Cevahir Koprulu, David Paz, Feng Tao +4cs.AI cs.LG
Batched simulators for autonomous driving have recently enabled training reinforcement learning (RL) agents at scale, encompassing thousands of traffic scenarios and billions of interactions within a matter of days. Although such high-throughput feeds RL algorithms faster than ever, their sample-efficiency has not kept pace: As the standard training scheme, domain randomization uniformly samples scenarios, thereby consuming a vast number of interactions on cases that contribute little to learning. Curriculum learning offers a remedy by adaptively prioritizing scenarios that matter most to policy improvement. We present CL4AD, the first integration of curriculum learning into batched autonomous driving simulators by framing scenario selection as an unsupervised environment design problem. We introduce utility functions that shape curricula based on success rates and the realism of the agent's behavior, in addition to existing regret-estimation functions. Large-scale experiments in GPUDRIVE demonstrate that curriculum learning achieves a 99% success rate a billion steps earlier than domain randomization, reducing wall-clock time by 77%, and outperforms heuristic curricula with static and dynamic attributes, with only one exception at the largest scale. An ablation under limited compute shows that curriculum learning improves sample efficiency by 67%. We also investigate how utility functions behave at scale, and how prioritized scenarios evolve during training. We release an implementation of CLForAD in GPUDRIVE.
Trader-facing dynamic fees are increasingly proposed for automated market makers (AMMs), but historical data do not identify how order flow would respond: trader-facing fees do not vary, trader types are latent, and a replayed tape is not a sequential decision environment. We therefore construct a minimal closed-loop simulator in which the missing signal exists by construction: two constant-product pools repriced by an equilibrium-inspired dynamic-fee rule, fee-sensitive noise flow, and closed-form CEX--AMM arbitrage. Equilibrium is used as a closure principle, not as an object the trader learns. Against a tuned benchmark ladder of schedule, planning, lookahead, and tabular policies, a small DQN is the only evaluated valid policy whose paired improvement over tuned one-step routing excludes zero. On a reserved final block of 1{,}000 seeds with completion forced to 1.0 for every policy, it reduces implementation shortfall under every tested intra-step ordering, by $13.3\bps$ of order notional under the pre-specified agent-last ordering, and the edge is concentrated in, and learned from, dynamic-fee environments: under constant fees the paired difference is indistinguishable from zero. The result is model-conditioned counterfactual evidence about execution control in AMMs, not evidence about historical traders, equilibrium play, or deployable profit.
Conflict Mitigation (ConMit) is a crucial part of intelligent network control in Open Radio Access Networks (O-RAN). In this paper, we propose a method named ACCoRD to resolve detected control conflicts in Near-Real Time RAN Intelligent Controller using a Conflict Resolution (CR) Agent with an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) trained with a reinforcement learning algorithm PPO-Clip. The implemented ANN analyzes data about the network and conflicting control decisions to infer optimal CR actions. The CR Agent gathers feedback from the network after each resolved conflict to assess its efficiency and adjust the ANN's weights during batch training. The evaluation of the proposed approach is based on simulation data. A new methodology for evaluating CR solutions is proposed. Results show that the proposed ANN-based method improves on the efficiency of rule-based approaches by significantly reducing negative network events caused by conflicting control decisions in medium and high traffic scenarios.