AIGP: An LLM-Based Framework for Long-Term Value Alignment in E-Commerce Pricing

Traditional dynamic pricing models in large-scale e-commerce suffer from limited interpretability, poor utilization of unstructured information, and misalignment with long-term business objectives such as cumulative Gross Merchandise Value (GMV), Return on Investment (ROI) and milestone achievement. We propose AIGP, a novel framework that leverages a Large Language Model (LLM) prompted with domain knowledge, structured data and textual context to make interpretable, knowledge-aware pricing decisions. For efficient deployment while maintaining high-quality outputs, we employ supervised fine-tuning for knowledge distillation. Central to AIGP is the Long-Term Value Estimator (LTVE), trained via offline reinforcement learning on historical data, which serves as a reward model to score candidate pricing actions and select preference pairs for Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), thereby aligning the pricing policy with long-term business objectives. Extensive offline evaluations and large-scale online A/B tests on Tao Factory demonstrate that AIGP achieves significant improvements: +13.21% in GMV, +7.59% in ROI, and +8.20% in milestone achievement rate over 14 days compared to the production baseline, while simultaneously providing interpretable and transparent pricing rationales.

Stagnant Neuron: Towards Understanding the Plasticity Loss in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Value Factorization Methods

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) value factorization methods can suffer from a loss of plasticity, gradually failing to adapt when transferring to new task instances. We trace this issue to stagnant neurons, units whose gradient updates become negligibly small relative to their weights, thereby hindering learning. While existing plasticity injection methods exist, they prove ineffective for such neurons. To address this, we propose Knowledge-retentive Neuron-level PlastIcity Focusing InjEction (KNIFE), a novel method that directly targets stagnant neurons. KNIFE replaces each stagnant neuron with a composite unit comprising three specialized components: a frozen knowledge neuron to preserve acquired knowledge, a re-initialized active neuron to restore learning capacity, and a compensation neuron to ensure the combined output matches the original, thus maintaining previous learned cooperation knowledge. Extensive experiments on SMACv2, predator-prey, and matrix games demonstrate that KNIFE significantly outperforms state-of-the-art plasticity injection methods.

RiskQ: Risk-sensitive Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Value Factorization

Multi-agent systems are characterized by environmental uncertainty, varying policies of agents, and partial observability, which result in significant risks. In the context of Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL), learning coordinated and decentralized policies that are sensitive to risk is challenging. To formulate the coordination requirements in risk-sensitive MARL, we introduce the Risk-sensitive Individual-Global-Max (RIGM) principle as a generalization of the Individual-Global-Max (IGM) and Distributional IGM (DIGM) principles. This principle requires that the collection of risk-sensitive action selections of each agent should be equivalent to the risk-sensitive action selection of the central policy. Current MARL value factorization methods do not satisfy the RIGM principle for common risk metrics such as the Value at Risk (VaR) metric or distorted risk measurements. Therefore, we propose RiskQ to address this limitation, which models the joint return distribution by modeling quantiles of it as weighted quantile mixtures of per-agent return distribution utilities. RiskQ satisfies the RIGM principle for the VaR and distorted risk metrics. We show that RiskQ can obtain promising performance through extensive experiments. The source code of RiskQ is available in https://github.com/xmu-rl-3dv/RiskQ.