Reinforcement Learning in Wearable Robotic Systems for Orthopedic Rehabilitation: An Elbow-Focused Narrative Review

Understanding cyclist route choice: A hierarchical adversarial inverse reinforcement learning approach to behavioral profiling

Antifragile Intelligence: A Triadic Framework for AI Governance, Digital Forensics, and Sovereignty in Emerging Economies

In an era defined by extreme Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity (VUCA), artificial intelligence (AI) governance must transcend passive compliance checklists to become an embedded, adaptive socio-technical architecture. This paper proposes a triadic synthesis of Reinforcement Learning (RL), Generative AI (GenAI), and Cybersecurity, organized within a Seven-Layer Integrated Architecture spanning perception, cognition, adaptation, generation, protection, embodiment, and governance. Central to the framework is a formal isomorphism between Predictive Processing (PP) and Reinforcement Learning, in which both systems minimize prediction error through Bayesian updating (Friston, 2010; Friston et al., 2009). This isomorphism is operationalized through a safety-constrained objective function that treats variational free energy as a regularizer, mitigating the class of failures known as “reward hacking” (Laidlaw et al., 2025; Shihab et al., 2025; Skalse et al., 2022). Illustrative comparison of the Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic (A3C) algorithm against legacy Q-Learning suggests materially faster and more stable policy convergence under the resource-constrained, high-packet-loss conditions typical of emerging economies. By integrating the sub-Saharan African relational philosophy of Ubuntu/Unhu with global AI4People principles (Floridi et al., 2018; Van Norren, 2023; Yilma, 2025), the framework embeds explicit digital forensics workflows and blockchain-anchored chain-of-custody protocols (Atlam et al., 2024; Patil et al., 2024). The framework is further extended and empirically grounded through a twentyproject, four-cluster Edge-AI case portfolio spanning domestic safety, environmental intelligence, sustainable energy and agriculture, and healthcare accessibility in the Indian context, demonstrating the triadic architecture’s applicability from enterprise-scale governance to grassroots micro, small, and medium enterprise (MSME) innovation. This synthesis serves as a blueprint for organizations in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and India to assert digital sovereignty, ensuring that autonomous systems are antifragile, context-sensitive, and designed for communal flourishing rather than extractive optimization.

AgentCreditBench: A Conformance-Test Suite for Turn-Level Credit Estimators

AgentCreditBench is a CPU-first conformance-test suite for turn-level credit assignment in agentic reinforcement learning. It compares GRPO, RLOO, GAE, GiGPO, Monte Carlo, and custom estimator outputs with exact policy advantages on tiny finite-horizon Markov decision processes, and separately evaluates the induced policy-gradient signal.

Antifragile Intelligence: A Triadic Framework for AI Governance, Digital Forensics, and Sovereignty in Emerging Economies

In an era defined by extreme Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity (VUCA), artificial intelligence (AI) governance must transcend passive compliance checklists to become an embedded, adaptive socio-technical architecture. This paper proposes a triadic synthesis of Reinforcement Learning (RL), Generative AI (GenAI), and Cybersecurity, organized within a Seven-Layer Integrated Architecture spanning perception, cognition, adaptation, generation, protection, embodiment, and governance. Central to the framework is a formal isomorphism between Predictive Processing (PP) and Reinforcement Learning, in which both systems minimize prediction error through Bayesian updating (Friston, 2010; Friston et al., 2009). This isomorphism is operationalized through a safety-constrained objective function that treats variational free energy as a regularizer, mitigating the class of failures known as “reward hacking” (Laidlaw et al., 2025; Shihab et al., 2025; Skalse et al., 2022). Illustrative comparison of the Asynchronous Advantage Actor-Critic (A3C) algorithm against legacy Q-Learning suggests materially faster and more stable policy convergence under the resource-constrained, high-packet-loss conditions typical of emerging economies. By integrating the sub-Saharan African relational philosophy of Ubuntu/Unhu with global AI4People principles (Floridi et al., 2018; Van Norren, 2023; Yilma, 2025), the framework embeds explicit digital forensics workflows and blockchain-anchored chain-of-custody protocols (Atlam et al., 2024; Patil et al., 2024). The framework is further extended and empirically grounded through a twentyproject, four-cluster Edge-AI case portfolio spanning domestic safety, environmental intelligence, sustainable energy and agriculture, and healthcare accessibility in the Indian context, demonstrating the triadic architecture’s applicability from enterprise-scale governance to grassroots micro, small, and medium enterprise (MSME) innovation. This synthesis serves as a blueprint for organizations in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and India to assert digital sovereignty, ensuring that autonomous systems are antifragile, context-sensitive, and designed for communal flourishing rather than extractive optimization.

PBFT-CG-MARL

PBFT-CG-MAPPO is a consensus-conditioned multi-agent reinforcement learning framework that embeds a Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) three-phase commit protocol inside the CTDE-MAPPO training loop as an additive consensus loss with zero initialization, complemented by an entropy floor that prevents premature policy collapse. Across three cooperative environments (MPE spread, SMAClite 5m_vs_6m, VMAS UAV coverage) with five seeds each, PBFT-CG-MAPPO reduces cross-seed return variance by 1.9–47.4× compared to MAPPO and produces zero catastrophic seeds. Under Byzantine injection (f = 1), the PBFT quorum maintains stable consensus rates against random and adversarial attacks, where disabling the consensus layer causes up to 93% return degradation—demonstrating that consensus provides critical protection under active attacks while remaining non-interfering in clean environments. The experimental results yield three design principles for safe consensus conditioning in MARL: replace only dissenting actions (never overwrite consenting agents), condition via additive loss with zero initialization, and enforce an entropy floor. The framework transfers from 4-agent cooperative navigation to 12-agent permafrost monitoring without modification, scaling the f < n/3 tolerance bound automatically. The codebase includes six algorithm baselines (MAPPO, MADDPG, QMIX, CommNet, TarMAC), three Byzantine attack types, ablation studies, cross-environment evaluation, and publication-quality figure generation scripts.

Residual RL on a PSO-tuned Fuzzy Controller for Mobile Robot Trajectory Tracking

This paper presents a two-wheeled mobile robot trajectory-tracking controller combining a particle swarm optimization (PSO)-tuned fuzzy logic controller (FLC) with a residual reinforcement learning (RL) correction layer.PSO tuning reduces the global distance error by 35% and the integral absolute error by 44% over the initial FLC.The residual RL layer further reduces the global distance error by approximately 2.3% and improves cornering-region tracking by 3.9% in RMSE, 4.7% in IAE, and 5.2% in peak distance error.The proposed controller also reduces the global distance error by 41% and 66% relative to independently tuned PID and fuzzy-PID baselines.Trained across four trajectory families with a held-out test split, the generalized agent reduces the average test distance error by 18% relative to the tuned FLC baseline.These results show that a lightweight residual correction improves both accuracy and generalization while preserving the fuzzy controller's interpretability.