arXiv subjects

Yongheng Liang

Publications and source records attributed to Yongheng Liang.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

CMRL: Collision-Aware and Memory-Enhanced Reinforcement Learning for UAV Navigation in Multi-Scale Obstacle Environments

In obstacle avoidance navigation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), variations in obstacle scale have received less attention than obstacle number or density. Existing methods typically extract purely geometric features from single-frame depth observations. Such representations tend to neglect small obstacles and lose spatial context under occlusions caused by large obstacles, leading to noticeable degradation in environments with multi-scale obstacles. To address this issue, we propose CMRL, a Collision-aware and Memory-enhanced Reinforcement Learning framework for UAV navigation. The collision-aware latent representation encodes risk-sensitive depth cues to preserve fine-grained obstacle structures, thereby improving sensitivity to small obstacles. The temporal memory module integrates observations across frames, mitigating partial observability caused by large-obstacle occlusions. We evaluate CMRL with multi-scale obstacles, including ultra-small and extra-large obstacle settings. Results show that CMRL outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across all scales, with success rate gains of 0.47 and 0.29 in the ultra-small and extra-large settings, respectively. More importantly, CMRL achieves reliable navigation in cluttered outdoor environments. The code is available at https://honghongdev.github.io/camerl/

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

PACT: Phenotype-Aware Contrastive Team Representation for Multi-Phenotype Grouped Ad Hoc Teamwork

Learning to collaborate with various unfamiliar teammates poses a great challenge in the domain of multi-agent systems. Existing ad hoc teamwork methods typically drive controlled agents to collaborate with a group of teammates exhibiting a single coordination phenotype shaped by the same reward function. However, in real-world applications, controlled agents should collaborate with unfamiliar teammates of diverse coordination phenotypes among groups that have never worked together. We formalize this as the Multi-Phenotype Grouped Ad Hoc Teamwork (MPG-AHT) problem, and propose Phenotype-Aware Contrastive Team Representation (PACT) to solve this problem. PACT is empowered with phenotype-aware contrastive learning and relational reasoning to accurately distinguish coordination phenotypes and capture inter-agent interactions. Extensive experiments on multi-phenotype collaboration tasks show that PACT outperforms state-of-the-art baselines on average, achieving a mean 21.0% gain in out-of-distribution evaluation and a mean 36.5% gain in sample efficiency.

cs.MA↗

arXiv2026

Distilling LLM Reasoning into an Interpretable Policy Tree for Human-AI Collaboration

Constructing efficient and reliable policies to assist humans is indispensable for human-AI collaboration. Existing methods mainly follow two lines of work. Most prior work relies on multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) to learn black-box policies, which limits interpretability and raises safety concerns. Recent methods query large language models (LLMs) at each decision step, causing slow responses and high inference costs. We propose Collaboration Policy Tree (Co-pi-tree), a closed-loop method that learns an executable policy tree consisting of a partner-behavior prediction tree and an agent-action selection tree. Co-pi-tree constructs a policy by distilling LLM reasoning into policy tree code. It then evaluates the policy through partner interaction, obtains feedback, and uses natural language to summarize the interaction feedback to improve problematic branches. Experiments in Overcooked-AI show that Co-pi-tree improves average reward by 35.4% over the baseline average, while reducing the number of LLM queries by 77.7% and test-time latency by 97.1%. Project page: https://beiwenzhang.github.io/Co-pi-tree/

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

Asynchronous Credit Assignment for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning

Credit assignment is a critical problem in multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL), aiming to identify agents' marginal contributions for optimizing cooperative policies. Current credit assignment methods typically assume synchronous decision-making among agents. However, many real-world scenarios require agents to act asynchronously without waiting for others. This asynchrony introduces conditional dependencies between actions, which pose great challenges to current methods. To address this issue, we propose an asynchronous credit assignment framework, incorporating a Virtual Synchrony Proxy (VSP) mechanism and a Multiplicative Value Decomposition (MVD) algorithm. VSP enables physically asynchronous actions to be virtually synchronized during credit assignment. We theoretically prove that VSP preserves both task equilibrium and algorithm convergence. Furthermore, MVD leverages multiplicative interactions to effectively model dependencies among asynchronous actions, offering theoretical advantages in handling asynchronous tasks. Extensive experiments show that our framework consistently outperforms state-of-the-art MARL methods on challenging tasks while providing improved interpretability for asynchronous cooperation.

cs.MA↗