The paper presents a graph-based framework for large-scale railway network management that combines a hierarchical Bayesian model with a Gaussian Process on a graph kernel to model spatially correlated maintenance environments, and a topology-aware Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning system using graph neural networks and Transformers to optimize network-level policies. It demonstrates scalability by training agents on small network segments and deploying them zero-shot on larger, unseen networks, achieving superior performance over heuristics and standard MARL baselines while reducing training time. The approach addresses the computational challenges of centralized methods and the coordination gaps of decentralized methods in complex, long-horizon infrastructure asset management.
arXiv:2511. 13103v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) has shown promise for large-scale network control, yet existing methods face two major limitations.
By Vidur Sinha, Muhammed Ustaomeroglu, Guannan Qu
arXiv:2607. 05179v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In liberalised railway systems, operators must set prices dynamically in an environment with partial observability, as they retain private information about their objectives and performance, where regulatory constraints prohibit communication or direct information exchange between competitors to prevent explicit collusion.
By Enrique Adrian Villarrubia-Martin, David Mu\~noz-Valero, Luis Rodriguez-Benitez, Giovanni Montana, Luis Jimenez-Linares
The paper introduces Graph-Guided Quasimetric Dense Reward (G2QDR), a framework that learns a state connectivity model to predict pairwise connectivity strengths in asymmetric environments. These strengths are converted into scalar auxiliary dense rewards, offering continuous guidance across hierarchical levels. G2QDR can be integrated into any existing Goal-Conditioned Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning architecture and shows empirical performance improvements in sparse reward settings with modest computational cost.
By Shuyuan Zhang, Zihan Wang, Xiao-Wen Chang, Doina Precup
arXiv:2609.21945v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Urban transportation networks present complex optimization challenges spanning calibration of high-fidelity simulators and real-time operational contro...
By Adewumi Augustine Adepitan, Christopher J. Haruna, Oluwasegun Adegoke, Ayooluwatomiwa Ajiboye, Oluwatobi Oluwasakin
arXiv:2601. 20753v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Preference-Conditioned Policy Learning (PCPL) in Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning (MORL) approximates diverse Pareto-optimal solutions by conditioning a single policy on user-specified preferences, enabling run-time adaptation to arbitrary trade-offs without retraining.
By Zhiheng Jiang, Yunzhe Wang, Ryan Marr, Ellen Novoseller, Benjamin T. Files, Volkan Ustun