arXiv AI
Oct 15

OPTIC-ER: A Reinforcement Learning Framework for Real-Time Emergency Response and Equitable Resource Allocation in Underserved African Communities

OPTIC-ER is a reinforcement learning framework designed to improve emergency response in underserved African communities by providing real‑time, adaptive, and equitable dispatch decisions. It employs an attention‑guided actor‑critic architecture with a Context‑Rich State Vector and a Precision Reward Function, trained on high‑fidelity simulations using real data from Rivers State, Nigeria. In tests on 500 unseen incidents, OPTIC-ER reduced response times by over 35% and surpassed the nearest‑facility heuristic’s 62.94% optimal‑selection rate, while also producing infrastructure deficiency maps and equity monitoring dashboards.

By Mary Tonwe
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

MCRL2: Multi-resource Cross-attention-based Representation Learning-augmented Reinforcement Learning for Cloud Microservice Scheduling

MCRL2 is a reinforcement learning framework that enhances microservice scheduling in cloud data centers by integrating multi-resource cross-attention-based representation learning. It introduces MCRL, a representation learning component that captures structured interactions among nodes, resources, and microservices, and couples this with an actor‑critic architecture and a maximum entropy objective. Experiments on real production cluster traces show that MCRL2 outperforms existing baselines in load balancing, scheduling success rate, and average completion time across diverse workloads.

By Tiangang Li, Shi Ying, Xiangbo Tian, Chuan Shi, Ding Xiao