Prépublications

Modern AI systems often comprise multiple learnable components that can be naturally organized as graphs. A central challenge is the end-to-end training of such systems without restrictive architectural or training assumptions. Such tasks fit the theory and approaches of the collaborative Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) field. We introduce Reinforcement Networks, a general framework for MARL that organizes agents as vertices in a directed acyclic graph (DAG). This structure extends hierarchical RL to arbitrary DAGs, enabling flexible credit assignment and scalable coordination while avoiding strict topologies, fully centralized training, and other limitations of current approaches. We formalize training and inference methods for the Reinforcement Networks framework and connect it to the LevelEnv concept to support reproducible construction, training, and evaluation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on several collaborative MARL setups by developing several Reinforcement Networks models that achieve improved performance over standard MARL baselines. Beyond empirical gains, Reinforcement Networks unify hierarchical, modular, and graph-structured views of MARL, opening a principled path toward designing and training complex multi-agent systems. We conclude with theoretical and practical directions - richer graph morphologies, compositional curricula, and graph-aware exploration. That positions Reinforcement Networks as a foundation for a new line of research in scalable, structured MARL.

Topic modelling is fundamentally a soft clustering problem (of known objects – documents, over unknown clusters – topics). That is, the task is incorrectly posed. In particular, the topic models are unstable and incomplete. All this leads to the fact that the process of finding a good topic model (repeated hyperparameter selection, model training, and topic quality assessment) can be particularly long and labor-intensive. We aim to simplify the process, to make it more deterministic and provable. To this end, we present a method for iterative training of a topic model. The essence of the method is that a series of related topic models are trained so that each subsequent model is at least as good as the previous one, i.e., that it retains all the good topics found earlier. The connection between the models is achieved by additive regularization. The result of this iterative training is the last topic model in the series, which we call the iteratively updated additively regularized topic model (ITAR). Experiments conducted on several collections of natural language texts show that the proposed ITAR model performs better than other popular topic models (LDA, ARTM, BERTopic), its topics are diverse, and its perplexity (ability to "explain" the underlying data) is moderate.

With an appendix by Sean Cotner, Joshua M. Lansky, and Loren Spice.

With an appendix by Sean Cotner. Per the arXiv v2 comment, the appendix allows the paper's Theorem 2.5 to be generalized.

Not intended for publication.

Recommended for publication at the Journal of Algebraic Geometry; under review.