The paper introduces LEAP-CBF, a safety filter that uses Least‑Effort Adversarial Potentials to quantify how much disturbance effort is needed to cause failure in nonlinear dynamical systems. LEAP serves as a control barrier function for the undisturbed system and can be combined with a robust safety filter that tolerates disturbances with bounded cumulative effort. The authors develop a deep reinforcement learning method to construct LEAPs and validate their effectiveness through simulations of multi‑agent systems and hardware experiments on a quadruped and quadrotors.
By Oswin So, Eric Yu, Chuchu Fan
The paper introduces a fully differentiable message‑passing neural network (MPNN) designed to approximate the Uniform Facility Location (UniFL) problem. Unlike many learning‑based approaches that require supervision or reinforcement learning, this model incorporates principles from classical approximation algorithms, providing provable approximation guarantees. Empirical results show that it outperforms standard approximation algorithms and reduces the performance gap to integer linear programming solutions.
By Chendi Qian, Christopher Morris, Stefanie Jegelka, Christian Sohler
arXiv:2604. 06039v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Value iteration-type methods have been extensively studied for computing a nearly optimal value function in reinforcement learning (RL).
By Zhichao Jia, Guanghui Lan
The paper introduces Verifier-Certified Rule Transport (VCRT), a method that uses native verifiers to replay adjacent operation pairs and identify commutation certificates or anti-diamonds, thereby distinguishing true logical dependencies from mere serialization choices in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards. VCRT assigns policy credit based on the total probability mass of each certified orbit and imposes constraints on post-swap consistency, source retention, and policy drift. In leave-one-environment-out transfer experiments across ProofWriter, CLRS, and Lean, VCRT achieves a 77.60% macro pass rate, outperforming the strongest baseline by 13.06 points, with the largest gains observed in Lean.
By Bang Xie, Hao Liu, Zhiyuan Peng, Xin Yin, Chenhao Ying, Yuan Luo, Senjian Zhang, Wei Chen
The paper introduces a stability‑aware autoscaling framework for edge serverless workloads that combines an Attention‑Enhanced Double‑Stacked LSTM with Proximal Policy Optimization to address temporal blindness in deep reinforcement learning. By weighting recent historical states non‑uniformly, the method suppresses high‑frequency jitter while preserving demand trends, outperforming single‑layer LSTM, static HPA, and KEDA baselines in latency reduction and stability. Experiments on two Kubernetes clusters with real Azure Functions traces show a ~67% reduction in P90 latency and improved adherence to a 50 ms hard SLO.
By Faraz Shaikh, Gianluca Reali, Mauro Femminella
The paper investigates whether evolutionary stability guarantees that learning agents can achieve cooperative outcomes in a multi‑agent setting. Using a three‑agent governance game, the authors compare the evolutionary basin of attraction with learning basins derived from independent Q‑learning, scaled Boltzmann exploration, and SA–EA BQL. They find that while the evolutionary basin covers the entire sampled grid, only ε‑greedy Q‑learning attains a substantial learning basin, whereas the other methods fail to sustain cooperation, highlighting a disconnect between population‑level stability and finite‑sample learning accessibility.
By Yijie Wang
The paper proposes using category theory to structure reinforcement learning in high‑dimensional, partially observable environments. By partitioning the state space into equivalence classes (symmetry orbits) and treating each class as a groupoid with a canonical representative, the agent can share learning across similar states, reducing redundancy and improving sample efficiency. Experiments on partially observable benchmarks show that this orbit‑based partitioning consistently enhances performance in environments with latent symmetry.
By Ben Opperman, Eduardo Alonso, Esther Mondrag\'on
The paper introduces AGVF, a multi‑agent framework for generating medical‑necessity appeals that must adhere to payer policy and evidence constraints. AGVF treats appeal synthesis as a Constrained Markov Decision Process involving five agents—policy formalization, evidence retrieval, gap analysis, adversarial critique, and gated synthesis—and proves that refining the policy constraint graph monotonically reduces evidence deficiency. A deterministic citation‑grounding gate ensures no unsupported assertions enter the shared state, and validation on 1,000 synthetic cases shows zero citation violations and monotonic deficiency reduction.
By Harshil Lodhiya, Alex McManus, Reese Walker
The paper introduces a finite‑sample probabilistic safety certification framework for black‑box AI decision models used in closed‑loop grid operation. It transforms the AI‑grid evaluation into a binary unsafe outcome under a safety specification and applies exact binomial inference to provide a tight one‑sided upper bound on the unsafe operation probability, using held‑out calibration scenarios. The framework also incorporates physically interpretable sample‑space adversarial attacks to address distribution shifts and is validated through case studies involving 1,000‑agent AI models for grid‑edge flexibility coordination.
By Yihong Zhou, Hanbin Yang, Thomas Morstyn
The paper investigates hindsight relabeling in preference‑conditioned multi‑objective reinforcement learning (MORL). It finds that relabeling transitions with the achieved preference direction often harms performance, causing a phenomenon called Preference Coverage Collapse where the critic’s coverage narrows to a small region of the preference space. The authors propose a simple method, her_mix, that blends achieved and requested preferences, which restores performance across most settings and dramatically reduces abandoned preference mass.
By Baptiste Bonin, Caro Strickland, Audrey Durand
The paper introduces Safety to Competence (S2C), a two‑stage reinforcement learning framework that first learns a safety filter and then trains a competitive task policy while embedding the filter. By separating safety synthesis from task learning, S2C reduces training complexity and prevents the policy from being exploited by adversarial attacks. Experiments on simulated touchdown games show that S2C achieves higher win rates, better Elo ratings, and lower exploitability than eight safe‑RL baselines, and hardware tests confirm its competence against a human opponent.
By Ruihan Wu, Rui Yang, Donggeon David Oh, Duy Nguyen, Haimin Hu
The paper presents a method for creating Open RAN (O‑RAN) slicing xApps that are both adaptive and fully inspectable. By using a large language model (LLM) to evolve compact Python programs, the authors generate slicing controllers whose decision logic remains readable and editable after optimization. In experiments on the NSF POWDER 5G testbed, the evolved controllers improved best‑effort throughput by 44.5% and reduced SLA misses from 79.9% to 2.2%, while evolutionary search outperformed independent prompting in trace‑driven simulations.
By Faezeh Dehghan Tarzjani, Bhaskar Krishnamachari
The paper investigates curriculum learning for graph neural network-based reinforcement learning applied to the job shop scheduling problem. By training policies on progressively larger instances (from 20×20 up to 30×30), the authors demonstrate that this approach reduces training time and improves performance compared to single-size training. Evaluation on unseen instances from 8×8 to 30×30 shows that curriculum learning lowers the mean optimality gap by about 8–9 percentage points and saves roughly 50 hours of training time at the largest target size.
By Jayakrishnan K. Vasudevan (Rosenheim University of Applied Sciences), Jonathan Hoss (Rosenheim University of Applied Sciences), Noah Klarmann (Rosenheim University of Applied Sciences)
The paper introduces UECR-GRPO, a method that unifies on‑policy distillation and verifier‑based reinforcement learning for mathematical reasoning. It combines verifier rewards and teacher‑derived log‑ratios into a single KL‑regularized objective (Path‑Utility Unification) and then redistributes credit at the token level using entropy‑calibrated redistribution, preserving total task credit. Experiments on five benchmarks show that UECR‑GRPO improves average accuracy by up to 0.89 percentage points over the best baseline for both Qwen3‑1.7B and Qwen3‑4B students.
By Jie Zhang, Jingxiao Yang, Zhehao Huang, Yuhang Liu, Xiaolin Huang
The paper investigates on‑policy distillation (OPD) as a preparatory step for reinforcement learning (RL). It shows that students initialized with OPD achieve higher final RL performance than those trained directly with RL or with supervised fine‑tuning followed by RL, even when OPD offers little immediate accuracy gain. The study also finds that the choice of distillation objective (reverse‑KL vs forward‑KL) and the source of trajectories influence OPD’s effectiveness at different stages of RL training.
By Shuai Dong, Yongfu Zhu, Yuqi Xu, Weichu Xie, Liuwenpu, Ziyue Wang, Kaiwen Tuo, Congcong Wang, Siyuan Wang, Wenqi Shao, Shuai Yang, Ji Zhao, Caoyuan Ma, Wenzheng Chang, Taiqiang Wu, Xinlei Yu, Hongrui Wu, Xiaoxuan He, Fangke Chen, Dianyi Wang, Kanghui Tian, Sirry Chen, Xingyu Liu, Xiangnan Wu, Jiawei Guo, Haowen Hou, LingHan Chen, Zhongyu Wei, Jiaqi Wang
The paper introduces Planned Test-Time Scaling (PTTS), a method that replaces independent sampling of reasoning branches with a coordinated joint policy. PTTS uses a planner to generate distinct solution outlines for each branch and an executor to produce full solutions, thereby improving coverage of complementary reasoning modes. Two variants—PTTS‑ZS (zero‑shot) and PTTS‑RL (reinforcement‑learned)—demonstrate significant gains on five mathematical reasoning benchmarks, with PTTS‑RL achieving up to a 13.4‑point improvement in pass@64 over repeated sampling.
By Xueqing Wu, Langxing Bai, Hritik Bansal, Po-Nien Kung, Shuo Li, Hao Liu, Nanyun Peng, Kai-Wei Chang
Quantum Reinforcement Learning for Cost and Delay Tradeoffs in Quantum Cloud Orchestration proposes QRLQ, a scheduling framework that integrates parameterised quantum circuits with a dueling double deep Q‑network to balance execution cost and delay in quantum‑as‑a‑service environments. Simulation results show QRLQ outperforms heuristic baselines, achieving 5‑11% lower mean cost and up to 82% lower mean delay while maintaining fidelity within 2% of a fidelity‑greedy policy. Compared to a classical deep reinforcement learning baseline, QRLQ delivers comparable performance with 72% fewer trainable parameters.
By An N. H. Phan, Dang Van Huynh, Muhammad Usman, Hoa T. Nguyen
MobileGym is a browser-hosted, lightweight simulation platform designed for mobile GUI agent research. It offers verifiable outcome signals via deterministic, JSON-based state judging and supports scalable online reinforcement learning with hundreds of parallel instances on a single server. The platform includes a declarative task-definition framework, a structured AnswerSheet protocol, and a benchmark of 416 parameterized tasks across 28 apps, demonstrating strong sim-to-real transfer in a case study.
By Dingbang Wu, Rui Hao, Haiyang Wang, Shuzhe Wu, Han Xiao, Zhenghong Li, Bojiang Zhou, Zheng Ju, Zichen Liu, Lue Fan, Zhaoxiang Zhang
The paper introduces VHD-Play, a pipeline that first samples and solves a mathematical model before generating agentic reinforcement learning environments, ensuring that dynamics and evaluation are aligned from the outset. This approach yields 3,300 diverse environments at a low cost and significantly improves the performance of a large language‑model agent (Qwen3.6‑35B‑A3B) across multiple diagnostic families and external benchmarks. The study demonstrates that stateful interaction is a key factor in learning gains and that scaling the training substrate can further enhance performance.
By Xinjie Shen, Wei Fan, Xudong Guo, Jianhong Tu, Yang Su, Chuqiao Kuang, Yinger Zhang, Dayiheng Liu
Omni-Decision is an omni-modal agent that uses evidence-ledger planning to manage noisy multimodal observations. It replaces the growing dialogue history with a compact evidence ledger that tracks missing, confirmed, and conflicting evidence, allowing the planner to operate on a streamlined context. The system achieves state‑of‑the‑art accuracy on OmniGAIA and WorldSense while operating at a fraction of the cost of larger models.
By Ming Ma, Yi Zhu, Yiran Zhong, Feida Zhu, Yuhao Wang, Junhan Shi, Lingrui Mei, Tianming Yang, Steven Hoi