We study autonomous pickup-and-delivery routing problems in which internal adversarial agents spoof their locations to attract request assignments and then intentionally leave those requests unserviced. Such attacks disrupt the centralized scheduler, causing delays, cancellations, and routing instability. A routing policy is stable if its cost remains uniformly bounded over time. Existing policy-cost formulations typically characterize cost through the work required to service outstanding requests. Such a formulation requires analyzing agent-specific route execution and is therefore not well suited to adversarial settings, where non-cooperative agents may arbitrarily deviate from assigned routes or fail to service requests altogether. We introduce a new policy-cost formulation based only on observable system signals, namely the numbers of outstanding and canceled requests. Under bounded arrivals and finite request time windows, we show that stability under this formulation is equivalent to keeping the expected cumulative number of canceled requests uniformly bounded over time, an important operational metric in both cooperative and adversarial settings. We also extend cooperative fleet-sizing guarantees to finite time-window settings and highlight that request time windows are not merely a modeling detail, but are essential for ruling out \emph{degenerate stability}, a regime in which policies are certified as stable despite undesirable large request backlogs.
Self-triggered reinforcement learning control (RL-STC) learns the sparsest control schedule that preserves Lyapunov-decreasing stability under a Run-Time Assurance (RTA) override. We invert this: an adversarial RL agent learns the sparsest jamming or Denial-of-Service (DoS) schedule that destabilizes the closed loop, with a Lyapunov-increase admissibility predicate mirroring the defender's safety certificate. We prove a plant-property lower bound on the minimum jam count required for an immediate hold-last medium-access-control adversary to force a crash against a self-triggered controller (STC) satisfying a Lyapunov contract, and recover a certificate-level analog of the consecutive-grouping optimality of prior count-budget DoS scheduling as a corollary. This extends the DoS-scheduling count-budget analysis from periodic and linear-time-invariant to STC controllers. Empirically, we train against four fixed defenders per plant (one Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) and three RL-STC) on Pendulum, CartPole, and Quadrotor2D. The learned adversary is the only adversary that crashes every defender on every plant at 100%: greedy misses Quadrotor2D LQR on 42% of episodes and periodic misses Pendulum LQR on 97%. On jam-time-per-failure it beats baselines by up to 2.8×, and shows its widest absolute margin on Quadrotor2D LQR. Robustness ablations show that Gaussian observation noise exceeding the initial-state magnitude and position-only observation both preserve 100% failure rate and keep the learned adversary strictly ahead of both baselines on jam-time-per-failure.
Adam Haroon, Erick J. Rodríguez-Seda, Tristan Schuler +1
Web agents observe a browser through text, pixels, or both, and the choice is usually fixed once for all tasks. We measure six observation modes across eight site-model combinations (cells) on VisualWebArena and WebArena and ask what choosing per task would buy. The modes are complementary: each solves tasks the others miss, they fail in structurally different ways, and the best choice reverses between task sets. The obvious prize, an oracle that picks a winning mode for every task, looks large but is inflated by run-to-run noise: rerunning the same mode on the same tasks changes 12-14% of outcomes, so a second run of a mode already in hand gains about as much as adding a new one. What survives is a cost bound: sending only the tasks no mode solves to the cheapest mode cuts cost by 9.5-30.6% in 8 of 8 cells at unchanged success. We then test five routing policies (picking the mode, deciding when to spend on the strong mode, a zero-cost rule read off the task text, a confidence cascade, and pooled cost tiers), and none robustly beats simply fixing one well-chosen mode; the one exception is a fragile result in our sparsest cell. The central obstruction is that routing supervision is produced at the agent's success rate: the weaker the agent, the fewer labels a router gets, exactly where routing would be most valuable. This limit belongs to today's agents rather than to routing itself. Label supply and routing opportunity rise together (correlation 0.95 across cells), so a stronger agent can overturn the result, and we report the rerun noise bands and the full measurement protocol.
In dynamic urban logistics, the stochastic emergence of time-sensitive tasks poses a significant optimality challenge for heterogeneous AAVs logistics task allocation. To address this problem, a reinforcement learning enhanced overlapping coalition formation game approach is proposed. A dynamic task allocation model is established, where global optimality is mathematically quantified by a generalized logistics cost coupling service quality and resource consumption. To deal with the time-varying task sets induced by stochastic order arrivals, a transformer-based soft actor-critic network is designed. By leveraging multi-head self-attention to encode variable-length logistics states and capture task-wise spatiotemporal dependencies, the learned policy adaptively guides coalition updates, replacing heuristic rules in the overlapping coalition formation game. On this basis, heterogeneous AAVs can form more efficient overlapping coalitions for dynamic logistics tasks. The resulting coalition formation process is proven to constitute an exact potential game, which guarantees convergence to a Nash-stable equilibrium within a finite number of iterations. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the proposed algorithm effectively improves the optimality of task allocation under the generalized logistics cost criterion. In a scenario with 32 AAVs and 80 tasks, our algorithm achieves a 39.76% cost reduction compared with the heuristic OCF baseline. Indoor flight experiments further validate its practicality.