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Related papers: Towards Safe Reinforcement Learning Using NMPC and…

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We propose policy gradient algorithms for solving a risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) problem in on-policy as well as off-policy settings. We consider episodic Markov decision processes, and model the risk using the broad class of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-06-25 Nithia Vijayan , Prashanth L. A

Solving partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) remains a fundamental challenge in reinforcement learning (RL), primarily due to the curse of dimensionality induced by the non-stationarity of optimal policies. In this work,…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2025-10-20 Semih Cayci , Atilla Eryilmaz

We study robust reinforcement learning (RL) with the goal of determining a well-performing policy that is robust against model mismatch between the training simulator and the testing environment. Previous policy-based robust RL algorithms…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-12 Ruida Zhou , Tao Liu , Min Cheng , Dileep Kalathil , P. R. Kumar , Chao Tian

Model-based policy optimization is a well-established framework for designing reliable and high-performance controllers across a wide range of control applications. Recently, this approach has been extended to model predictive control…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2026-04-15 Riccardo Zuliani , Efe C. Balta , John Lygeros

We tackle neural networks (NNs) to approximate model predictive control (MPC) laws. We propose a novel learning-based explicit MPC structure, which is reformulated into a dual-mode scheme over maximal constrained feasible set. The scheme…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-07-29 Anjie Mao , Zheming Wang , Hao Gu , Bo Chen , Li Yu

In this paper, we are interested in optimal control problems with purely economic costs, which often yield optimal policies having a (nearly) bang-bang structure. We focus on policy approximations based on Model Predictive Control (MPC) and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-04-07 Arash Bahari Kordabad , Wenqi Cai , Sebastien Gros

This paper targets the efficient construction of a safety shield for decision making in scenarios that incorporate uncertainty. Markov decision processes (MDPs) are prominent models to capture such planning problems. Reinforcement learning…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2019-11-26 Nils Jansen , Bettina Könighofer , Sebastian Junges , Alexandru C. Serban , Roderick Bloem

Reinforcement learning is a promising approach to learning robotics controllers. It has recently been shown that algorithms based on finite-difference estimates of the policy gradient are competitive with algorithms based on the policy…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-12 Osbert Bastani

We present foundations for using Model Predictive Control (MPC) as a differentiable policy class for reinforcement learning in continuous state and action spaces. This provides one way of leveraging and combining the advantages of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-15 Brandon Amos , Ivan Dario Jimenez Rodriguez , Jacob Sacks , Byron Boots , J. Zico Kolter

Having a perfect model to compute the optimal policy is often infeasible in reinforcement learning. It is important in high-stakes domains to quantify and manage risk induced by model uncertainties. Entropic risk measure is an exponential…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Reazul Hasan Russel , Bahram Behzadian , Marek Petrik

Sequence-to-sequence architectures built upon recurrent neural networks have become a standard choice for multi-step-ahead time series prediction. In these models, the decoder produces future values conditioned on contextual inputs,…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Qi Sima , Xinze Zhang , Yukun Bao , Siyue Yang , Liang Shen

Risk-sensitive reinforcement learning (RL) is crucial for maintaining reliable performance in high-stakes applications. While traditional RL methods aim to learn a point estimate of the random cumulative cost, distributional RL (DRL) seeks…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-02-03 Minheng Xiao , Xian Yu , Lei Ying

The theory of continuous-time reinforcement learning (RL) has progressed rapidly in recent years. While the ultimate objective of RL is typically to learn deterministic control policies, most existing continuous-time RL methods rely on…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Ziheng Cheng , Xin Guo , Yufei Zhang

We investigate the important problem of certifying stability of reinforcement learning policies when interconnected with nonlinear dynamical systems. We show that by regulating the input-output gradients of policies, strong guarantees of…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2018-10-30 Ming Jin , Javad Lavaei

The problem of synthesizing stochastic explicit model predictive control policies is known to be quickly intractable even for systems of modest complexity when using classical control-theoretic methods. To address this challenge, we present…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-05-24 Ján Drgoňa , Sayak Mukherjee , Aaron Tuor , Mahantesh Halappanavar , Draguna Vrabie

In high-stake scenarios like medical treatment and auto-piloting, it's risky or even infeasible to collect online experimental data to train the agent. Simulation-based training can alleviate this issue, but may suffer from its inherent…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-03-16 Jialian Li , Tongzheng Ren , Dong Yan , Hang Su , Jun Zhu

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in a wide range of control and decision-making tasks. However, RL agents often exhibit unstable or degraded performance when deployed in environments subject to unexpected external…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Taeho Lee , Donghwan Lee

We study continuous action reinforcement learning problems in which it is crucial that the agent interacts with the environment only through safe policies, i.e.,~policies that do not take the agent to undesirable situations. We formulate…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-13 Yinlam Chow , Ofir Nachum , Aleksandra Faust , Edgar Duenez-Guzman , Mohammad Ghavamzadeh

It is quite challenging to ensure the safety of reinforcement learning (RL) agents in an unknown and stochastic environment under hard constraints that require the system state not to reach certain specified unsafe regions. Many popular…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-06-14 Yixuan Wang , Simon Sinong Zhan , Ruochen Jiao , Zhilu Wang , Wanxin Jin , Zhuoran Yang , Zhaoran Wang , Chao Huang , Qi Zhu

We present a model predictive control (MPC) framework for nonlinear stochastic systems that ensures safety guarantee with high probability. Unlike most existing stochastic MPC schemes, our method adopts a set-erosion that converts the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-12-16 Zishun Liu , Liqian Ma , Yongxin Chen