Boon‐Hee Soong

Guangyuan Liu, Hongyang Du, Dusit Niyato et al.

The popularity of Metaverse as an entertainment, social, and work platform has led to a great need for seamless avatar integration in the virtual world. In Metaverse, avatars must be updated and rendered to reflect users' behaviour. Achieving real-time synchronization between the virtual bilocation and the user is complex, placing high demands on the Metaverse Service Provider (MSP)'s rendering resource allocation scheme. To tackle this issue, we propose a semantic communication framework that leverages contest theory to model the interactions between users and MSPs and determine optimal resource allocation for each user. To reduce the consumption of network resources in wireless transmission, we use the semantic communication technique to reduce the amount of data to be transmitted. Under our simulation settings, the encoded semantic data only contains 51 bytes of skeleton coordinates instead of the image size of 8.243 megabytes. Moreover, we implement Deep Q-Network to optimize reward settings for maximum performance and efficient resource allocation. With the optimal reward setting, users are incentivized to select their respective suitable uploading frequency, reducing down-sampling loss due to rendering resource constraints by 66.076\% compared with the traditional average distribution method. The framework provides a novel solution to resource allocation for avatar association in VR environments, ensuring a smooth and immersive experience for all users.

Pengcheng Luo, Yunyang Zhao, Bowen Zhang et al.

With the advent of 5G, the internet has entered a new video-centric era. From short-video platforms like TikTok to long-video platforms like Bilibili, online video services are reshaping user consumption habits. Adaptive Bitrate (ABR) control is widely recognized as a critical factor influencing Quality of Experience (QoE). Recent learning-based ABR methods have attracted increasing attention. However, most of them rely on limited network trace sets during training and overlook the wide-distribution characteristics of real-world network conditions, resulting in poor generalization in out-of-distribution (OOD) scenarios. To address this limitation, we propose SABR, a training framework that combines behavior cloning (BC) pretraining with reinforcement learning (RL) fine-tuning. We also introduce benchmarks, ABRBench-3G and ABRBench-4G+, which provide wide-coverage training traces and dedicated OOD test sets for assessing robustness to unseen network conditions. Experimental results demonstrate that SABR achieves the best average rank compared with Pensieve, Comyco, and NetLLM across the proposed benchmarks. These results indicate that SABR enables more stable learning across wide distributions and improves generalization to unseen network conditions.

Bowen Zhang, Pengcheng Luo, Genke Yang et al.

With the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), applying large language models (LLMs) to mathematical problem-solving has attracted increasing attention. Most existing approaches attempt to improve Operations Research (OR) optimization problem-solving through prompt engineering or fine-tuning strategies for LLMs. However, these methods are fundamentally constrained by the limited capabilities of non-reasoning LLMs. To overcome these limitations, we propose OR-LLM-Agent, an AI agent framework built on reasoning LLMs for automated OR problem solving. The framework decomposes the task into three sequential stages: mathematical modeling, code generation, and debugging. Each task is handled by a dedicated sub-agent, which enables more targeted reasoning. We also construct BWOR, an OR dataset for evaluating LLM performance on OR tasks. Our analysis shows that in the benchmarks NL4OPT, MAMO, and IndustryOR, reasoning LLMs sometimes underperform their non-reasoning counterparts within the same model family. In contrast, BWOR provides a more consistent and discriminative assessment of model capabilities. Experimental results demonstrate that OR-LLM-Agent utilizing DeepSeek-R1 in its framework outperforms advanced methods, including GPT-o3, Gemini 2.5 Pro, DeepSeek-R1, and ORLM, by at least 7\% in accuracy. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of task decomposition for OR problem solving.