pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Improving Mixed-Criticality Scheduling with Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Muhammad El-Mahdy, Nourhan Sakr, Rodrigo Carrasco
Date: 2025-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Scheduling

This paper introduces a novel reinforcement learning (RL) approach to scheduling mixed-criticality (MC) systems on processors with varying speeds. Building upon the foundation laid by [1], we extend their work to address the non-preemptive scheduling problem, which is known to be NP-hard. By modeling this scheduling challenge as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), we develop an RL agent capable of generating near-optimal schedules for real-time MC systems. Our RL-based scheduler prioritizes high-critical tasks while maintaining overall system performance. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the scalability and effectiveness of our approach. The RL scheduler significantly improves task completion rates, achieving around 80% overall and 85% for high-criticality tasks across 100,000 instances of synthetic data and real data under varying system conditions. Moreover, under stable conditions without degradation, the scheduler achieves 94% overall task completion and 93% for high-criticality tasks. These results highlight the potential of RL-based schedulers in real-time and safety-critical applications, offering substantial improvements in handling complex and dynamic scheduling scenarios.
Attention-Augmented Inverse Reinforcement Learning with Graph Convolutions for Multi-Agent Task Allocation
Authors: Huilin Yin, Zhikun Yang, Linchuan Zhang, Daniel Watzenig
Date: 2025-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Graph Attention, Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

This work has been submitted to the IEEE for possible publication. Copyright may be transferred without notice, after which this version may no longer be accessible. Multi-agent task allocation (MATA) plays a vital role in cooperative multi-agent systems, with significant implications for applications such as logistics, search and rescue, and robotic coordination. Although traditional deep reinforcement learning (DRL) methods have been shown to be promising, their effectiveness is hindered by a reliance on manually designed reward functions and inefficiencies in dynamic environments. In this paper, an inverse reinforcement learning (IRL)-based framework is proposed, in which multi-head self-attention (MHSA) and graph attention mechanisms are incorporated to enhance reward function learning and task execution efficiency. Expert demonstrations are utilized to infer optimal reward densities, allowing dependence on handcrafted designs to be reduced and adaptability to be improved. Extensive experiments validate the superiority of the proposed method over widely used multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) algorithms in terms of both cumulative rewards and task execution efficiency.
Joint Pedestrian and Vehicle Traffic Optimization in Urban Environments using Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Bibek Poudel, Xuan Wang, Weizi Li, Lei Zhu, Kevin Heaslip
Date: 2025-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning (RL), Traffic Signal Control

Reinforcement learning (RL) holds significant promise for adaptive traffic signal control. While existing RL-based methods demonstrate effectiveness in reducing vehicular congestion, their predominant focus on vehicle-centric optimization leaves pedestrian mobility needs and safety challenges unaddressed. In this paper, we present a deep RL framework for adaptive control of eight traffic signals along a real-world urban corridor, jointly optimizing both pedestrian and vehicular efficiency. Our single-agent policy is trained using real-world pedestrian and vehicle demand data derived from Wi-Fi logs and video analysis. The results demonstrate significant performance improvements over traditional fixed-time signals, reducing average wait times per pedestrian and per vehicle by up to 67% and 52%, respectively, while simultaneously decreasing total accumulated wait times for both groups by up to 67% and 53%. Additionally, our results demonstrate generalization capabilities across varying traffic demands, including conditions entirely unseen during training, validating RL's potential for developing transportation systems that serve all road users.
A Nature-Inspired Colony of Artificial Intelligence System with Fast, Detailed, and Organized Learner Agents for Enhancing Diversity and Quality
Authors: Shan Suthaharan
Date: 2025-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

The concepts of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and multi-agent systems are two important areas of research in artificial intelligence (AI). In this paper, we present an approach that builds a CNN-based colony of AI agents to serve as a single system and perform multiple tasks (e.g., predictions or classifications) in an environment. The proposed system impersonates the natural environment of a biological system, like an ant colony or a human colony. The proposed colony of AI that is defined as a role-based system uniquely contributes to accomplish tasks in an environment by incorporating AI agents that are fast learners, detailed learners, and organized learners. These learners can enhance their localized learning and their collective decisions as a single system of colony of AI agents. This approach also enhances the diversity and quality of the colony of AI with the help of Genetic Algorithms and their crossover and mutation mechanisms. The evolution of fast, detailed, and organized learners in the colony of AI is achieved by introducing a unique one-to-one mapping between these learners and the pretrained VGG16, VGG19, and ResNet50 models, respectively. This role-based approach creates two parent-AI agents using the AI models through the processes, called the intra- and inter-marriage of AI, so that they can share their learned knowledge (weights and biases) based on a probabilistic rule and produce diversified child-AI agents to perform new tasks. This process will form a colony of AI that consists of families of multi-model and mixture-model AI agents to improve diversity and quality. Simulations show that the colony of AI, built using the VGG16, VGG19, and ResNet50 models, can provide a single system that generates child-AI agents of excellent predictive performance, ranging between 82% and 95% of F1-scores, to make diversified collective and quality decisions on a task.
Debate-Feedback: A Multi-Agent Framework for Efficient Legal Judgment Prediction
Authors: Xi Chen, Mao Mao, Shuo Li, Haotian Shangguan
Date: 2025-04-07 00:00:00

The use of AI in legal analysis and prediction (LegalAI) has gained widespread attention, with past research focusing on retrieval-based methods and fine-tuning large models. However, these approaches often require large datasets and underutilize the capabilities of modern large language models (LLMs). In this paper, inspired by the debate phase of real courtroom trials, we propose a novel legal judgment prediction model based on the Debate-Feedback architecture, which integrates LLM multi-agent debate and reliability evaluation models. Unlike traditional methods, our model achieves significant improvements in efficiency by minimizing the need for large historical datasets, thus offering a lightweight yet robust solution. Comparative experiments show that it outperforms several general-purpose and domain-specific legal models, offering a dynamic reasoning process and a promising direction for future LegalAI research.
Large-Scale Mixed-Traffic and Intersection Control using Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Songyang Liu, Muyang Fan, Weizi Li, Jing Du, Shuai Li
Date: 2025-04-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

Traffic congestion remains a significant challenge in modern urban networks. Autonomous driving technologies have emerged as a potential solution. Among traffic control methods, reinforcement learning has shown superior performance over traffic signals in various scenarios. However, prior research has largely focused on small-scale networks or isolated intersections, leaving large-scale mixed traffic control largely unexplored. This study presents the first attempt to use decentralized multi-agent reinforcement learning for large-scale mixed traffic control in which some intersections are managed by traffic signals and others by robot vehicles. Evaluating a real-world network in Colorado Springs, CO, USA with 14 intersections, we measure traffic efficiency via average waiting time of vehicles at intersections and the number of vehicles reaching their destinations within a time window (i.e., throughput). At 80% RV penetration rate, our method reduces waiting time from 6.17 s to 5.09 s and increases throughput from 454 vehicles per 500 seconds to 493 vehicles per 500 seconds, outperforming the baseline of fully signalized intersections. These findings suggest that integrating reinforcement learning-based control large-scale traffic can improve overall efficiency and may inform future urban planning strategies.
Conformal Data-driven Control of Stochastic Multi-Agent Systems under Collaborative Signal Temporal Logic Specifications
Authors: Eleftherios E. Vlahakis, Lars Lindemann, Dimos V. Dimarogonas
Date: 2025-04-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Conformal Prediction, Model Predictive Control

We study the control of stochastic discrete-time linear multi-agent systems (MAS) subject to additive stochastic noise and collaborative signal temporal logic (STL) specifications to be satisfied with a desired probability. Given available disturbance datasets, we leverage conformal prediction (CP) to address the underlying chance-constrained multi-agent STL synthesis problem in a distribution-free manner. By introducing nonconformity scores as functions of prediction regions (PRs) of error trajectories, we develop an iterative PR-scaling and disturbance-feedback synthesis approach to bound training error trajectory samples. These bounds are then calibrated using a separate dataset, providing probabilistic guarantees via CP. Subsequently, we relax the underlying stochastic optimal control problem by tightening the robustness functions of collaborative tasks based on their Lipschitz constants and the computed error bounds. To address scalability, we exploit the compositional structure of the multi-agent STL formula and propose a model-predictive-control-like algorithm, where agent-level problems are solved in a distributed fashion. Lastly, we showcase the benefits of the proposed method in comparison with [1] via an illustrative example.
OrbitZoo: Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Environment for Orbital Dynamics
Authors: Alexandre Oliveira, Katarina Dyreby, Francisco Caldas, Cláudia Soares
Date: 2025-04-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Collision Avoidance, Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

The increasing number of satellites and orbital debris has made space congestion a critical issue, threatening satellite safety and sustainability. Challenges such as collision avoidance, station-keeping, and orbital maneuvering require advanced techniques to handle dynamic uncertainties and multi-agent interactions. Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise in this domain, enabling adaptive, autonomous policies for space operations; however, many existing RL frameworks rely on custom-built environments developed from scratch, which often use simplified models and require significant time to implement and validate the orbital dynamics, limiting their ability to fully capture real-world complexities. To address this, we introduce OrbitZoo, a versatile multi-agent RL environment built on a high-fidelity industry standard library, that enables realistic data generation, supports scenarios like collision avoidance and cooperative maneuvers, and ensures robust and accurate orbital dynamics. The environment is validated against a real satellite constellation, Starlink, achieving a Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) of 0.16% compared to real-world data. This validation ensures reliability for generating high-fidelity simulations and enabling autonomous and independent satellite operations.
Enforcement Agents: Enhancing Accountability and Resilience in Multi-Agent AI Frameworks
Authors: Sagar Tamang, Dibya Jyoti Bora
Date: 2025-04-05 00:00:00

As autonomous agents become more powerful and widely used, it is becoming increasingly important to ensure they behave safely and stay aligned with system goals, especially in multi-agent settings. Current systems often rely on agents self-monitoring or correcting issues after the fact, but they lack mechanisms for real-time oversight. This paper introduces the Enforcement Agent (EA) Framework, which embeds dedicated supervisory agents into the environment to monitor others, detect misbehavior, and intervene through real-time correction. We implement this framework in a custom drone simulation and evaluate it across 90 episodes using 0, 1, and 2 EA configurations. Results show that adding EAs significantly improves system safety: success rates rise from 0.0% with no EA to 7.4% with one EA and 26.7% with two EAs. The system also demonstrates increased operational longevity and higher rates of malicious drone reformation. These findings highlight the potential of lightweight, real-time supervision for enhancing alignment and resilience in multi-agent systems.
Offline and Distributional Reinforcement Learning for Wireless Communications
Authors: Eslam Eldeeb, Hirley Alves
Date: 2025-04-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Distributional Reinforcement Learning, Management, quantile regression, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

The rapid growth of heterogeneous and massive wireless connectivity in 6G networks demands intelligent solutions to ensure scalability, reliability, privacy, ultra-low latency, and effective control. Although artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have demonstrated their potential in this domain, traditional online reinforcement learning (RL) and deep RL methods face limitations in real-time wireless networks. For instance, these methods rely on online interaction with the environment, which might be unfeasible, costly, or unsafe. In addition, they cannot handle the inherent uncertainties in real-time wireless applications. We focus on offline and distributional RL, two advanced RL techniques that can overcome these challenges by training on static datasets and accounting for network uncertainties. We introduce a novel framework that combines offline and distributional RL for wireless communication applications. Through case studies on unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) trajectory optimization and radio resource management (RRM), we demonstrate that our proposed Conservative Quantile Regression (CQR) algorithm outperforms conventional RL approaches regarding convergence speed and risk management. Finally, we discuss open challenges and potential future directions for applying these techniques in 6G networks, paving the way for safer and more efficient real-time wireless systems.
FMNV: A Dataset of Media-Published News Videos for Fake News Detection
Authors: Yihao Wang, Zhong Qian, Peifeng Li
Date: 2025-04-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Fake News Detection, Misinformation

News media, particularly video-based platforms, have become deeply embed-ded in daily life, concurrently amplifying the risks of misinformation dissem-ination. Consequently, multimodal fake news detection has garnered signifi-cant research attention. However, existing datasets predominantly comprise user-generated videos characterized by crude editing and limited public en-gagement, whereas professionally crafted fake news videos disseminated by media outlets-often politically or virally motivated-pose substantially greater societal harm. To address this gap, we construct FMNV, a novel da-taset exclusively composed of news videos published by media organizations. Through empirical analysis of existing datasets and our curated collection, we categorize fake news videos into four distinct types. Building upon this taxonomy, we employ Large Language Models (LLMs) to automatically generate deceptive content by manipulating authentic media-published news videos. Furthermore, we propose FMNVD, a baseline model featuring a dual-stream architecture that integrates spatio-temporal motion features from a 3D ResNeXt-101 backbone and static visual semantics from CLIP. The two streams are fused via an attention-based mechanism, while co-attention modules refine the visual, textual, and audio features for effective multi-modal aggregation. Comparative experiments demonstrate both the generali-zation capability of FMNV across multiple baselines and the superior detec-tion efficacy of FMNVD. This work establishes critical benchmarks for de-tecting high-impact fake news in media ecosystems while advancing meth-odologies for cross-modal inconsistency analysis. Our dataset is available in https://github.com/DennisIW/FMNV.
Extending Visual Dynamics for Video-to-Music Generation
Authors: Xiaohao Liu, Teng Tu, Yunshan Ma, Tat-Seng Chua
Date: 2025-04-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Music Generation, Optical Flow Estimation

Music profoundly enhances video production by improving quality, engagement, and emotional resonance, sparking growing interest in video-to-music generation. Despite recent advances, existing approaches remain limited in specific scenarios or undervalue the visual dynamics. To address these limitations, we focus on tackling the complexity of dynamics and resolving temporal misalignment between video and music representations. To this end, we propose DyViM, a novel framework to enhance dynamics modeling for video-to-music generation. Specifically, we extract frame-wise dynamics features via a simplified motion encoder inherited from optical flow methods, followed by a self-attention module for aggregation within frames. These dynamic features are then incorporated to extend existing music tokens for temporal alignment. Additionally, high-level semantics are conveyed through a cross-attention mechanism, and an annealing tuning strategy benefits to fine-tune well-trained music decoders efficiently, therefore facilitating seamless adaptation. Extensive experiments demonstrate DyViM's superiority over state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods.
Why We Feel: Breaking Boundaries in Emotional Reasoning with Multimodal Large Language Models
Authors: Yuxiang Lin, Jingdong Sun, Zhi-Qi Cheng, Jue Wang, Haomin Liang, Zebang Cheng, Yifei Dong, Jun-Yan He, Xiaojiang Peng, Xian-Sheng Hua
Date: 2025-04-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Interpretation, Emotion Recognition

Most existing emotion analysis emphasizes which emotion arises (e.g., happy, sad, angry) but neglects the deeper why. We propose Emotion Interpretation (EI), focusing on causal factors-whether explicit (e.g., observable objects, interpersonal interactions) or implicit (e.g., cultural context, off-screen events)-that drive emotional responses. Unlike traditional emotion recognition, EI tasks require reasoning about triggers instead of mere labeling. To facilitate EI research, we present EIBench, a large-scale benchmark encompassing 1,615 basic EI samples and 50 complex EI samples featuring multifaceted emotions. Each instance demands rationale-based explanations rather than straightforward categorization. We further propose a Coarse-to-Fine Self-Ask (CFSA) annotation pipeline, which guides Vision-Language Models (VLLMs) through iterative question-answer rounds to yield high-quality labels at scale. Extensive evaluations on open-source and proprietary large language models under four experimental settings reveal consistent performance gaps-especially for more intricate scenarios-underscoring EI's potential to enrich empathetic, context-aware AI applications. Our benchmark and methods are publicly available at: https://github.com/Lum1104/EIBench, offering a foundation for advanced multimodal causal analysis and next-generation affective computing.
Audio-visual Event Localization on Portrait Mode Short Videos
Authors: Wuyang Liu, Yi Chai, Yongpeng Yan, Yanzhen Ren
Date: 2025-04-09 00:00:00
Tasks: audio-visual event localization, Scene Understanding

Audio-visual event localization (AVEL) plays a critical role in multimodal scene understanding. While existing datasets for AVEL predominantly comprise landscape-oriented long videos with clean and simple audio context, short videos have become the primary format of online video content due to the the proliferation of smartphones. Short videos are characterized by portrait-oriented framing and layered audio compositions (e.g., overlapping sound effects, voiceovers, and music), which brings unique challenges unaddressed by conventional methods. To this end, we introduce AVE-PM, the first AVEL dataset specifically designed for portrait mode short videos, comprising 25,335 clips that span 86 fine-grained categories with frame-level annotations. Beyond dataset creation, our empirical analysis shows that state-of-the-art AVEL methods suffer an average 18.66% performance drop during cross-mode evaluation. Further analysis reveals two key challenges of different video formats: 1) spatial bias from portrait-oriented framing introduces distinct domain priors, and 2) noisy audio composition compromise the reliability of audio modality. To address these issues, we investigate optimal preprocessing recipes and the impact of background music for AVEL on portrait mode videos. Experiments show that these methods can still benefit from tailored preprocessing and specialized model design, thus achieving improved performance. This work provides both a foundational benchmark and actionable insights for advancing AVEL research in the era of mobile-centric video content. Dataset and code will be released.
Attributes-aware Visual Emotion Representation Learning
Authors: Rahul Singh Maharjan, Marta Romeo, Angelo Cangelosi
Date: 2025-04-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Emotion Recognition, Representation Learning, Scene Understanding

Visual emotion analysis or recognition has gained considerable attention due to the growing interest in understanding how images can convey rich semantics and evoke emotions in human perception. However, visual emotion analysis poses distinctive challenges compared to traditional vision tasks, especially due to the intricate relationship between general visual features and the different affective states they evoke, known as the affective gap. Researchers have used deep representation learning methods to address this challenge of extracting generalized features from entire images. However, most existing methods overlook the importance of specific emotional attributes such as brightness, colorfulness, scene understanding, and facial expressions. Through this paper, we introduce A4Net, a deep representation network to bridge the affective gap by leveraging four key attributes: brightness (Attribute 1), colorfulness (Attribute 2), scene context (Attribute 3), and facial expressions (Attribute 4). By fusing and jointly training all aspects of attribute recognition and visual emotion analysis, A4Net aims to provide a better insight into emotional content in images. Experimental results show the effectiveness of A4Net, showcasing competitive performance compared to state-of-the-art methods across diverse visual emotion datasets. Furthermore, visualizations of activation maps generated by A4Net offer insights into its ability to generalize across different visual emotion datasets.