173 accepted papers
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has shown promise in enhancing the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs) by increasing test-time compute. However, even after extensive RLVR training, such models still tend to generate unnecessary and low-quality steps in their…
The efficiency of Logic Optimization (LO) has become one of the key bottlenecks in chip design. To prompt efficient LO, many graph-based machine learning (ML) methods, such as graph neural networks (GNNs), have been proposed to predict and prune a large number of ineffective subgraphs of the LO heur…
Research on continual learning for LLMs seeks to acquire new skills without catastrophic forgetting of established prior knowledge. However, domain-specific fine-tuning still triggers severe, long-tailed forgetting issues even under narrow updates, particularly when the pre-training data is inaccess…
Large language model (LLM) agents have demonstrated strong capabilities across diverse domains, yet automated agent design remains a significant challenge. Current automated agent design approaches are often constrained by limited search spaces that primarily optimize workflows but fail to integrate
Multi-domain reinforcement learning (RL) for large language models (LLMs) involves highly intricate reward surfaces, posing significant challenges in finding parameters that excel across all domains. Recent empirical studies have further highlighted conflicts among domains, where gains in one capabi…
Offline goal-conditioned RL (OGCRL) learns to reach arbitrary goals from offline dataset, but long-horizon performance hinges on crossing a handful of hard-to-cross bottlenecks. These bottlenecks not only dictate the feasible paths toward the goal but also act as critical keypoints, marking the tran…
Single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) and spatial transcriptomics (ST) data analysis are pivotal for advancing biological research, enabling precise characterization of cellular heterogeneity. However, existing analysis approaches require extensive manual programming and complex tool integration, p…
Asynchronous reinforcement learning (RL) has shown notable success in accelerating the post-training of large language models (LLMs). However, its decoupled data generation and training paradigm introduces a fundamental distributional mismatch between data generated by stale behavior policies and cu…
In complex embodied long-horizon manipulation tasks, effective task decomposition and execution require synergistic integration of textual logical reasoning and visual-spatial imagination to ensure efficient and accurate operation. Current methods fail to adopt a unified generation framework for mul…
Generalization in embodied AI is hindered by the "seeing-to-doing gap", stemming from data scarcity and embodiment heterogeneity. To address this, we pioneer "pointing" as a unified, embodiment-agnostic intermediate representation, defining four core embodied pointing abilities that bridge high-leve…
Logic synthesis (LS), which aims to generate a *compact* logic circuit graph with minimized size while *accurately* satisfying a given functionality, plays an important role in chip design. However, existing LS methods struggle to balance circuit structure compactness and functional accuracy, often…
Large language models (LLMs), such as OpenAI-o1 and DeepSeek-R1, excel in contextual reasoning by leveraging extensive world knowledge and deep contextual understanding. However, their high computational costs limit deployment in resource-constrained settings. Conversely, small language models (SLMs…
Achieving generalization in robotic manipulation remains a critical challenge, particularly for unseen scenarios and novel tasks. Current Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, while building on top of general Vision-Language Models (VLMs), still fall short of achieving robust zero-shot performance du…
Hierarchical Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have rapidly become a dominant paradigm for robotic manipulation. It typically comprising a Vision-Language backbone for perception and understanding, together with a generative policy for action generation. However, its performance is increasingly bo
Abstract visual reasoning benchmarks such as ARC-AGI evaluate the ability to infer generalizable transformation rules from few graphical demonstrations, a capability where current deep learning models severely underperform. Mainstream LLMs achieve only 15.8% (DeepSeek-R1) and 34.5% (o3-mini-high) ac
Existing mobile device control agents often perform poorly when solving complex tasks requiring long-horizon planning and precise operations, typically due to a lack of relevant task experience or unfamiliarity with skill execution. We propose $\textbf{K²-Agent}$, a hierarchical framework that model…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex reasoning tasks, but their high computational costs limit their widespread practical application. We argue that this inefficiency arises from the tight coupling of high-level cognitive planning (devising the solution s…
Deploying robots in open‑ended real‑world environments demands continual learning capabilities to adapt to an ever-expanding range of tasks. This requires retaining previously acquired skills without forgetting while effectively leveraging prior knowledge to learn new ones. Inspired by neuroscience,…
Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have opened new opportunities for embodied intelligence, enabling multimodal understanding, reasoning, and interaction, as well as continuous spatial decision-making. Nevertheless, current MLLM-based embodied systems face two critical limit…
Pre-trained large language models (LLMs) show promise for robotic task planning but often struggle to guarantee correctness in long-horizon problems. Task and motion planning (TAMP) addresses this by grounding symbolic plans in low-level execution, yet it relies heavily on manually engineered planni…
Many real-world tasks, such as assembly, cooking, and object handovers, require bi-manual coordination. Learning such skills via imitation remains challenging due to dataset scarcity, mainly caused by the high cost of bi-manual robotic platforms and barriers to entry in robotics software. To address
Many real-world tasks, such as assembly, cooking, and object handovers, require bi-manual coordination. Learning such skills via imitation remains challenging due to dataset scarcity, mainly caused by the high cost of bi-manual robotic platforms and barriers to entry in robotics software. To address…
Large Language Model (LLM) agents have shown significant potential in automated optimization modeling for mathematical problems. However, real-world problems are still challenging due to their knowledge-intensive nature. Existing methods, constrained by static parametric knowledge, often lack the do…
Building mathematical optimization models is critical in operations research (OR), while it requires substantial human expertise. Recent advancements have utilized large language models (LLMs) to automate this modeling process. However, existing works often struggle to verify the correctness of the …
Standard on-policy reinforcement learning relies on heuristic clipping to enforce trust regions, but this mechanism imposes a severe cost by indiscriminately truncating high-return yet high-divergence updates. We demonstrate that explicitly constraining the *policy ratio **variance*** provides a pri…
Recent advancements in language models have demonstrated remarkable in-context learning abilities, prompting the exploration of in-context reinforcement learning (ICRL) to extend the promise to decision domains. Due to involving more complex dynamics and temporal correlations, existing ICRL approach…
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have emerged as a promising paradigm where pretrained Vision-Language Models (VLMs) serve as System 2 for high-level reasoning, connected to action experts as System 1 for low-level motor control.However, current works fail to genuinely leverage VLM capabilities:
While Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in solving complex tasks through the generation of long reasoning chains, this reliance on verbose generation results in significant latency and computational overhead. To address these challenges, we propose \textbf{CoSMo…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated its potential to improve the reasoning ability of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet most existing Reinforcement Finetuning (RFT) methods are inherently \textit{on-policy} RL, failing to reuse historical data and thus preventing efficient scaling. In this…
Value factorization eases non-stationarity in MARL, but its static coordination assumptions hinder generalization on long-horizon tasks with shifting dependencies. Prior VQ-VAE methods abstract trajectories yet miss time-varying inter-agent dependencies. We present TACTIC, a CTDE framework with thre…
Deep reinforcement learning (RL) suffers from plasticity loss severely due to the nature of non-stationarity, which impairs the ability to adapt to new data and learn continually. Unfortunately, our understanding of how plasticity loss arises, dissipates, and can be dissolved remains limited to empi…
Despite the impressive progress on understanding and generating images shown by the recent unified architectures, the integration of 3D tasks remains challenging and largely unexplored. In this paper, we introduce UniUGG, the first unified understanding and generation framework for 3D modalities. Ou…
This paper investigates the entropy dynamics of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and uncovers a consistent two-phase structure: an ***Uncertainty Region*** of exploration transitioning sharply to a ***Confidence Region*** of convergence. We demonstrate that the Confidence Region possesses two critical propert…
App agents, which autonomously operate mobile Apps through GUIs, have gained significant interest in real-world applications. Yet, they often struggle with long-horizon planning, failing to find the optimal actions for complex tasks with longer steps. To address this, world models are used to predic…
Attention patterns play a crucial role in both training and inference of large language models (LLMs). Prior works have identified individual patterns—such as retrieval heads, sink heads, and diagonal traces—but these observations remain fragmented and lack a unifying explanation. To bridge this gap…
3D Affordance detection is a challenging problem with broad applications on various robotic tasks. Existing methods typically formulate the detection paradigm as a label-based semantic segmentation task. This paradigm relies on predefined labels and lacks the ability to comprehend complex natural l…
The efficiency of Logic Optimization (LO) has become one of the key bottlenecks in chip design. To prompt efficient LO, previous studies propose using a key scoring function to predict and prune a large number of ineffective nodes of the LO heuristics. However, the existing scoring functions struggl…
Tree-search-based reasoning methods have significantly enhanced the reasoning capability of large language models (LLMs) by facilitating the exploration of multiple intermediate reasoning steps, i.e., thoughts. However, these methods suffer from substantial inference latency, as they have to generat…
Key-Value (KV) cache eviction---which retains the KV pairs of the most important tokens while discarding less important ones---is a critical technique for optimizing both memory usage and inference latency in large language models (LLMs). However, existing approaches often rely on simple heuristics-…
Leveraging machine learning (ML) to predict an initial solution for mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) has gained considerable popularity in recent years. These methods predict a solution and fix a subset of variables to reduce the problem dimension. Then, they solve the reduced problem to obta…
With the development of large language models (LLMs), efficient inference through Key-Value (KV) cache compression has attracted considerable attention, especially for long-context generation. To compress the KV cache, recent methods identify critical KV tokens through static modeling of attention s…
Chip placement is a critical step in the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) workflow, which aims to arrange chip modules on the canvas to optimize the performance, power, and area (PPA) metrics of final designs. Recent advances show great potential of AI-based algorithms in chip placement. However,…
The multi-domain fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs) confronts a notorious trade-off among abilities across domains. Existing studies attribute this trade-off to the conflicts between samples rooted in inherent semantics. Recent approaches attempt to mitigate these conflicts through the empi…
Many real-world control problems require continual policy adjustments to balance multiple objectives, which requires the acquisition of high-quality policies to cover diverse preferences. Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning (MORL) provides a general framework to solve such problems. However, curr…
Floorplanning is the initial step in the physical design process of Electronic Design Automation (EDA), directly influencing subsequent placement, routing, and final power of the chip. However, the solution space in floorplanning is vast, and current algorithms often struggle to explore it sufficien…
Optimizing computing circuits such as multipliers and adders is a fundamental challenge in modern integrated circuit design. Recent efforts propose formulating this optimization problem as a reinforcement learning (RL) proxy task, offering a promising approach to search high-speed and area-efficient…
Diffusion policies have emerged as a mainstream paradigm for building vision-language-action (VLA) models. Although they demonstrate strong robot control capabilities, their training efficiency remains suboptimal. In this work, we identify a fundamental challenge in conditional diffusion policy trai…
Machine learning (ML) techniques have shown great potential in generating high-quality solutions for integer linear programs (ILPs). However, existing methods typically rely on a *supervised learning* paradigm, leading to (1) *expensive training cost* due to repeated invocations of traditional solve…
On-device control agents, especially on mobile devices, are responsible for operating mobile devices to fulfill users' requests, enabling seamless and intuitive interactions. Integrating Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) into these agents enhances their ability to understand and execute compl…
Multi-Hop Question Answering (MHQA) tasks permeate real-world applications, posing challenges in orchestrating multi-step reasoning across diverse knowledge domains. While existing approaches have been improved with iterative retrieval, they still struggle to identify and organize dynamic knowledge.…
Cutting planes (cuts) are essential for solving mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) problems, as they tighten the feasible solution space and accelerate the solving process. Modern MILP solvers offer diverse cutting plane separators to generate cuts, enabling users to leverage their potential co…
Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have catalyzed numerous efforts to apply these technologies to embodied tasks, with a particular focus on high-level task planning and task decomposition. LLMs face challenges in understanding the physical world, especially regarding spatial, tempo
Traffic Anomaly Understanding (TAU) is essential for improving public safety and transportation efficiency by enabling timely detection and response to incidents. Beyond existing methods, which rely largely on visual data, we propose to consider audio cues, a valuable source that offers strong hints…
Arithmetic circuit optimization remains a fundamental challenge in modern integrated circuit design. Recent advances have cast this problem within the Learning to Optimize (L2O) paradigm, where intelligent agents autonomously explore high-performance design spaces with encouraging results. However,…
Recent advancements have significantly enhanced the performance of large language models (LLMs) in tackling complex reasoning tasks, achieving notable success in domains like mathematical and logical reasoning. However, these methods encounter challenges with complex planning tasks, primarily due to…
Dealing with the distribution shift is a significant challenge when building offline reinforcement learning (RL) models that can generalize from a static dataset to out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios. Previous approaches have employed pessimism or conservatism strategies. More recently, data-driven…
Machine learning techniques have shown great potential in enhancing macro placement, a critical stage in modern chip design. However, existing methods primarily focus on *online* optimization of *intermediate surrogate metrics* that are available at the current placement stage, rather than directly…
The integration of evolutionary algorithms (EAs) with reinforcement learning (RL) has shown superior performance compared to standalone methods. However, previous research focuses on exploration in policy parameter space, while overlooking the reward function search. To bridge this gap, we propose *…
This paper introduces a novel mobile phone control architecture, Lightweight Multi-modal App Control (LiMAC), for efficient interactions and control across various Android apps. LiMAC takes as input a textual goal and a sequence of past mobile observations, such as screenshots and corresponding UI…
Despite their remarkable performance on various tasks, Large Language Models (LLMs) still struggle with logical reasoning, particularly in complex and multi-step reasoning processes. Among various efforts to enhance LLMs' reasoning capabilities, synthesizing large-scale, high-quality logical reason…
Multi-objective Reinforcement Learning (MORL) seeks to develop policies that simultaneously optimize multiple conflicting objectives, but it requires extensive online interactions. Offline MORL provides a promising solution by training on pre-collected datasets to generalize to any preference upon d…
Optimization modeling is one of the most crucial but technical parts of operations research (OR). To automate the modeling process, existing works have leveraged large language models (LLMs), prompting them to break down tasks into steps for generating variables, constraints, and objectives. How…
Reward functions are crucial for policy learning. Large Language Models (LLMs), with strong coding capabilities and valuable domain knowledge, provide an automated solution for high-quality reward design. However, code-based reward functions require precise guiding logic and parameter configuratio…
Black-Box Optimization (BBO) has found successful applications in many fields of science and engineering. Recently, there has been a growing interest in meta-learning particular components of BBO algorithms to speed up optimization and get rid of tedious hand-crafted heuristics. As an extension, lea
Recent advances in robotics have produced numerous valuable large-scale demonstration datasets, yet their potential remains underutilized due to annotation limitations. Current datasets often suffer from sparse temporal annotations, and inconsistent labeling granularity, particularly for complex lon…
Smartphone agents are increasingly important for helping users control devices efficiently, with (Multimodal) Large Language Model (MLLM)-based approaches emerging as key contenders. Fairly comparing these agents is essential but challenging, requiring a varied task scope, the integration of agents…
Transforming complex actions into discrete skill abstractions has demonstrated strong potential for robotic manipulation.Existing approaches mainly leverage latent variable models, e.g., VQ-VAE, to learn skill abstractions through learned vectors (codebooks), while they suffer from codebook collapse…
Translation elongation is essential for cellular proteostasis and is implicated in cancer and neurodegeneration. Accurately predicting the rate of ribosome elongation in each codon (also called ribosomal A site) on mRNA is important for understanding and modulating protein synthesis. However, predic…
Despite the significant success of imitation learning in robotic manipulation, its application to bimanual tasks remains highly challenging. Existing approaches mainly learn a policy to predict a distant next-best end-effector pose (NBP) and then compute the corresponding joint rotation angles for m…
Reinforcement learning (RL) using foundation models for policy approximations in multi-turn tasks remains challenging. We identify two main limitations related to sparse reward settings and policy gradient updates, based on which we formulate a key insight: updates from positive samples with high re…
Logic synthesis is a crucial phase in the circuit design process, responsible for transforming hardware description language (HDL) designs into optimized netlists. However, traditional logic synthesis methods are computationally intensive, restricting their iterative use in refining chip designs. Re
Heterogeneity in sensors and actuators across environments poses a significant challenge to building large-scale pre-trained world models on top of this low-dimensional sensor information. In this work, we explore pre-training world models for heterogeneous environments by addressing key transfer ba…
Video Temporal Grounding (TG) aims to temporally locate video segments matching a natural language description (a query) in a long video. While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) are effective at holistic semantic matching, they often struggle with fine-grained temporal localisation. Recently, Group Rela…
Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) have reshaped the landscape of reasoning tasks, particularly through test-time scaling (TTS) to enhance LLM reasoning. Prior research has used structures such as trees or graphs to guide LLMs in searching for optimal solutions. These methods are time-c…
Logic Synthesis (LS) plays a vital role in chip design. A key task in LS is to simplify circuits---modeled by directed acyclic graphs (DAGs)---with functionality-equivalent transformations. To tackle this task, many LS heuristics apply transformations to subgraphs---rooted at each node on an input D…
Multiplier design---which aims to explore a large combinatorial design space to simultaneously optimize multiple conflicting objectives---is a fundamental problem in the integrated circuits industry. Although traditional approaches tackle the multi-objective multiplier optimization problem by manual…
Transfer learning (TL) has shown great potential to improve Reinforcement Learning (RL) efficiency by leveraging prior knowledge in new tasks. However, much of the existing TL research focuses on transferring knowledge between tasks that share the same state-action spaces. Further, transfer from mu…
Aligning agent behaviors with diverse human preferences remains a challenging problem in reinforcement learning (RL), owing to the inherent abstractness and mutability of human preferences. To address these issues, we propose AlignDiff, a novel framework that leverages RLHF to quantify human prefere…
Leveraging the powerful generative capability of diffusion models (DMs) to build decision-making agents has achieved extensive success. However, there is still a demand for an easy-to-use and modularized open-source library that offers customized and efficient development for DM-based decision-makin…
Diffusion planning has been recognized as an effective decision-making paradigm in various domains. The capability of generating high-quality long-horizon trajectories makes it a promising research direction. However, existing diffusion planning methods suffer from low decision-making frequencies du…
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) is a learning paradigm where an agent learns from a fixed dataset of experience. However, learning solely from a static dataset can limit the performance due to the lack of exploration. To overcome it, offline-to-online RL combines offline pre-training with online…
The emerging citation-based QA systems are gaining more attention especially in generative AI search applications. The importance of extracted knowledge provided to these systems is vital from both accuracy (completeness of information) and efficiency (extracting the information in a timely manner).…
Both Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) have demonstrated powerful capabilities in policy search with different principles. A promising direction is to combine the respective strengths of both for efficient policy optimization. To this end, many works have proposed various…
In the Integrated Circuit (IC) design flow, floorplanning (FP) determines the position and shape of each block. Serving as a prototype for downstream tasks, it is critical and establishes the upper bound of the final PPA (Power, Performance, Area). However, with the emergence of 3D IC with stacked l…
Robotics agents often struggle to understand and follow the multi-modal prompts in complex manipulation scenes which are challenging to be sufficiently and accurately described by text alone. Moreover for long-horizon manipulation tasks the deviation from general instruction tends to accumulate if l…
Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) holds the promise of sample-efficient learning by utilizing a world model, which models how the environment works and typically encompasses components for two tasks: observation modeling and reward modeling. In this paper, through a dedicated empirical inves…
Hybrid action control tasks are common in the real world, which require controlling some discrete and continuous actions simultaneously. To solve these tasks, existing Deep Reinforcement learning (DRL) methods either directly build a separate policy for each type of action or simplify the hybrid act…
Offline Reinforcement Learning (RL) commonly suffers from the out-of-distribution (OOD) overestimation issue due to the distribution shift. Prior work gradually shifts their focus from suppressing OOD overestimation to avoiding overly conservative learning from suboptimal behavior policies to improv…
Learning representations to capture the very fundamental understanding of the world is a key challenge in machine learning. The hierarchical structure of explanatory factors hidden in data is such a general representation and could be potentially achieved with a hierarchical VAE. However training a…
One of the fundamental challenges for offline reinforcement learning (RL) is ensuring robustness to data distribution. Whether the data originates from a near-optimal policy or not, we anticipate that an algorithm should demonstrate its ability to learn an effective control policy that seamlessly al…
Robotic manipulation tasks often span over long horizons and encapsulate multiple subtasks with different skills. Learning policies directly from long-horizon demonstrations is challenging without intermediate keyframes guidance and corresponding skill annotations. Existing approaches for keyframe i…
AlphaZero and MuZero have achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance in a wide range of domains, including board games and robotics, with discrete and continuous action spaces. However, to obtain an improved policy, they often require an excessively large number of simulations, especially for doma…
In reinforcement learning, the optimism in the face of uncertainty (OFU) is a mainstream principle for directing exploration towards less explored areas, characterized by higher uncertainty. However, in the presence of environmental stochasticity (noise), purely optimistic exploration may lead to ex…
Long-horizon manipulation tasks with general instructions often implicitly encapsulate multiple sub-tasks, posing significant challenges in instruction following. While language planning is a common approach to decompose general instructions into stepwise sub-instructions, text-only guidance may lac…
Despite many breakthroughs in recent years, it is still hard for MultiAgent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) algorithms to directly solve complex tasks in MultiAgent Systems (MASs) from scratch. In this work, we study how to use Automatic Curriculum Learning (ACL) to reduce the number of environmental…
Pre-routing timing prediction has been recently studied for evaluating the quality of a candidate cell placement in chip design. It involves directly estimating the timing metrics for both pin-level (slack, slew) and edge-level (net delay, cell delay), without time-consuming routing. However, it oft…
Macro placement is a crucial step in modern chip design, and reinforcement learning (RL) has recently emerged as a promising technique for improving the placement quality. However, existing RL-based techniques are hindered by their low sample efficiency, requiring numerous online rollouts or substan…
Machine learning (ML) has been shown to successfully accelerate solving NP-hard combinatorial optimization (CO) problems under the branch and bound framework. However, the high training and inference cost and limited interpretability of ML approaches severely limit their wide application to modern…
Decision Transformer (DT) is an innovative algorithm leveraging recent advances of the transformer architecture in reinforcement learning (RL). However, a notable limitation of DT is its reliance on recalling trajectories from datasets, losing the capability to seamlessly stitch sub-optimal trajecto…
Playing table tennis with a human player is a challenging robotic task due to its dynamic nature. Despite a number of researches being devoted to developing robotic table tennis systems, most of the works have demanding hardware requirements and ignore safety measures when generating the swing stoke…
The popularity of multiagent reinforcement learning (MARL) is growing rapidly with the demand for real-world tasks that require swarm intelligence. However, a noticeable drawback of MARL is its low sample efficiency, which leads to a huge amount of interactions with the environment. Surprisingly, fe…
Quality-Diversity (QD) algorithms, as a subset of evolutionary algorithms, have emerged as a powerful optimization paradigm with the aim of generating a set of high-quality and diverse solutions. Although QD has demonstrated competitive performance in reinforcement learning, its low sample efficienc…
Knowing the learning dynamics of policy is significant to unveiling the mysteries of Reinforcement Learning (RL). It is especially crucial yet challenging to Deep RL, from which the remedies to notorious issues like sample inefficiency and learning instability could be obtained. In this paper, we st…
Machine learning (ML) approaches have been successfully applied to accelerating exact combinatorial optimization (CO) solvers. However, many of them fail to explain what patterns they have learned that accelerate the CO algorithms due to the black-box nature of ML models like neural networks, and th…
Logic Synthesis (LS) aims to generate an optimized logic circuit satisfying a given functionality, which generally consists of circuit translation and optimization. It is a challenging and fundamental combinatorial optimization problem in integrated circuit design. Traditional LS approaches rely on…
Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF) has received significant attention for performing tasks without the need for costly manual reward design by aligning human preferences. It is crucial to consider diverse human feedback types and various learning methods in different environments. How…
The policies learned by humans in simple scenarios can be deployed in complex scenarios with the same task logic through limited feature alignment training, a process referred to as cognitive generalization or systematic generalization. Thus, a plausible conjecture is that unlocking cognitive genera…
Intermittent control problems are common in real world. The interactions between the decision maker and the executor can be discontinuous (intermittent) due to various types of interruptions, e.g. unstable communication channel. Due to intermittent interaction, agents are unable to acquire the state…
Combining Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) and Reinforcement Learning (RL) for policy search has been proven to improve RL performance. However, previous works largely overlook value-based RL in favor of merging EAs with policy-based RL. This paper introduces Value-Evolutionary-Based Reinforcement Lear…
World models empower model-based agents to interactively explore, reason, and plan within imagined environments for real-world decision-making. However, the high demand for interactivity poses challenges in harnessing recent advancements in video generative models for developing world models at scal…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a widely employed technique in decision-making problems, encompassing two fundamental operations -- policy evaluation and policy improvement. Enhancing learning efficiency remains a key challenge in RL, with many efforts focused on using ensemble critics to boost polic…
The state space in Multiagent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) grows exponentially with the agent number. Such a curse of dimensionality results in poor scalability and low sample efficiency, inhibiting MARL for decades. To break this curse, we propose a unified agent permutation framework that exploit…
Generative flow networks (GFlowNets), as an emerging technique, can be used as an alternative to reinforcement learning for exploratory control tasks. GFlowNets aims to sample actions with a probability proportional to the reward, similar to sampling different candidates in an active learning fashio…
Placement is a critical step in modern chip design, aiming to determine the positions of circuit modules on the chip canvas. Recent works have shown that reinforcement learning (RL) can improve human performance in chip placement. However, such an RL-based approach suffers from long training time an…
There is a growing demand of automatically synthesizing co-speech gestures for virtual characters. However, it remains a challenge due to the complex relationship between input speeches and target gestures. Most existing works focus on predicting the next gesture that fits the data best, however, su…
Uncovering rationales behind predictions of graph neural networks (GNNs) has received increasing attention over the years. Existing literature mainly focus on selecting a subgraph, through combinatorial optimization, to provide faithful explanations. However, the exponential size of candidate subgra…
Deep Reinforcement Learning (Deep RL) and Evolutionary Algorithm (EA) are two major paradigms of policy optimization with distinct learning principles, i.e., gradient-based v.s. gradient-free. An appealing research direction is integrating Deep RL and EA to devise new methods by fusing their complem…
Unsupervised reinforcement learning (URL) poses a promising paradigm to learn useful behaviors in a task-agnostic environment without the guidance of extrinsic rewards to facilitate the fast adaptation of various downstream tasks. Previous works focused on the pre-training in a model-free manner whi…
Many score-based active learning methods have been successfully applied to graph-structured data, aiming to reduce the number of labels and achieve better performance of graph neural networks based on predefined score functions. However, these algorithms struggle to learn policy distributions that a…
The exploration problem is one of the main challenges in deep reinforcement learning (RL). Recent promising works tried to handle the problem with population-based methods, which collect samples with diverse behaviors derived from a population of different exploratory policies. Adaptive policy selec…
Recently, diffusion model shines as a promising backbone for the sequence modeling paradigm in offline reinforcement learning(RL). However, these works mostly lack the generalization ability across tasks with reward or dynamics change. To tackle this challenge, in this paper we propose a task-orient…
Research in model-based reinforcement learning has made significant progress in recent years. Compared to single-agent settings, the exponential dimension growth of the joint state-action space in multi-agent systems dramatically increases the complexity of the environment dynamics, which makes it i…
The mobile communication enabled by cellular networks is the one of the main foundations of our modern society. Optimizing the performance of cellular networks and providing massive connectivity with improved coverage and user experience has a considerable social and economic impact on our daily lif…
Outlier exposure (OE) is powerful in out-of-distribution (OOD) detection, enhancing detection capability via model fine-tuning with surrogate OOD data. However, surrogate data typically deviate from test OOD data. Thus, the performance of OE when facing unseen OOD data, can be weaken. To address thi…
Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) has demonstrated its effectiveness in learning collaboration, but it often struggles with low-quality reward signals and high non-stationarity. In contrast, Evolutionary Algorithm (EA) has shown better convergence, robustness, and signal quality insensitivit…
Contrastive learning has emerged as a premier method for learning representations with or without supervision. Recent studies have shown its utility in graph representation learning for pre-training. Despite successes, the understanding of how to design effective graph augmentations that can capture…
MinMax Multiple Travelling Salesman Problem (mTSP) is an important class of combinatorial optimization problems with many practical applications, of which the goal is to minimize the longest tour of all vehicles. Due to its high computational complexity, existing methods for solving this problem can…
Recommender systems now consume large-scale data and play a significant role in improving user experience. Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as one of the most effective recommender system models because they model the rich relational information. The ever-growing volume of data can make tra…
Trajectory prediction has been a crucial task in building a reliable autonomous driving system by anticipating possible dangers. One key issue is to generate consistent trajectory predictions without colliding. To overcome the challenge, we propose an efficient masked autoencoder for trajectory pred…
Despite the impressive success achieved in various domains, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) is still faced with the sample inefficiency problem. Transfer learning (TL), which leverages prior knowledge from different but related tasks to accelerate the target task learning, has emerged as a promis…
Adapting to the changes in transition dynamics is essential in robotic applications. By learning a conditional policy with a compact context, context-aware meta-reinforcement learning provides a flexible way to adjust behavior according to dynamics changes. However, in real-world applications, the a…
Despite achieving superior performance in human-level control problems, unlike humans, deep reinforcement learning (DRL) lacks high-order intelligence (e.g., logic deduction and reuse), thus it behaves ineffectively than humans regarding learning and generalization in complex problems. Previous work…
Discrete-continuous hybrid action space is a natural setting in many practical problems, such as robot control and game AI. However, most previous Reinforcement Learning (RL) works only demonstrate the success in controlling with either discrete or continuous action space, while seldom take into acc…
In many real-world multi-agent systems, the sparsity of team rewards often makes it difficult for an algorithm to successfully learn a cooperative team policy. At present, the common way for solving this problem is to design some dense individual rewards for the agents to guide the cooperation. Howe…
Offline reinforcement learning is a promising approach for practical applications since it does not require interactions with real-world environments. However, existing offline RL methods only work well in environments with continuous or small discrete action spaces. In environments with large and d…
We propose learning via retracing, a novel self-supervised approach for learning the state representation (and the associated dynamics model) for reinforcement learning tasks. In addition to the predictive (reconstruction) supervision in the forward direction, we propose to include "retraced" transi…
In many real-world cooperative multiagent reinforcement learning (MARL) tasks, teams of agents can rehearse together before deployment, but then communication constraints may force individual agents to execute independently when deployed. Centralized training and decentralized execution (CTDE) is in…
We propose Neuro-Symbolic Hierarchical Rule Induction, an efficient interpretable neuro-symbolic model, to solve Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) problems. In this model, which is built from a pre-defined set of meta-rules organized in a hierarchical structure, first-order rules are invented by lea…
Autonomous agents often need to work together as a team to accomplish complex cooperative tasks. Due to privacy and other realistic constraints, agents might need to collaborate with previously unknown teammates on the fly. This problem is known as ad hoc teamwork, which remains a core research chal…
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has been a promising solution to many complex decision-making problems. Nevertheless, the notorious weakness in generalization among environments prevent widespread application of DRL agents in real-world scenarios. Although advances have been made recently, most pr…
Learning to collaborate is critical in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL). Previous works promote collaboration by maximizing the correlation of agents’ behaviors, which is typically characterized by Mutual Information (MI) in different forms. However, we reveal sub-optimal collaborative beha…
In Model-based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL), model learning is critical since an inaccurate model can bias policy learning via generating misleading samples. However, learning an accurate model can be difficult since the policy is continually updated and the induced distribution over visited states…
Recent progress in state-only imitation learning extends the scope of applicability of imitation learning to real-world settings by relieving the need for observing expert actions. However, existing solutions only learn to extract a state-to-action mapping policy from the data, without considering h…
Quality Diversity (QD) algorithms in population-based reinforcement learning aim to optimize agents' returns and diversity among the population simultaneously. It is conducive to solving exploration problems in reinforcement learning and potentially getting multiple good and diverse strategies. Howe…
As increasing numbers of autonomous vehicles (AVs) are being deployed, it is important to construct a multi-agent self-driving (MASD) system for navigating traffic flows of AVs. In an MASD system, AVs not only navigate themselves to pursue their own goals, but also interact with each other to preven…
Placement and routing are two critical yet time-consuming steps of chip design in modern VLSI systems. Distinct from traditional heuristic solvers, this paper on one hand proposes an RL-based model for mixed-size macro placement, which differs from existing learning-based placers that often consider…
Learning in real-world multiagent tasks is challenging due to the usual partial observability of each agent. Previous efforts alleviate the partial observability by historical hidden states with Recurrent Neural Networks, however, they do not consider the multiagent characters that either the multia…
Due to the rapid growth in the scale of circuits and the desire for knowledge transfer from old designs to new ones, deep learning technologies have been widely exploited in Electronic Design Automation (EDA) to assist circuit design. In chip design cycles, we might encounter heterogeneous and diver…
We study Policy-extended Value Function Approximator (PeVFA) in Reinforcement Learning (RL), which extends conventional value function approximator (VFA) to take as input not only the state (and action) but also an explicit policy representation. Such an extension enables PeVFA to preserve values of…
The Dynamic Pickup and Delivery Problem (DPDP) is an essential problem in the logistics domain, which is NP-hard. The objective is to dynamically schedule vehicles among multiple sites to serve the online generated orders such that the overall transportation cost could be minimized. The critical cha…
The partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) provides a general framework for modeling an agent's decision process with state uncertainty, and online planning plays a pivotal role in solving it. A belief is a distribution of states representing state uncertainty. Methods for large-scale…
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms have been demonstrated to be effective on a wide range of challenging decision making and control tasks. However, these methods typically suffer from severe action oscillations in particular in discrete action setting, which means that agents select diffe…
Transfer Learning has shown great potential to enhance single-agent Reinforcement Learning (RL) efficiency. Similarly, Multiagent RL (MARL) can also be accelerated if agents can share knowledge with each other. However, it remains a problem of how an agent should learn from other agents. In this pap…
Learning disentanglement aims at finding a low dimensional representation which consists of multiple explanatory and generative factors of the observational data. The framework of variational autoencoder (VAE) is commonly used to disentangle independent factors from observations. However, in real sc…
Exploration methods based on pseudo-count of transitions or curiosity of dynamics have achieved promising results in solving reinforcement learning with sparse rewards. However, such methods are usually sensitive to environmental dynamics-irrelevant information, e.g., white-noise. To handle such dyn…
The backpropagation networks are notably susceptible to catastrophic forgetting, where networks tend to forget previously learned skills upon learning new ones. To address such the 'sensitivity-stability' dilemma, most previous efforts have been contributed to minimizing the empirical risk with diff…
Value function is the central notion of Reinforcement Learning (RL). Value estimation, especially with function approximation, can be challenging since it involves the stochasticity of environmental dynamics and reward signals that can be sparse and delayed in some cases. A typical model-free RL alg…
Model-based reinforcement learning aims to improve the sample efficiency of policy learning by modeling the dynamics of the environment. Recently, the latent dynamics model is further developed to enable fast planning in a compact space. It summarizes the high-dimensional experiences of an agent, wh…
It is a long-standing question to discover causal relations among a set of variables in many empirical sciences. Recently, Reinforcement Learning (RL) has achieved promising results in causal discovery from observational data. However, searching the space of directed graphs and enforcing acyclic…
One principled approach for provably efficient exploration is incorporating the upper confidence bound (UCB) into the value function as a bonus. However, UCB is specified to deal with linear and tabular settings and is incompatible with Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL). In this paper, we propose a…
In this paper, a novel navigation learning method in continuous action space among crowds based on relational graph is proposed which can be directly deployed on differential-drive mobile robots without any change. More specifically, in order to increase generalization ability in crowd sizes, Graph…
Context, the embedding of previous collected trajectories, is a powerful construct for Meta-Reinforcement Learning (Meta-RL) algorithms. By conditioning on an effective context, Meta-RL policies can easily generalize to new tasks within a few adaptation steps. We argue that improving the quality of…
In multiagent systems (MASs), each agent makes individual decisions but all of them contribute globally to the system evolution. Learning in MASs is difficult since each agent's selection of actions must take place in the presence of other co-learning agents. Moreover, the environmental stochasticit…
In E-commerce, advertising is essential for merchants to reach their target users. The typical objective is to maximize the advertiser’s cumulative revenue over a period of time under a budget constraint. In real applications, an advertisement (ad) usually needs to be exposed to the same user multip…
Transfer learning has shown great potential to accelerate Reinforcement Learning (RL) by leveraging prior knowledge from past learned policies of relevant tasks. Existing approaches either transfer previous knowledge by explicitly computing similarities between tasks or select appropriate source pol…
Generating diverse behaviors for game artificial intelligence (Game AI) has been long recognized as a challenging task in the game industry. Designing a Game AI with a satisfying behavioral characteristic (style) heavily depends on the domain knowledge and is hard to achieve manually. Deep reinforce…
Reinforcement learning agents usually learn from scratch, which requires a large number of interactions with the environment. This is quite different from the learning process of human. When faced with a new task, human naturally have the common sense and use the prior knowledge to derive an initial…
Bipartite b-matching is fundamental in algorithm design, and has been widely applied into diverse applications, such as economic markets, labor markets, etc. These practical problems usually exhibit two distinct features: large-scale and dynamic, which requires the matching algorithm to be repeatedl…
Reward shaping is an effective technique for incorporating domain knowledge into reinforcement learning (RL). Existing approaches such as potential-based reward shaping normally make full use of a given shaping reward function. However, since the transformation of human knowledge into numeric reward…
Recently, deep multiagent reinforcement learning (MARL) has become a highly active research area as many real-world problems can be inherently viewed as multiagent systems. A particularly interesting and widely applicable class of problems is the partially observable cooperative multiagent setting,…
Interaction is fundamental in autonomous driving (AD). Despite more than a decade of intensive R&D in AD, how to dynamically interact with diverse road users in various contexts still remains unsolved. Multi-agent learning has recently seen big breakthroughs and has much to offer towards solving rea
Generative adversarial imitation learning (GAIL) has shown promising results by taking advantage of generative adversarial nets, especially in the field of robot learning. However, the requirement of isolated single modal demonstrations limits the scalability of the approach to real world scenarios…
In multiagent domains, coping with non-stationary agents that change behaviors from time to time is a challenging problem, where an agent is usually required to be able to quickly detect the other agent's policy during online interaction, and then adapt its own policy accordingly. This paper studies…