10.4LGMay 29, 2022Code
Frustratingly Easy Regularization on Representation Can Boost Deep Reinforcement LearningQiang He, Huangyuan Su, Jieyu Zhang et al. · uw
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) gives the promise that an agent learns good policy from high-dimensional information, whereas representation learning removes irrelevant and redundant information and retains pertinent information. In this work, we demonstrate that the learned representation of the $Q$-network and its target $Q$-network should, in theory, satisfy a favorable distinguishable representation property. Specifically, there exists an upper bound on the representation similarity of the value functions of two adjacent time steps in a typical DRL setting. However, through illustrative experiments, we show that the learned DRL agent may violate this property and lead to a sub-optimal policy. Therefore, we propose a simple yet effective regularizer called Policy Evaluation with Easy Regularization on Representation (PEER), which aims to maintain the distinguishable representation property via explicit regularization on internal representations. And we provide the convergence rate guarantee of PEER. Implementing PEER requires only one line of code. Our experiments demonstrate that incorporating PEER into DRL can significantly improve performance and sample efficiency. Comprehensive experiments show that PEER achieves state-of-the-art performance on all 4 environments on PyBullet, 9 out of 12 tasks on DMControl, and 19 out of 26 games on Atari. To the best of our knowledge, PEER is the first work to study the inherent representation property of Q-network and its target. Our code is available at https://sites.google.com/view/peer-cvpr2023/.
13.0LGApr 12
Intent-aligned Formal Specification Synthesis via Traceable RefinementZhe Ye, Aidan Z. H. Yang, Huangyuan Su et al.
Large language models are increasingly used to generate code from natural language, but ensuring correctness remains challenging. Formal verification offers a principled way to obtain such guarantees by proving that a program satisfies a formal specification. However, specifications are frequently missing in real-world codebases, and writing high-quality specifications remains expensive and expertise-intensive. We present VeriSpecGen, a traceable refinement framework that synthesizes intent-aligned specifications in Lean through requirement-level attribution and localized repair. VeriSpecGen decomposes natural language into atomic requirements and generates requirement-targeted tests with explicit traceability maps to validate generated specifications. When validation fails, traceability maps attribute failures to specific requirements, enabling targeted clause-level repairs. VeriSpecGen achieve 86.6% on VERINA SpecGen task using Claude Opus 4.5, improving over baselines by up to 31.8 points across different model families and scales. Beyond inference-time gains, we generate 343K training examples from VeriSpecGen refinement trajectories and demonstrate that training on these trajectories substantially improves specification synthesis by 62-106% relative and transfers gains to general reasoning abilities.
7.2AIMay 16
Reliability and Effectiveness of Autonomous AI Agents in Supply Chain ManagementCarol Xuan Long, David Simchi-Levi, Feng Zhu et al.
This paper studies autonomous generative AI agents in multi-echelon supply chains using the MIT Beer Game. We identify four inference-time levers that shape performance: model selection, policies and guardrails, centralized data sharing, and prompt engineering. Model capability is the dominant factor: an out-of-the-box reasoning model exceeds human-level performance, and optimized reasoning models reduce costs by up to 67% relative to human teams. However, strong average performance masks substantial reliability risks. We introduce the agent bullwhip effect, the amplification of decision unreliability across echelons, manifesting along two dimensions: decision variance increases both across facilities at the same point in time and within the same facility across time. We develop a mathematical framework showing that this phenomenon is inherent to multi-agent systems that involve coordination and information delays, and we demonstrate that repeated sampling fails to meaningfully reduce it. To address this limitation, we propose a Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO)-based reinforcement-learning post-training framework that trains a shared base LLM using system-level supply-chain rewards. GRPO post-training substantially reduces tail events, curtails agent bullwhip, and improves the reliability of autonomous supply-chain agents.