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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

Ensuring safety of nonlinear systems under model uncertainty and external disturbances is crucial, especially for real-world control tasks. Predictive methods such as robust model predictive control (RMPC) require solving nonconvex…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-11-14 Zeyang Li , Chuxiong Hu , Weiye Zhao , Changliu Liu

We study the safe reinforcement learning problem with nonlinear function approximation, where policy optimization is formulated as a constrained optimization problem with both the objective and the constraint being nonconvex functions. For…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-10-29 Ming Yu , Zhuoran Yang , Mladen Kolar , Zhaoran Wang

Estimating a policy that maps states to actions is a central problem in reinforcement learning. Traditionally, policies are inferred from the so called value functions (VFs), but exact VF computation suffers from the curse of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-05-29 Sergio Rozada , Antonio G. Marques

Policy gradient is a generic and flexible reinforcement learning approach that generally enjoys simplicity in analysis, implementation, and deployment. In the last few decades, this approach has been extensively advanced for fully…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-05-26 Kamyar Azizzadenesheli , Yisong Yue , Animashree Anandkumar

Despite its popularity in the reinforcement learning community, a provably convergent policy gradient method for continuous space-time control problems with nonlinear state dynamics has been elusive. This paper proposes proximal gradient…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2022-12-27 Christoph Reisinger , Wolfgang Stockinger , Yufei Zhang

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

Stochastic policies (also known as relaxed controls) are widely used in continuous-time reinforcement learning algorithms. However, executing a stochastic policy and evaluating its performance in a continuous-time environment remain open…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-03 Yanwei Jia , Du Ouyang , Yufei Zhang

In real-life scenarios, a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent aiming to maximise their reward, must often also behave in a safe manner, including at training time. Thus, much attention in recent years has been given to Safe RL, where an agent…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-03-26 Edwin Hamel-De le Court , Francesco Belardinelli , Alexander W. Goodall

We propose a method to encourage safety in Model Predictive Control (MPC)-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) via Gaussian Process (GP) regression. This framework consists of 1) a parametric MPC scheme that is employed as model-based…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-12-13 Filippo Airaldi , Bart De Schutter , Azita Dabiri

While reinforcement learning has shown experimental success in a number of applications, it is known to be sensitive to noise and perturbations in the parameters of the system, leading to high variance in the total reward amongst different…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2024-12-02 Erfaun Noorani , Christos Mavridis , John Baras

Model predictive control (MPC) is widely used for motion planning, particularly in autonomous driving. Real-time capability of the planner requires utilizing convex approximation of optimal control problems (OCPs) for the planner. However,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Johannes Fischer , Marlon Steiner , Ömer Sahin Tas , Christoph Stiller

Model predictive control (MPC) provides a useful means for controlling systems with constraints, but suffers from the computational burden of repeatedly solving an optimization problem in real time. Offline (explicit) solutions for MPC…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2022-09-14 Daniel Tabas , Baosen Zhang

Stochastic model predictive control (SMPC) has been a promising solution to complex control problems under uncertain disturbances. However, traditional SMPC approaches either require exact knowledge of probabilistic distributions, or rely…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2020-01-03 Chao Shang , Fengqi You

For all its successes, Reinforcement Learning (RL) still struggles to deliver formal guarantees on the closed-loop behavior of the learned policy. Among other things, guaranteeing the safety of RL with respect to safety-critical systems is…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2020-04-03 Sebastien Gros , Mario Zanon , Alberto Bemporad

We present a numerically efficient Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) approach, called Set Membership based NMPC (SM-NMPC). In particular, a Set Membership method is used to derive from data an approximation and tight bounds on the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-02-01 Mattia Boggio , Carlo Novara , Michele Taragna

Flexible robots may overcome some of the industry's major challenges, such as enabling intrinsically safe human-robot collaboration and achieving a higher payload-to-mass ratio. However, controlling flexible robots is complicated due to…

We present a sample-based Learning Model Predictive Controller (LMPC) for constrained uncertain linear systems subject to bounded additive disturbances. The proposed controller builds on earlier work on LMPC for deterministic systems.…

Systems and Control · Computer Science 2021-01-22 Ugo Rosolia , Francesco Borrelli

The unaffordable computation load of nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) has prevented it for being used in robots with high sampling rates for decades. This paper is concerned with the policy learning problem for nonlinear MPC with…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-11-21 Rizhong Wang , Huiping Li , Bin Liang , Yang Shi , Demin Xu

Reinforcement learning has been established over the past decade as an effective tool to find optimal control policies for dynamical systems, with recent focus on approaches that guarantee safety during the learning and/or execution phases.…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-10-06 S M Nahid Mahmud , Scott A Nivison , Zachary I. Bell , Rushikesh Kamalapurkar