments. It effectively alleviates the resource allocation bottlenecks faced by traditional methods under heavy load, demonstrating its practical value for intelligent scheduling in microservice systems.
Investigating Adaptive Tuning of Assistive Exoskeletons Using Offline Reinforcement Learning: Challenges and Insights
Findik, Yasin, Coco, Christopher, Azadeh, Reza
-- Assistive exoskeletons have shown great potential in enhancing mobility for individuals with motor impairments, yet their effectiveness relies on precise parameter tuning for personalized assistance. In this study, we investigate the potential of offline reinforcement learning for optimizing effort thresholds in upper-limb assistive exoskeletons, aiming to reduce reliance on manual calibration. Mixed Q-Functionals (MQF) is employed to efficiently handle continuous action spaces while leveraging pre-collected data, thereby mitigating the risks associated with real-time exploration. Experiments were conducted using the MyoPro 2 exoskeleton across two distinct tasks involving horizontal and vertical arm movements. Our results indicate that the proposed approach can dynamically adjust threshold values based on learned patterns, potentially improving user interaction and control, though performance evaluation remains challenging due to dataset limitations. Assistive robotics, particularly powered exoskeletons, have emerged as a promising technology for enhancing human mobility, whether by helping individuals with disabilities, supporting the elderly in daily activities, or improving physical performance in demanding tasks [1], [2], [3]. Effective control in these systems depends on the ability to interpret user intentions and adapt to user learning and changes in physical conditions (e.g., fatigue) [4].
Deep Reinforcement Learning Policies for Underactuated Satellite Attitude Control
Hariry, Matteo El, Cini, Andrea, Mellone, Giacomo, Balossino, Alessandro
Autonomy is a key challenge for future space exploration endeavours. Deep Reinforcement Learning holds the promises for developing agents able to learn complex behaviours simply by interacting with their environment. This paper investigates the use of Reinforcement Learning for the satellite attitude control problem, namely the angular reorientation of a spacecraft with respect to an in- ertial frame of reference. In the proposed approach, a set of control policies are implemented as neural networks trained with a custom version of the Proximal Policy Optimization algorithm to maneuver a small satellite from a random starting angle to a given pointing target. In particular, we address the problem for two working conditions: the nominal case, in which all the actuators (a set of 3 reac- tion wheels) are working properly, and the underactuated case, where an actuator failure is simulated randomly along with one of the axes. We show that the agents learn to effectively perform large-angle slew maneuvers with fast convergence and industry-standard pointing accuracy. Furthermore, we test the proposed method on representative hardware, showing that by taking adequate measures controllers trained in simulation can perform well in real systems.
Efficient Reinforcement Finetuning via Adaptive Curriculum Learning
Shi, Taiwei, Wu, Yiyang, Song, Linxin, Zhou, Tianyi, Zhao, Jieyu
Reinforcement finetuning (RFT) has shown great potential for enhancing the mathematical reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs), but it is often sample- and compute-inefficient, requiring extensive training. In this work, we introduce AdaRFT (Adaptive Curriculum Reinforcement Finetuning), a method that significantly improves both the efficiency and final accuracy of RFT through adaptive curriculum learning. AdaRFT dynamically adjusts the difficulty of training problems based on the model's recent reward signals, ensuring that the model consistently trains on tasks that are challenging but solvable. This adaptive sampling strategy accelerates learning by maintaining an optimal difficulty range, avoiding wasted computation on problems that are too easy or too hard. AdaRFT requires only a lightweight extension to standard RFT algorithms like Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), without modifying the reward function or model architecture. Experiments on competition-level math datasets-including AMC, AIME, and IMO-style problems-demonstrate that AdaRFT significantly improves both training efficiency and reasoning performance. We evaluate AdaRFT across multiple data distributions and model sizes, showing that it reduces training time by up to 2x and improves accuracy by a considerable margin, offering a more scalable and effective RFT framework.
GPG: A Simple and Strong Reinforcement Learning Baseline for Model Reasoning
Chu, Xiangxiang, Huang, Hailang, Zhang, Xiao, Wei, Fei, Wang, Yong
Reinforcement Learning (RL) can directly enhance the reasoning capabilities of large language models without extensive reliance on Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT). In this work, we revisit the traditional Policy Gradient (PG) mechanism and propose a minimalist RL approach termed Group Policy Gradient (GPG). Unlike conventional methods, GPG directly optimize the original RL objective, thus obviating the need for surrogate loss functions. By eliminating the critic and reference models, avoiding KL divergence constraints, and addressing the advantage and gradient estimation bias, our approach significantly simplifies the training process compared to Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO). Our approach achieves superior performance without relying on auxiliary techniques or adjustments. As illustrated in Figure 1, extensive experiments demonstrate that our method not only reduces computational costs but also consistently outperforms GRPO across various unimodal and multimodal tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/AMAP-ML/GPG.
Adaptive 3D UI Placement in Mixed Reality Using Deep Reinforcement Learning
Lu, Feiyu, Chen, Mengyu, Hsu, Hsiang, Deshpande, Pranav, Wang, Cheng Yao, MacIntyre, Blair
Mixed Reality (MR) could assist users' tasks by continuously integrating virtual content with their view of the physical environment. However, where and how to place these content to best support the users has been a challenging problem due to the dynamic nature of MR experiences. In contrast to prior work that investigates optimization-based methods, we are exploring how reinforcement learning (RL) could assist with continuous 3D content placement that is aware of users' poses and their surrounding environments. Through an initial exploration and preliminary evaluation, our results demonstrate the potential of RL to position content that maximizes the reward for users on the go. We further identify future directions for research that could harness the power of RL for personalized and optimized UI and content placement in MR.
Designing Control Barrier Function via Probabilistic Enumeration for Safe Reinforcement Learning Navigation
Marzari, Luca, Trotti, Francesco, Marchesini, Enrico, Farinelli, Alessandro
Achieving safe autonomous navigation systems is critical for deploying robots in dynamic and uncertain real-world environments. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical control framework leveraging neural network verification techniques to design control barrier functions (CBFs) and policy correction mechanisms that ensure safe reinforcement learning navigation policies. Our approach relies on probabilistic enumeration to identify unsafe regions of operation, which are then used to construct a safe CBF-based control layer applicable to arbitrary policies. We validate our framework both in simulation and on a real robot, using a standard mobile robot benchmark and a highly dynamic aquatic environmental monitoring task. These experiments demonstrate the ability of the proposed solution to correct unsafe actions while preserving efficient navigation behavior. Our results show the promise of developing hierarchical verification-based systems to enable safe and robust navigation behaviors in complex scenarios.
SimPRIVE: a Simulation framework for Physical Robot Interaction with Virtual Environments
Nesti, Federico, D'Amico, Gianluca, Marinoni, Mauro, Buttazzo, Giorgio
--The use of machine learning in cyber-physical systems has attracted the interest of both industry and academia. However, no general solution has yet been found against the unpredictable behavior of neural networks and reinforcement learning agents. Nevertheless, the improvements of photo-realistic simulators have paved the way towards extensive testing of complex algorithms in different virtual scenarios, which would be expensive and dangerous to implement in the real world. PRIVE, a simulation framework for physical robot interaction with virtual environments, which operates as a vehicle-in-the-loop platform, rendering a virtual world while operating the vehicle in the real world. PRIVE, any physical mobile robot running on ROS 2 can easily be configured to move its digital twin in a virtual world built with the Unreal Engine 5 graphic engine, which can be populated with objects, people, or other vehicles with programmable behavior . PRIVE has been designed to accommodate custom or pre-built virtual worlds while being light-weight to contain execution times and allow fast rendering. Its main advantage lies in the possibility of testing complex algorithms on the full software and hardware stack while minimizing the risks and costs of a test campaign. The framework has been validated by testing a reinforcement learning agent trained for obstacle avoidance on an AgileX Scout Mini rover that navigates a virtual office environment where everyday objects and people are placed as obstacles. Recently, artificial intelligence (AI) models have achieved impressive performance in many applications, including cyber-physical systems (CPS).
FAST-Q: Fast-track Exploration with Adversarially Balanced State Representations for Counterfactual Action Estimation in Offline Reinforcement Learning
Agrawal, Pulkit, Talwadker, Rukma, Pareek, Aditya, Mukherjee, Tridib
Recent advancements in state-of-the-art (SOTA) offline reinforcement learning (RL) have primarily focused on addressing function approximation errors, which contribute to the overestimation of Q-values for out-of-distribution actions, a challenge that static datasets exacerbate. However, high stakes applications such as recommendation systems in online gaming, introduce further complexities due to player's psychology (intent) driven by gameplay experiences and the inherent volatility on the platform. These factors create highly sparse, partially overlapping state spaces across policies, further influenced by the experiment path selection logic which biases state spaces towards specific policies. Current SOTA methods constrain learning from such offline data by clipping known counterfactual actions as out-of-distribution due to poor generalization across unobserved states. Further aggravating conservative Q-learning and necessitating more online exploration. FAST-Q introduces a novel approach that (1) leverages Gradient Reversal Learning to construct balanced state representations, regularizing the policy-specific bias between the player's state and action thereby enabling counterfactual estimation; (2) supports offline counterfactual exploration in parallel with static data exploitation; and (3) proposes a Q-value decomposition strategy for multi-objective optimization, facilitating explainable recommendations over short and long-term objectives. These innovations demonstrate superiority of FAST-Q over prior SOTA approaches and demonstrates at least 0.15 percent increase in player returns, 2 percent improvement in lifetime value (LTV), 0.4 percent enhancement in the recommendation driven engagement, 2 percent improvement in the player's platform dwell time and an impressive 10 percent reduction in the costs associated with the recommendation, on our volatile gaming platform.