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Main Authors: Lei, Songxin, Ma, Chunming, Wen, Haomin, Li, Yexin, Chen, Lizhenghe, Yang, Qianyu, Tsung, Fugee, Chen, Lei, Ruan, Sijie, Liang, Yuxuan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.12913
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author Lei, Songxin
Ma, Chunming
Wen, Haomin
Li, Yexin
Chen, Lizhenghe
Yang, Qianyu
Tsung, Fugee
Chen, Lei
Ruan, Sijie
Liang, Yuxuan
author_facet Lei, Songxin
Ma, Chunming
Wen, Haomin
Li, Yexin
Chen, Lizhenghe
Yang, Qianyu
Tsung, Fugee
Chen, Lei
Ruan, Sijie
Liang, Yuxuan
contents Cooperative air-ground delivery has emerged as a promising logistics paradigm by leveraging the complementary strengths of UAVs and ground carriers. However, effective dispatching in such heterogeneous systems faces two critical challenges: i) the heterogeneity between flight and road dynamics, ii) the scalability bottleneck raised by the exponential decision variables in large-scale fleets. To address these challenges, we propose HRL4AG, a Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning framework for cooperative Air-Ground delivery. Specifically, HRL4AG employs a high-level manager to tackle the scalability bottleneck by decomposing the joint action space, and mode-specific workers that encode distinct flight and road dynamics to address the heterogeneity. Furthermore, a novel internal reward mechanism is designed to guide the hierarchical policy learning, addressing the credit assignment problem in sparse-reward settings. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets and an evaluation platform demonstrate that HRL4AG significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, improving the delivery success rate by up to 26% while achieving an 80-fold increase in computational efficiency.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_12913
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for Cooperative Air-Ground Delivery in Urban System
Lei, Songxin
Ma, Chunming
Wen, Haomin
Li, Yexin
Chen, Lizhenghe
Yang, Qianyu
Tsung, Fugee
Chen, Lei
Ruan, Sijie
Liang, Yuxuan
Computers and Society
Cooperative air-ground delivery has emerged as a promising logistics paradigm by leveraging the complementary strengths of UAVs and ground carriers. However, effective dispatching in such heterogeneous systems faces two critical challenges: i) the heterogeneity between flight and road dynamics, ii) the scalability bottleneck raised by the exponential decision variables in large-scale fleets. To address these challenges, we propose HRL4AG, a Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning framework for cooperative Air-Ground delivery. Specifically, HRL4AG employs a high-level manager to tackle the scalability bottleneck by decomposing the joint action space, and mode-specific workers that encode distinct flight and road dynamics to address the heterogeneity. Furthermore, a novel internal reward mechanism is designed to guide the hierarchical policy learning, addressing the credit assignment problem in sparse-reward settings. Extensive experiments on two real-world datasets and an evaluation platform demonstrate that HRL4AG significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, improving the delivery success rate by up to 26% while achieving an 80-fold increase in computational efficiency.
title Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for Cooperative Air-Ground Delivery in Urban System
topic Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.12913