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Wenwu Yu

Publications and source records attributed to Wenwu Yu.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

Correct Online Estimation of the Powertrain Time Constants in Adaptive Vehicular Platooning

In longitudinal platooning, some key sources of uncertainty are the powertrain time constants of the vehicles. Because such time constants appear in the input matrix of the platooning dynamics, their correct estimation is either impractical with methods requiring persistence of excitation, or impossible with methods requiring the input matrix to be known. This work proposes a novel adaptive longitudinal platooning method with correct estimation of the powertrain time constants. To achieve correct estimation, the composite adaptive control framework and its stability analysis are suitably modified to handle the time constant uncertainty in the design of the adaptive law. The result is a platooning protocol that guarantees convergence of the estimated time constants to their true values without the need for persistence of excitation: it is sufficient the derivative of the acceleration to be nonzero over a possibly short transient, an extremely relaxed excitation condition. Comparisons with state-of-the-art platooning solutions reveal advantages such as no required measurements of acceleration derivative nor collection of past data. The robustness and practicality of the proposed design is also verified with CarSim-based platooning experiments.

eess.SY

Fault Diagnosis and Prognosis in Partially-Observed Discrete Event Systems with Delayed Observations

Fault diagnosis and prognosis in discrete event systems are studied in the scenario where the observations are possibly received with delay. To address this scenario, two conditions for diagnosis and prognosis with delayed observations are proposed, where we show that the state-of-the-art notion of prognosability must be revised to avoid conservativeness. Diagnosability and prognosability conditions are then verified by introducing a delay observer and a new verification function. Theoretical analysis indicates the effectiveness of the verification method for fault diagnosis and prognosis in the system.

math.OC

Enforcing Opacity in Discrete Event Systems via Delayed Observations

Artificially introducing a delay in the observations of a system can be an effective mechanism to mask the system itself, with the goal to increase its opacity and thus its security. This work investigates opacity in discrete event systems with delayed observations. We focus on two questions: how to verify opacity under delayed observations, and how to synthesize sensor activation policies that guarantee opacity under such delayed conditions. To address these questions, we first introduce the definition of opacity under delayed observation and develop a corresponding verification method. We then extend such analysis tool into a synthesis tool by proposing an optimization approach for designing sensor activation policies guaranteeing opacity under delayed observations. An example is used to illustrate the analysis and synthesis procedures.

math.OC

Distributed Fault Diagnosis in Discrete Event Systems with Transmission Delay Impairments

This note studies the distributed fault diagnosis problem in partially-observed discrete event systems, where the system is monitored by a group of agents to cooperatively diagnose faults within a finite number of steps. The novelty of this work is the creation of a methodology to verify when the faults can be diagnosed even in the presence of transmission delay impairments. To address this scenario, a new distributed diagnosability condition is proposed, which extends decentralized diagnosability conditions proposed in the literature. Such distributed diagnosability condition is then verified via a novel structure named delay recorder and a new diagnosis function. Theoretical analysis shows that the verification method can successfully determine whether the faults can be diagnosed.

math.OC

A Cooperative Implementation of Mesh Stability in Vehicular Platoons

This work studies the problem of mesh stability in connected and automated vehicles. Mesh stability, also known as 2D string stability, refers to studying how disturbances propagate in vehicular platoons in both longitudinal and lateral direction. As opposed to available decentralized results only relying on on-board sensing, the distinguishing feature of this work is a cooperative version of mesh stability, where onboard sensing is augmented by vehicle-to-vehicle communication. This cooperative version dramatically improves the state-of-the-art decentralized performance: for longitudinal control, a new cooperative non-identical protocol (i.e. with non-identical control gains) is proposed that improves the state-of-the-art decentralized non-identical protocol in terms of scalability of the control gains and strong notion of string stability. For lateral control, after showing that the non-identical approach is not necessary, a cooperative non-identical protocol is proposed to achieve another strong notion of string stability. Robustness of the proposed implementation against vehicle-to-vehicle communication delays and actuation time lags is considered. Numerical experiments, also performed with the vehicle simulator CarSim, validate the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed protocol.

eess.SY

Scalable Policy Optimization for Networked Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning with Continuous State-Action Spaces

We develop the Continuous Distributed Coupled Policy Gradient (CDCPG) algorithm for cooperative reinforcement learning in networked Markov decision processes with continuous state and action spaces. Each agent maintains a local actor over a bounded graph neighborhood, and a localized least-squares temporal-difference critic evaluates a truncated action-value function through a spectral random-feature representation of the local transition kernel. The analysis makes four contributions. First, the truncated action-value function is constructed as a conditional expectation over the neighborhood, yielding a well-posed localized Bellman theory that removes the continuation-kernel mismatch of naive truncation arguments. Second, we expose a dimensional obstruction to temporal-difference stability for normalized random features and prove an unconditional excitation bound that reduces stability to a symmetric persistence-of-excitation condition, monitorable through an online matrix-concentration certificate. Third, under exponential spatial decay of agent interactions, the excitation condition, and smoothness of the objective, CDCPG drives an averaged per-agent stationarity measure to within any excess $\epsilon$ of an explicitly characterized approximation floor using $\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(\epsilon^{-2})$ shared-oracle samples, and the excess dependence matches the smooth nonconvex first-order rate; per-agent computation and communication are governed by the neighborhood size rather than the network size. Fourth, an adaptive-locality rule selects the radius that balances truncation and graph-decay residuals against the target accuracy. Experiments on a networked linear-quadratic benchmark corroborate the locality and feature-dimension predictions.

cs.MA

From Uniform to Learned Graph Priors: Diffusion for Structure Discovery

Neural relational inference (NRI) methods discover interaction graphs from trajectories through variational reasoning on discrete potential edges. However, these methods typically rely on oversimplified, factorized graph priors. Such priors, typically nearing uniform distributions, treat edges as independent entities. This systemic misalignment does not match the real-world systems and yields diffuse and indecisive edge posteriors limiting the reliability of structural discovery. To address this, we propose \textit{Diff-prior}, a diffusion-parameterized adaptive prior used to calibrate latent graph distribution rather than generate graphs. Our core insight is to reframe prior integration as a learnable denoising-style calibration that organizes scattered, uncertain edge posteriors into a more reliable overall structure which can be trained by the diffusion model. Diff-prior learns an adaptive structure prior that performs structured calibration on the edge posteriors during inference, guiding it towards a distribution closer to the underlying structure. The diff-prior operates before structural sampling and acts as a denoising calibrator directly on the encoder edge distribution, which provides a generic training paradigm over structured variables. Experiments on standard benchmarks validated our framework, and the results indicate that Diff-prior improves the performance of structure inference and generates more decisive edge posteriors across multiple NRI-family architectures. The code is available on https://github.com/Hardy158118/Diffprior.

cs.LG

ASIND: Alternating Sparse Identification for Predicting Network Dynamics Without Knowledge

Identifying network dynamics is a critical yet challenging task to to understand the mechanism of real-world social systems. There are two types of algorithms, and one requires the knowledge of self-dynamics function, interactive function, and interactive network to sparsely identify the network dynamics. Another one does not require any knowledge, but use simple functions to universally approximate complex functions. However, this type of algorithms lack interpretability, and the functional space is too extensive to search efficiently. Thus, to address this issue, this work proposes an Alternating Sparse Identification of Network Dynamics (ASIND) algorithm to sparsely identify the self-dynamics function, interactive function and interactive network alternatively. Extensive experiments are conducted to show the state-of-the-art identification and 100-steps prediction performance compared to the baseline. The experimental results also show the weak identifiability of interactive network, that means different networks can generate highly similar trajectories of network dynamics. The code is available at https://github.com/KMY-SEU/ASIND.

cs.SI

Distributed Zeroth-Order Policy Gradient for Networked Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

We study a networked multi-agent reinforcement learning (NMARL) problem with human feedback in an infinite-horizon setting, where agents interact over an underlying network with localized state dependencies and aim to collaboratively maximize the average discounted return. Existing approaches with preference feedback are primarily developed for single-agent settings and rely on centralized training, which limits their scalability and applicability to large-scale networked multi-agent systems. To address this, we introduce a novel human feedback mechanism based on spatiotemporally truncated trajectories, defined as $H$-horizon trajectory pairs aggregated over each agent's $\kappa$-hop neighborhood. Building on this, we develop a distributed zeroth-order policy gradient algorithm, where each agent estimates its local policy gradient using human preference feedback generated from both the current joint policy and a perturbed joint policy drawn from zero-mean Gaussian distribution. Specifically, the algorithm is fully distributed, as the feedback received by each agent depends solely on the state-action information within its $\kappa$-hop neighborhood and does not require explicit reward signals or centralized control. We further rigorously establish that the proposed algorithm converges to an $\epsilon$-stationary point with polynomial sample complexity. Finally, simulation results in a stochastic GridWorld environment and a predator-prey environment further demonstrate that the effectiveness and scalability of the proposed algorithm in achieving collaborative optimization based solely on human preference feedback.

cs.MA

Weisfeiler Lehman Test on Combinatorial Complexes: Generalized Expressive Power of Topological Neural Networks

Topological neural networks have emerged as effective tools for modeling higher-order relational structures beyond pairwise graphs, including hypergraphs, simplicial complexes, and cell complexes. However, existing Weisfeiler-Leman type expressivity analyses are typically developed on different structural domains and rely on domain-specific neighborhood systems, making their expressive powers difficult to compare within a common formalism. In this paper, we introduce the Combinatorial Complex Weisfeiler-Leman (CCWL) framework, a unified expressive power refinement defined on combinatorial complexes. By exploiting the ability of combinatorial complexes to represent both set-type relations and part-whole hierarchies, CCWL performs topological color refinement through four structural neighborhoods: boundary, co-boundary, lower adjacency, and upper adjacency. We show that, under specified lifting maps, CCWL can simulate several domain-specific WL-type refinements, thereby providing a common theoretical baseline for analyzing topological message passing. We further study the neighborhood sufficiency problem and prove that, under explicit coverage conditions, a reduced refinement using only lower- and upper-adjacent bridge information preserves the distinguishing power of the full four-neighborhood CCWL refinement. Guided by this theoretical result, we instantiate the reduced refinement as the Combinatorial Complex Isomorphism Network (CCIN). Experiments on synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that CCIN achieves competitive performance against representative graph and topological neural network baselines. Ablation studies and resource-efficiency analyses further support the effectiveness of the proposed lower/upper-neighborhood design.

cs.LG

Generative Learning Enhanced Intelligent Resource Management for Cell-Free Delay Deterministic Communications

Cell-free multiple-input multiple-output (CF-MIMO) architecture significantly enhances wireless network performance, offering a promising solution for delay-sensitive applications. This paper investigates the resource allocation problem in CF-MIMO systems, aiming to maximize energy efficiency (EE) while satisfying delay violation rate constraint. We design a Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) with a primal-dual method to solve it. To address the low sample efficiency and safety risks caused by cold-start of the designed safe deep reinforcement learning (DRL) method, we propose a novel offline pretraining framework based on virtual constrained Markov decision process (CMDP) modeling. The virtual CMDP consists of reward and cost prediction module, initial-state distribution module and state transition module. Notably, we propose an evidence-aware conditional Gaussian Mixture Model (EA-CGMM) inference approach to mitigate data sparsity and distribution drift issues in state transition modeling. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of CMDP modeling and validate the safety and efficiency of the proposed pretraining framework. Specifically, compared with non-pretrained baseline, the agent pretrained through our proposed framework achieves twice the initial EE and maintains a low delay constraint violation rate of $1\%$, while ultimately converging to an EE that is $4.7\%$ higher with a $50\%$ reduction in exploration steps. Additionally, our proposed pretraining framework implementation exhibits comparable performance to the SOTA diffusion model-based implementation, while achieving a $14$-fold reduction in computational complexity.

cs.IT

Predicting Dynamics of Ultra-Large Complex Systems by Inferring Governing Equations

Predicting the behavior of ultra-large complex systems, from climate to biological and technological networks, is a central unsolved challenge. Existing approaches face a fundamental trade-off: equation discovery methods provide interpretability but fail to scale, while neural networks scale but operate as black boxes and often lose reliability over long times. Here, we introduce the Sparse Identification Graph Neural Network, a framework that overcome this divide by allowing to infer the governing equations of large networked systems from data. By defining symbolic discovery as edge-level information, SIGN decouples the scalability of sparse identification from network size, enabling efficient equation discovery even in large systems. SIGN allows to study networks with over 100,000 nodes while remaining robust to noise, sparse sampling, and missing data. Across diverse benchmark systems, including coupled chaotic oscillators, neural dynamics, and epidemic spreading, it recovers governing equations with high precision and sustains accurate long-term predictions. Applied to a data set of time series of temperature measurements in 71,987 sea surface positions, SIGN identifies a compact predictive network model and captures large-scale sea surface temperature conditions up to two years in advance. By enabling equation discovery at previously inaccessible scales, SIGN opens a path toward interpretable and reliable prediction of real-world complex systems.

cs.LG

TFWaveFormer: Temporal-Frequency Collaborative Multi-level Wavelet Transformer for Dynamic Link Prediction

Dynamic link prediction plays a crucial role in diverse applications including social network analysis, communication forecasting, and financial modeling. While recent Transformer-based approaches have demonstrated promising results in temporal graph learning, their performance remains limited when capturing complex multi-scale temporal dynamics. In this paper, we propose TFWaveFormer, a novel Transformer architecture that integrates temporal-frequency analysis with multi-resolution wavelet decomposition to enhance dynamic link prediction. Our framework comprises three key components: (i) a temporal-frequency coordination mechanism that jointly models temporal and spectral representations, (ii) a learnable multi-resolution wavelet decomposition module that adaptively extracts multi-scale temporal patterns through parallel convolutions, replacing traditional iterative wavelet transforms, and (iii) a hybrid Transformer module that effectively fuses local wavelet features with global temporal dependencies. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that TFWaveFormer achieves state-of-the-art performance, outperforming existing Transformer-based and hybrid models by significant margins across multiple metrics. The superior performance of TFWaveFormer validates the effectiveness of combining temporal-frequency analysis with wavelet decomposition in capturing complex temporal dynamics for dynamic link prediction tasks.

cs.LG

CausalCompass: Evaluating the Robustness of Time-Series Causal Discovery in Misspecified Scenarios

Causal discovery from time series is a fundamental task in machine learning. However, its widespread adoption is hindered by a reliance on untestable causal assumptions and by the lack of robustness-oriented evaluation in existing benchmarks. To address these challenges, we propose CausalCompass, a flexible and extensible benchmark framework designed to assess the robustness of time-series causal discovery (TSCD) methods under violations of modeling assumptions. To demonstrate the practical utility of CausalCompass, we conduct extensive benchmarking of representative TSCD algorithms across eight assumption-violation scenarios. Our experimental results indicate that no single method consistently attains optimal performance across all settings. Nevertheless, the methods exhibiting superior overall performance across diverse scenarios are almost invariably deep learning-based approaches. We further provide hyperparameter sensitivity analyses to deepen the understanding of these findings. We additionally conduct ablation experiments to explain the strong performance of deep learning-based methods under assumption violations. We also find, somewhat surprisingly, that NTS-NOTEARS relies heavily on standardized preprocessing in practice, performing poorly in the vanilla setting but exhibiting strong performance after standardization. Finally, our work aims to provide a comprehensive and systematic evaluation of TSCD methods under assumption violations, thereby facilitating their broader adoption in real-world applications. The user-friendly implementation, documentation and datasets are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/CausalCompass-anonymous-5B4F/.

cs.LG

CoDCL: Counterfactual-Inspired Augmentation Contrastive Learning for Temporal Link Prediction in Social Networks

Temporal link prediction is crucial for rapidly growing social networks. Existing methods often overlook the underlying causal mechanisms that drive link formation, making it difficult for algorithms to adapt to complex structures that continuously evolve over time. To enable prediction models to adapt to complex temporal environments, they need to be robust to emerging structural changes. We propose a dynamic network learning framework CoDCL, which combines counterfactual-inspired augmentation with contrastive learning to address this deficiency. Furthermore, we devise a comprehensive strategy to generate high-quality counterfactual data, combining a dynamic treatments design with efficient structural neighborhood exploration to quantify the temporal changes in interaction patterns. Crucially, the entire CoDCL is designed as a plug-and-play universal module that can be seamlessly integrated into various existing temporal graph models without requiring architectural modifications. Extensive experiments conducted on multiple real-world datasets demonstrate that CoDCL significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in temporal link prediction, highlighting the effectiveness of integrating counterfactual-inspired data augmentation into dynamic representation learning.

cs.LG

CCMamba: Topologically-Informed Selective State-Space Networks on Combinatorial Complexes for Higher-Order Graph Learning

Topological deep learning has emerged as a powerful paradigm for modeling higher-order relational structures beyond pairwise interactions that standard graph neural networks fail to capture. While combinatorial complexes (CCs) offer a unified topological foundation for the higher-order graph learning, existing topological deep learning methods rely heavily on local message passing and attention mechanisms. These suffer from quadratic complexity and local neighborhood constraints, limiting their scalability and capacity for rank-aware, long-range dependency modeling. To overcome these challenges, we propose Combinatorial Complex Mamba (CCMamba), the first unified Mamba-based neural framework for learning on combinatorial complexes. CCMamba reformulates higher-order message passing as a selective state-space modeling problem by linearizing multi-rank incidence relations into structured, rank-aware sequences. This architecture enables adaptive, directional, and long-range information propagation in linear time bypassing the scalability bottlenecks of self-attention. Theoretically, we further establish that the expressive power of CCMamba is upper-bounded by the 1-dimensional combinatorial complex Weisfeiler-Lehman (1-CCWL) test. Extensive experiments across graph, hypergraph, and simplicial benchmarks demonstrate that CCMamba consistently outperforms existing methods while exhibiting superior scalability and remarkable robustness against over-smoothing in deep architectures.

cs.LG

DualHNIE: Dual-Channel Hypergraph Learning for Node Importance Estimation in Heterogeneous Knowledge Graphs

Estimating node importance in heterogeneous knowledge graphs is a fundamental problem underlying recommendation, search, and knowledge decision systems. However, most existing methods rely on pairwise message passing mechanisms that fail to capture higher-order interactions induced by meta-relational structures. Furthermore, structural topology and semantic attributes are typically entangled within a unified embedding space, which obscures their distinct inductive biases and limits the discriminative capacity of learned importance representations. To address these limitations, we propose DualHNIE, a principled dual-channel hypergraph learning framework for node importance estimation. DualHNIE first constructs a higher-order knowledge graph by forming typed hyperedges from meta-path sequences, enabling explicit modeling of higher-order relational patterns. It then introduces two complementary encoders: a structure-aware hypergraph attention network that performs locally normalized aggregation over meta-path--induced hyperedges to capture localized structural dependencies, and a sparse--chunked hypergraph transformer that captures global semantic interactions while maintaining scalable computation. We further design a contrastive alignment mechanism with auxiliary supervision, ensuring cross-view consistency while preserving modality-specific representation. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate that DualHNIE outperforms state-of-the-art methods, validating the effectiveness of explicit high-order modeling and disentangled dual-channel representation learning for heterogeneous knowledge graphs. Code and datasets are available\footnote[1]{https://github.com/jiawenchen10/DualHNIE}.

cs.AI

Distributed scalable coupled policy algorithm for networked multi-agent reinforcement learning

This paper studies networked multi-agent reinforcement learning (NMARL) with interdependent rewards and coupled policies. In this setting, each agent's reward depends on its own state-action pair as well as those of its direct neighbors, and each agent's policy is parameterized by its local parameters together with those of its $\kappa_{p}$-hop neighbors, with $\kappa_{p}\geq 1$ denoting the coupled radius. The objective of the agents is to collaboratively optimize their policies to maximize the discounted average cumulative reward. To address the challenge of interdependent policies in collaborative optimization, we introduce a novel concept termed the neighbors' averaged $Q$-function and derive a new expression for the coupled policy gradient. Based on these theoretical foundations, we develop a distributed scalable coupled policy (DSCP) algorithm, where each agent relies only on the state-action pairs of its $\kappa_{p}$-hop neighbors and the rewards of its $(\kappa_{p}+1)$-hop neighbors. Specially, in the DSCP algorithm, we employ a geometric 2-horizon sampling method that does not require storing a full $Q$-table to obtain an unbiased estimate of the coupled policy gradient. Moreover, each agent interacts exclusively with its direct neighbors to obtain accurate policy parameters, while maintaining local estimates of other agents' parameters to execute its local policy and collect samples for optimization. These estimates and policy parameters are updated via a push-sum protocol, enabling distributed coordination of policy updates across the network. We prove that the joint policy produced by the proposed algorithm converges to a first-order stationary point of the objective function. Finally, the effectiveness of DSCP algorithm is demonstrated through simulations in a robot path planning environment, showing clear improvement over state-of-the-art methods.

cs.MA