Archives AI News

arXiv:2508.20723v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Ride-pooling systems, to succeed, must provide an attractive service, namely compensate perceived costs with an appealing price. However, because of a strong heterogeneity in a value-of-time, each traveller has his own acceptable price, unknown to the operator. Here, we show that individual acceptance levels can be learned by the operator (over $90%$ accuracy for pooled travellers in $10$ days) to optimise personalised fares. We propose an adaptive pricing policy, where every day the operator constructs an offer that progressively meets travellers' expectations and attracts a growing demand. Our results suggest that operators, by learning behavioural traits of individual travellers, may improve performance not only for travellers (increased utility) but also for themselves (increased profit). Moreover, such knowledge allows the operator to remove inefficient pooled rides and focus on attractive and profitable combinations.

arXiv:2508.20294v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Real-world reinforcement learning demands adaptation to unseen environmental conditions without costly retraining. Contextual Markov Decision Processes (cMDP) model this challenge, but existing methods often require explicit context variables (e.g., friction, gravity), limiting their use when contexts are latent or hard to measure. We introduce Dynamics-Aligned Latent Imagination (DALI), a framework integrated within the Dreamer architecture that infers latent context representations from agent-environment interactions. By training a self-supervised encoder to predict forward dynamics, DALI generates actionable representations conditioning the world model and policy, bridging perception and control. We theoretically prove this encoder is essential for efficient context inference and robust generalization. DALI's latent space enables counterfactual consistency: Perturbing a gravity-encoding dimension alters imagined rollouts in physically plausible ways. On challenging cMDP benchmarks, DALI achieves significant gains over context-unaware baselines, often surpassing context-aware baselines in extrapolation tasks, enabling zero-shot generalization to unseen contextual variations.

arXiv:2508.20914v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recently, deep representation learning has shown strong performance in multiple audio tasks. However, its use for learning spatial representations from multichannel audio is underexplored. We investigate the use of a pretraining stage based on feature distillation to learn a robust spatial representation of binaural speech without the need for data labels. In this framework, spatial features are computed from clean binaural speech samples to form prediction labels. These clean features are then predicted from corresponding augmented speech using a neural network. After pretraining, we throw away the spatial feature predictor and use the learned encoder weights to initialize a DoA estimation model which we fine-tune for DoA estimation. Our experiments demonstrate that the pretrained models show improved performance in noisy and reverberant environments after fine-tuning for direction-of-arrival estimation, when compared to fully supervised models and classic signal processing methods.

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