arXiv Machine Learning

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for Air Combat at DARPA's AlphaDogfight Trials

arXiv:2105. 00990v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Autonomous control in high-dimensional, continuous state spaces is a persistent and important challenge in the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence.

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

BVR Sim: An Open and High-Throughput Environment for Heterogeneous Air-Combat Reinforcement Learning

BVR Sim is an open‑source, Gymnasium‑style environment for heterogeneous air‑combat reinforcement learning, supporting multiple JSBSim aircraft models (F‑15, F‑16, F/A‑18, F‑22) with configurable weapons, sensors, and opponents. It offers a unified tactical action interface, interchangeable Python and accelerated C++ backends, entity‑oriented observations, compositional rewards, scripted opponents, replay and visualization, and adapters for multi‑agent learning frameworks. At a 0.4‑second decision interval, the C++ backend achieves 104 simulated seconds per wall‑clock second in 1‑vs‑1 and remains practical through 10‑vs‑10 scenarios, and a policy trained on the F‑16 transfers to four unseen aircraft with a 45.5% mean win rate after controller adaptation.

By Haocheng Sun (Beijing University of Posts,Telecommunications), Mulai Tan (Air Force Engineering University)
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

Curriculum-Based Adversarial Heterogeneous Agent Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Quad-Copter Landing in Maritime Settings

The paper presents a curriculum‑based adversarial heterogeneous agent reinforcement learning (HARL‑AC) approach for autonomous quad‑copter landing on a ship deck in maritime settings. Using Heterogeneous‑Agent Proximal Policy Optimization (HAPPO) in NVIDIA Isaac Lab, the authors train a cooperative control policy that outperforms domain‑randomized baselines, achieving up to 97.5% success on in‑distribution sea states and higher median success and lower crash rates on out‑of‑distribution sea states. The adversarially trained policy also exhibits more cautious behavior, slightly increasing timeouts but improving safety in severe, unseen conditions.

By Allan Minh-Tam Nguyen, Sree Showrya Kotala, Stefan Banioi-Crijman, Kurt Driessens, Rico M\"ockel
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 1

Deep Reinforcement Learning for Spacecraft Attitude Control During Atmospheric Re-Entry

arXiv:2606. 31291v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep reinforcement learning has the potential to solve attitude control problems more adaptively, precisely, and robustly by handling nonlinear dynamics, uncertainties, and failure cases more effectively than traditional attitude control approaches.

By Alexander Fabisch, Melvin Laux, Mariela De Lucas \'Alvarez, Edoardo Caroselli, Julian Theis
arXiv AI
Jul 3

Lightweight Safe Reinforcement Learning for End-to-End UAV Navigation

arXiv:2607. 01794v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: With the rapid development of autonomous aerial systems, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly deployed in applications such as inspection, environmental monitoring, and rescue, creating growing demand for reliable autonomous navigation.

By Shenghui Zhang, YuXuan Gao, Songwei Zhao, Jifeng Hu, Zijing Zhang, Hechang Chen
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

Learning Acrobatic Flight from Preferences

The paper introduces Reward Ensemble under Confidence (REC), a probabilistic reward learning framework for preference-based reinforcement learning that models per‑timestep reward uncertainty using an ensemble of distributional reward models. REC incorporates uncertainty into the preference loss and uses model disagreement to drive exploration, achieving 88.4% of shaped‑reward performance on acrobatic quadrotor control versus 55.2% with standard Preference PPO. The authors train policies in simulation and transfer them zero‑shot to real quadrotors, demonstrating complex acrobatic maneuvers learned solely from human preference feedback, and validate REC on a continuous‑control benchmark.

By Colin Merk, Ismail Geles, Jiaxu Xing, Angel Romero, Giorgia Ramponi, Davide Scaramuzza
arXiv AI
Sep 12

DRG-MAPPO: Hierarchical Dynamic Role-Graph Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Cooperative Air Combat

The paper introduces DRG-MAPPO, a hierarchical multi‑agent reinforcement learning framework for cooperative air combat. It combines graph‑based relational modeling with dynamic role assignment, using a high‑level policy to allocate tactical roles such as leader and supporter, and a low‑level policy to execute maneuver actions. The approach includes a target‑priority auxiliary task and achieves an 87% win rate in experiments, indicating effective coordination and stability.

By Junlin Liu, Chengwei Li, Yang Gao, Hui Chang, Xinchen Zhang, Zhijun Zhao, Hao Zhao