Dispatch in three-sided marketplaces provides a natural setting for reinforcement learning from world feedback: decisions are evaluated by delayed operational outcomes such as delivery speed, courier utilization, and merchant congestion. We present a deployed reinforcement learning system at DoorDash that adapts dispatch objective weights in a large-scale food-delivery marketplace using delayed signals.
arXiv:2608. 10897v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Instant delivery platforms have become a critical component of urban logistics, increasingly relying on crowdsourced couriers to fulfill highly dynamic orders.
By Fengming Yao, Man Luo
The paper introduces proximal residual value functions for two‑timescale decision systems, where a planning layer supplies a continuation‑value function to a real‑time optimizer that allocates resources, with inventory placement as a motivating example. The authors propose an end‑to‑end reinforcement learning method that learns a convex residual added to a strictly convex potential, enabling well‑posed optimization and end‑to‑end differentiation while maintaining an explicit convex objective for real‑time execution. They also provide necessary and sufficient conditions for smooth value functions to produce decisions consistent across planning and execution timescales, and demonstrate a 5.0% reduction in routing and transfer cost in an offline simulation using data from a large e‑commerce retailer.
By Harrison Waldon, Carson Eisenach, Akhil Bagaria, Daniel Russo, Dominique Perrault-Joncas, Alisha Zachariah, Dean Foster
arXiv:2607. 22356v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In recent years, the growing complexity of last-mile pickup operations has increased the need for fast and accurate decision-making on logistics platforms.
By Yida Xu, Zhaofang Mao, Yuheng Miao, Jiaxin Zhang, Yiting Sun
arXiv:2608.28878v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: This paper develops a hybrid offline-online multi-agent reinforcement learning framework based on decision transformers. The policy is first pretrain...
By Yiming Zhang, Kun Yang, Cong Shen, Dongning Guo
arXiv:2607. 16875v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We introduce the vehicle routing problem with stochastic demands and outsourcing options (VRP-SDO), in which a logistics service provider partitions customer requests into customers outsourced to a common carrier and customers committed to its fixed fleet.
By Mohsen Dastpak, Fausto Errico, Ola Jabali