HVAC-GRACE: Transferable Building Control via Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network Policies
Buildings consume 40% of global energy, with HVAC systems responsible for up to half of that demand. As energy use grows, optimizing HVAC ef… (voir plus)ficiency is critical to meeting climate goals. While reinforcement learning (RL) offers a promising alternative to rule-based control, real-world adoption is limited by poor sample efficiency and generalisation. We introduce HVAC-GRACE, a graph-based RL framework that models buildings as heterogeneous graphs and integrates spatial message passing directly into temporal GRU gates. This enables each zone to learn control actions informed by both its own history and its structural context. Our architecture supports zero-shot transfer by learning topology-agnostic functions—but initial experiments reveal that this benefit depends on sufficient conditioned zone connectivity to maintain gradient flow. These findings highlight both the promise and the architectural requirements of scalable, transferable RL for building control
LLMs and Stack Overflow discussions: Reliability, impact, and challenges
Leuson Da Silva
Jordan Samhi
LLMs and Stack Overflow discussions: Reliability, impact, and challenges
Leuson Da Silva
Jordan Samhi
Model approximation in MDPs with unbounded per-step cost
Ashutosh Nayyar
Yi Ouyang
We consider the problem of designing a control policy for an infinite-horizon discounted cost Markov decision process …
Modulation of leg trajectory by transcranial magnetic stimulation during walking
H. Bourgeois
Rose Guay-Hottin
El-Mehdi Meftah
Marina Martinez
D. Barthélemy
Self-Predictive Representations for Combinatorial Generalization in Behavioral Cloning
Behavioral cloning (BC) methods trained with supervised learning (SL) are an effective way to learn policies from human demonstrations in do… (voir plus)mains like robotics. Goal-conditioning these policies enables a single generalist policy to capture diverse behaviors contained within an offline dataset. While goal-conditioned behavior cloning (GCBC) methods can perform well on in-distribution training tasks, they do not necessarily generalize zero-shot to tasks that require conditioning on novel state-goal pairs, i.e. combinatorial generalization. In part, this limitation can be attributed to a lack of temporal consistency in the state representation learned by BC; if temporally related states are encoded to similar latent representations, then the out-of-distribution gap for novel state-goal pairs would be reduced. Hence, encouraging this temporal consistency in the representation space should facilitate combinatorial generalization. Successor representations, which encode the distribution of future states visited from the current state, nicely encapsulate this property. However, previous methods for learning successor representations have relied on contrastive samples, temporal-difference (TD) learning, or both. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective representation learning objective,
Speciation of coral-associated barnacles: generalists versus specialists in the Indo-West Pacific
Lorenzo C. Halasan
Yoko Nozawa
Benny Kwok Kan Chan
Using machine learning algorithms to predict students' general self-efficacy in PISA 2018
Bin Tan
Hao-Yue Jin
What Matters for Maximizing Data Reuse In Value-based Deep Reinforcement Learning
Roger Creus Castanyer
A key ingredient for successfully applying deep reinforcement learning to challenging tasks is the effective use of data at scale. Although … (voir plus)originally deep RL algorithms achieved this by storing past experiences collected from a synchronous actor in an external replay memory [DQN; Mnih et al., 2013], follow-up works scaled training by collecting data asynchronously through distributed actors [R2D2; Kapturowski et al., 2018], and more recently by GPU-optimized parallelization [PQN; Gallici et al., 2024]. We argue that DQN, PQN, and R2D2 constitute a group of value-based methods for parallel training and study them to shed light on the dynamics induced by varying data collection schemes. We conduct a thorough empirical study to better understand these dynamics, and propose the Data Replay Ratio as a novel metric for quantifying data reuse. Our findings suggest that maximizing data reuse involves directly addressing the deadly triad: Q-lambda rollouts for reducing the bias from bootstrapping, the use of LayerNorm for stabilizing function approximation, and parallelized data collection for mitigating off-policy divergence.
What Matters for Maximizing Data Reuse In Value-based Deep Reinforcement Learning
Roger Creus Castanyer
A key ingredient for successfully applying deep reinforcement learning to challenging tasks is the effective use of data at scale. Although … (voir plus)originally deep RL algorithms achieved this by storing past experiences collected from a synchronous actor in an external replay memory [DQN; Mnih et al., 2013], follow-up works scaled training by collecting data asynchronously through distributed actors [R2D2; Kapturowski et al., 2018], and more recently by GPU-optimized parallelization [PQN; Gallici et al., 2024]. We argue that DQN, PQN, and R2D2 constitute a group of value-based methods for parallel training and study them to shed light on the dynamics induced by varying data collection schemes. We conduct a thorough empirical study to better understand these dynamics, and propose the Data Replay Ratio as a novel metric for quantifying data reuse. Our findings suggest that maximizing data reuse involves directly addressing the deadly triad: Q-lambda rollouts for reducing the bias from bootstrapping, the use of LayerNorm for stabilizing function approximation, and parallelized data collection for mitigating off-policy divergence.
Zero-Shot Constraint Satisfaction with Forward- Backward Representations
Adriana Hugessen
Cyrus Neary
Amy Zhang
Traditionally, constrained policy optimization with Reinforcement Learning (RL) requires learning a new policy from scratch for any new envi… (voir plus)ronment, goal or cost function, with limited generalization to new tasks and constraints. Given the sample inefficiency of many common deep RL methods, this procedure can be impractical for many real-world scenarios, particularly when constraints or tasks are changing. As an alternative, in the unconstrained setting, various works have sought to pre-train representations from offline datasets to accelerate policy optimization upon specification of a reward. Such methods can permit faster adaptation to new tasks in a given environment, dramatically improving sample efficiency. Recently, zero-shot policy optimization has been explored by leveraging a particular
Circuit Discovery Helps To Detect LLM Jailbreaking
Despite extensive safety alignment, large language models (LLMs) remain vulnerable to jailbreak attacks that bypass safeguards to elicit har… (voir plus)mful content. While prior work attributes this vulnerability to safety training limitations, the internal mechanisms by which LLMs process adversarial prompts remain poorly understood. We present a mechanistic analysis of the jailbreaking behavior in a large-scale, safety-aligned LLM, focusing on LLaMA-2-7B-chat-hf. Leveraging edge attribution patching and subnetwork probing, we systematically identify computational circuits responsible for generating affirmative responses to jailbreak prompts. Ablating these circuits during the first token prediction can reduce attack success rates by up to 80\%, demonstrating its critical role in safety bypass. Our analysis uncovers key attention heads and MLP pathways that mediate adversarial prompt exploitation, revealing how important tokens propagate through these components to override safety constraints. These findings advance the understanding of adversarial vulnerabilities in aligned LLMs and pave the way for targeted, interpretable defenses mechanisms based on mechanistic interpretability.