Communication-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control

Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC) plays a pivotal role in enhancing traffic efficiency and safety in Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAVs). Reinforcement Learning (RL) has proven effective in optimizing complex decision-making processes in CACC, leading to improved system performance and adaptability. Among RL approaches, Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) has shown remarkable potential by enabling coordinated actions among multiple CAVs through Centralized Training with Decentralized Execution (CTDE). However, MARL often faces scalability issues, particularly when CACC vehicles suddenly join or leave the platoon, resulting in performance degradation. To address these challenges, we propose Communication-Aware Reinforcement Learning (CA-RL). CA-RL includes a communication-aware module that extracts and compresses vehicle communication information through forward and backward information transmission modules. This enables efficient cyclic information propagation within the CACC traffic flow, ensuring policy consistency and mitigating the scalability problems of MARL in CACC. Experimental results demonstrate that CA-RL significantly outperforms baseline methods in various traffic scenarios, achieving superior scalability, robustness, and overall system performance while maintaining reliable performance despite changes in the number of participating vehicles.

LiveQA: A Question Answering Dataset over Sports Live

In this paper, we introduce LiveQA, a new question answering dataset constructed from play-by-play live broadcast. It contains 117k multiple-choice questions written by human commentators for over 1,670 NBA games, which are collected from the Chinese Hupu (https://nba.hupu.com/games) website. Derived from the characteristics of sports games, LiveQA can potentially test the reasoning ability across timeline-based live broadcasts, which is challenging compared to the existing datasets. In LiveQA, the questions require understanding the timeline, tracking events or doing mathematical computations. Our preliminary experiments show that the dataset introduces a challenging problem for question answering models, and a strong baseline model only achieves the accuracy of 53.1\% and cannot beat the dominant option rule. We release the code and data of this paper for future research.