Papers for

logistics optimization teams

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Homomorphic advantage operator stabilizes encrypted reinforcement learning

Homomorphic Advantage Operator: Stabilizing Reinforcement Learning Under Fully Homomorphic Encryption Constraints

Abstract: Privacy-preserving machine learning presents significant deployment challenges on the cloud for intelligent systems with confidential data. Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE) offers a compelling solution for secure computation, preserving data confidentiality of cloud computations. However, applying FHE to reinforcement learning (RL) requires replacing non-linear operations with polynomial approximations, which diverge catastrophically due to a unique recursive error phenomenon known as the Bellman drift. This article introduces the Homomorphic Advantage Operator (HAO), a stabilization framework designed to prevent polynomial approximation divergence in FHE-based deep RL. HAO adapts the zero-mean centering projection from advantage-based value estimation directly to temporal-difference (TD) targets. This linear projection annihilates the uniform state-value baseline that drives the Bellman drift, maintaining per-state action rankings while requiring zero additional non-linear multiplicative depth and avoiding expensive ciphertext bootstrapping. The proposed HAO framework was evaluated using a three-tier experimental methodology, including a tabular Markov Decision Process (MDP), an encrypted CartPole environment using real CKKS cryptographic operations, and a 20-node logistics routing benchmark with dense continuous features. The results demonstrate that the proposed HAO strictly bounds network pre-activations within the safe polynomial approximation domain. The proposed HAO RL agents achieved 0% boundary breaches across all random seeds used, whereas regularization alone (L2 weight decay and gradient clipping) breached the bound on 3 of 5 seeds and the unstabilized baseline did so in 83.8% of episodes. Finally, HAO agents improve optimal policy accuracy by 18.0 percentage points in tabular domains and remain stable when DP-SGD-style Gaussian noise is added to the clipped gradients.

Thu 1 OctArtificial IntelligenceCryptography and Security
The gist
Reinforcement learning uses trial and error to teach computers how to make decisions, but keeping the data private during this process is hard. The paper shows that applying fully homomorphic encryption, which lets computers work on encrypted data, causes errors that make learning unstable. The researchers created a new method called the Homomorphic Advantage Operator that stops these errors from growing, keeping the learning process stable and accurate. They tested this method in different scenarios and found it worked well, even when extra noise was added to the learning.
Open → 2610.02074v1

Trajectory representation learning improved by closed loop feedback method

REFINE: Trajectory Representation Learning via Closed-Loop Transcription -- Extended Version

Abstract: Trajectory representation learning underpins a wide range of trajectory analytics tasks; however, most existing self-supervised approaches, whether discriminative or generative, adopt an open-loop paradigm, relying on fixed data augmentations or random masking without feedback, which limits their ability to generalize and scale. We propose REFINE, a simple yet effective Representation lEarning Framework vIa closed-loop traNscription rEfinement for trajectory data. Drawing upon feedback control theory, REFINE tightly couples road-network-aware generative reconstruction with feedback-driven contrastive learning, enabling the model to capture fine-grained local movement semantics and global spatio-temporal dependencies without manually designed augmentation views. We further provide a control-theoretic analysis that establishes convergence guarantees for the proposed closed-loop optimization. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate that REFINE consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across multiple downstream tasks while remaining computationally efficient and scalable. This paper is an extended version of REFINE: Trajectory Representation Learning via Closed-Loop Transcription, to appear in KDD 2026.

Mon 7 SeptMachine LearningArtificial Intelligence
The gist
Understanding and analyzing movement paths, like how vehicles travel on roads, is important but challenging. The authors propose REFINE, a new approach that improves how these movement paths are learned by using a feedback loop inspired by control theory. This method helps the model better understand both local details and overall patterns without relying on fixed, manual data tweaks. Experiments show REFINE works better than previous methods on real-world movement data while being efficient and scalable.
Open → 2609.07206v1