English

Path Integral Networks: End-to-End Differentiable Optimal Control

Artificial Intelligence 2017-06-30 v1 Systems and Control

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce Path Integral Networks (PI-Net), a recurrent network representation of the Path Integral optimal control algorithm. The network includes both system dynamics and cost models, used for optimal control based planning. PI-Net is fully differentiable, learning both dynamics and cost models end-to-end by back-propagation and stochastic gradient descent. Because of this, PI-Net can learn to plan. PI-Net has several advantages: it can generalize to unseen states thanks to planning, it can be applied to continuous control tasks, and it allows for a wide variety learning schemes, including imitation and reinforcement learning. Preliminary experiment results show that PI-Net, trained by imitation learning, can mimic control demonstrations for two simulated problems; a linear system and a pendulum swing-up problem. We also show that PI-Net is able to learn dynamics and cost models latent in the demonstrations.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1706.09597,
  title  = {Path Integral Networks: End-to-End Differentiable Optimal Control},
  author = {Masashi Okada and Luca Rigazio and Takenobu Aoshima},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.09597},
  year   = {2017}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-22T20:32:59.139Z