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Meta reinforcement learning (RL) allows agents to leverage experience across a distribution of tasks on which the agent can train at will, enabling faster learning of optimal policies on new test tasks. Despite its success in improving…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Tingting Ni , Maryam Kamgarpour

Continuous-time reinforcement learning (CTRL) provides a natural framework for sequential decision-making in dynamic environments where interactions evolve continuously over time. While CTRL has shown growing empirical success, its ability…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-12-04 Runze Zhao , Yue Yu , Ruhan Wang , Chunfeng Huang , Dongruo Zhou

Reinforcement learning has proven its power on various occasions. However, its performance is not always guaranteed when system dynamics change. Instead, it largely relies on users' empirical experience. For reinforcement learning…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-05 Jingyi Liu , Jian Guo , Eberhard Gill

The actor-critic (AC) framework has achieved strong empirical success in off-policy reinforcement learning but suffers from the "moving target" problem, where the evaluated policy changes continually. Functional critics, or…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Qinxun Bai , Yuxuan Han , Wei Xu , Zhengyuan Zhou

Many of the challenges facing today's reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, such as robustness, generalization, transfer, and computational efficiency are closely related to compression. Prior work has convincingly argued why minimizing…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-09-08 Benjamin Eysenbach , Ruslan Salakhutdinov , Sergey Levine

When applying imitation learning techniques to fit a policy from expert demonstrations, one can take advantage of prior stability/robustness assumptions on the expert's policy and incorporate such control-theoretic prior knowledge…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2021-03-25 Aaron Havens , Bin Hu

Robotic systems must be able to quickly and robustly make decisions when operating in uncertain and dynamic environments. While Reinforcement Learning (RL) can be used to compute optimal policies with little prior knowledge about the…

Robotics · Computer Science 2016-09-13 Yunpeng Pan , Xinyan Yan , Evangelos Theodorou , Byron Boots

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) has emerged as a powerfulparadigm for cooperative decision-making in connected autonomous vehicles(CAVs); however, existing approaches often fail to guarantee stability, optimality,and…

General Mathematics · Mathematics 2025-11-25 Mazyar Taghavi , Javad Vahidi

Optimal control methods provide solutions to safety-critical problems but easily become intractable. Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) have emerged as a popular technique that facilitates their solution by provably guaranteeing safety,…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-02-21 Ehsan Sabouni , H. M. Sabbir Ahmad , Vittorio Giammarino , Christos G. Cassandras , Ioannis Ch. Paschalidis , Wenchao Li

In this paper, we propose a cost-matching approach for optimal humanoid locomotion within a Model Predictive Control (MPC)-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) framework. A parameterized MPC formulation with centroidal dynamics is trained to…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Wenqi Cai , Kyriakos G. Vamvoudakis , Sébastien Gros , Anthony Tzes

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies that satisfy certain constraints before deploying them to safety-critical applications. Previous primal-dual style approaches suffer from instability issues and lack optimality…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-20 Zuxin Liu , Zhepeng Cen , Vladislav Isenbaev , Wei Liu , Zhiwei Steven Wu , Bo Li , Ding Zhao

It is a popular belief that model-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) is more sample efficient than model-free RL, but in practice, it is not always true due to overweighed model errors. In complex and noisy settings, model-based RL tends to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-13 Feiyang Pan , Jia He , Dandan Tu , Qing He

In this paper, we propose the Model Reference Adaptive Control & Reinforcement Learning (MRAC-RL) approach to developing online policies for systems in which modeling errors occur in real-time. Although reinforcement learning (RL)…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-10-20 Anubhav Guha , Anuradha Annaswamy

Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated remarkable potential in robotic manipulation but faces challenges in sample inefficiency and lack of interpretability, limiting its applicability in real world scenarios. Enabling the agent to…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-05-16 Xinrui Wang , Yan Jin

Actor Critic methods have found immense applications on a wide range of Reinforcement Learning tasks especially when the state-action space is large. In this paper, we consider actor critic and natural actor critic algorithms with function…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-09-01 Prashansa Panda , Shalabh Bhatnagar

Model Predictive Control (MPC) is attracting tremendous attention in the autonomous driving task as a powerful control technique. The success of an MPC controller strongly depends on an accurate internal dynamics model. However, the static…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-04-28 Yuan Zhang , Joschka Boedecker , Chuxuan Li , Guyue Zhou

In this paper, we present a new intrinsically motivated actor-critic algorithm for learning continuous motor skills directly from raw visual input. Our neural architecture is composed of a critic and an actor network. Both networks receive…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-02-19 Muhammad Burhan Hafez , Cornelius Weber , Matthias Kerzel , Stefan Wermter

Existing actor-critic algorithms, which are popular for continuous control reinforcement learning (RL) tasks, suffer from poor sample efficiency due to lack of principled exploration mechanism within them. Motivated by the success of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-30 Haque Ishfaq , Guangyuan Wang , Sami Nur Islam , Doina Precup

Model Predictive Control (MPC) is a widely known control method that has proved to be particularly effective in multivariable and constrained control. Closed-loop stability and recursive feasibility can be guaranteed by employing accurate…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-02-05 Marco Polver , Daniel Limon , Fabio Previdi , Antonio Ferramosca

Contraction analysis establishes exponential incremental convergence of a nonlinear system by solving a linear matrix inequality for a contraction metric, and has become a standard resource for solving problems in nonlinear control and…

Dynamical Systems · Mathematics 2026-03-03 Winfried Lohmiller , Jean-Jacques Slotine