arXiv AI

Deep Reinforcement Learning for HPC Job Scheduling: A Statistical Evaluation

The study evaluates six deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approaches for high‑performance computing (HPC) job scheduling, comparing Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), Advantage Actor‑Critic (A2C), and Deep Q‑Network (DQN) with and without action masking. Across two real Slurm workload traces—one homogeneous and one heterogeneous—masked DRL treatments complete evaluation, while unmasked ones are truncated. On the heterogeneous trace, MaskablePPO outperforms baseline heuristics in all three metrics, achieving waiting times within 10% of the best heuristics and a 22% lower maximum bounded slowdown than Last‑Come, First‑Served (LCFS).

arXiv AI
Jun 11

When Does Deep RL Beat Calibrated Baselines? A Benchmark Study on Adaptive Resource Control

arXiv:2605. 26418v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: A properly calibrated rule-based autoscaler can beat every one of six mainstream deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms on cost across every workload we test - so when, if ever, does DRL actually help?

By Guilin Zhang, Chuanyi Sun, Kai Zhao, Shahryar Sarkani, John Fossaceca
arXiv AI
Jun 11

Generalizing Beyond Suboptimality: Offline Reinforcement Learning Learns Effective Scheduling through Random Solutions

arXiv:2509. 10303v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Online reinforcement learning (RL) approaches have demonstrated strong performance on Job Shop Scheduling (JSP) and Flexible JSP (FJSP) problems by learning scheduling policies through direct interaction with simulated environments.

By Jesse van Remmerden, Zaharah Bukhsh, Yingqian Zhang
arXiv AI
Oct 9

On the Clock: Towards Punctual and Productive Time-Budgeted AI Agents

The paper investigates whether small large language model agents can operate within explicit wall‑clock time budgets while using the allotted time productively. Experiments with Qwen3.6‑27B on MLE‑Bench Lite and Qwen3‑4B on Zork I show that agents fail to translate budget statements into controlled time use, largely due to lack of timing feedback and poor anticipation of action durations. Interventions such as harness‑based timing exposure, enforcement hooks, and reinforcement learning with budget‑aware rewards improve budget adherence but do not lead to better task performance, revealing a persistent gap between respecting time limits and effectively allocating extra time.

By Aaron Wang, Neelabh Madan, Vlad Sobal, Matthew Trager, Michael Kleinman, Elman Mansimov, Wei Xia, Stefano Soatto
arXiv AI
Oct 9

Constrained Command-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning with Bandit Strategy Selection in Real-Time Strategy Games

The paper presents a constrained command‑conditioned Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) executor for the MicroRTS real‑time strategy environment, enabling a single execution policy to follow diverse strategic commands. A Thompson‑sampling bandit strategist selects command tuples based on in‑game observations of the opponent’s strategy, rather than relying on opponent identity. In controlled experiments, the strategist‑executor system outperforms a flat PPO baseline against three of the four strongest opponents on a training map, including two held‑out opponents, while showing no significant difference against the remaining opponents.

By Nick Leenders, Roy Lindelauf, Joost van Oijen, Boris Cule
arXiv AI
Oct 12

Multi-Harness Reinforcement Learning for Coding Agents: Training Gains and Harness Dependence

The study evaluates multi-harness reinforcement learning (RL) for coding agents by training two Qwen3-8B RL variants—one with rewards normalized within each harness and one across harnesses—using identical replay data. Results show modest gains over the supervised fine-tuning baseline (+0.48 and +0.77 percentage points for within and cross normalization, respectively), but no consistent advantage of cross normalization on unseen harnesses. Performance differences across harnesses are much larger than the training gains, indicating that harness dependence remains a significant challenge.

By Chenqian Le, Jiayi Cheng, Qijia He, Runhao Li, Yinghao Li, Xupeng Chen
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 11

Scheduling Mixed RL Rollouts Beyond Prefix Locality

Modern reinforcement learning (RL) post-training pipelines for large language models (LLMs) increasingly combine rollout workloads across multiple domains and feedback paradigms. Prefix-aware routing improves inference efficiency through cache reuse and load balancing, but it does not control how heterogeneous rollout sessions compete for KV-cache capacity.