arXiv AI

Learning-Based Decision Making for Combustion Phasing Control in Multi-Fuel CI Engines with Latent Fuel Reactivity Estimation

arXiv:2606. 18393v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multi-fuel compression-ignition engines offer fuel flexibility but introduce uncertain, time-varying fuel reactivity, represented by cetane number (CN), which complicates cycle-to-cycle combustion-phasing control.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 2

Accelerating Reinforcement Learning via MPC Solver-Gradient Guidance for Weights-varying MPC

The paper introduces Solver-Gradient Guided Reinforcement Learning (SG‑RL), a method that augments standard RL with bounded gradients from a differentiable MPC solver to adapt cost‑function weights online. SG‑RL integrates solver‑gradient guidance into PPO through actor‑update scaling, policy loss, advantage estimation, and value‑function learning, achieving comparable or superior closed‑loop performance while requiring up to 70.6% fewer samples. Experiments on two autonomous racing platforms with intentional model mismatch demonstrate that SG‑RL outperforms both RL and gradient‑based policy learning baselines and generalizes zero‑shot to unseen environments.

By Baha Zarrouki, Arslan Thobani, Jasper Hoffmann, Mattia Piccinini, Rudolf Reiter, Felix Jahncke, S\'ebastien Gros, Davide Scaramuzza, Johannes Betz
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

Towards Sustainable Hydrogen Systems: Supply Chain Optimization with Model Predictive Control and Reinforcement Learning

This study evaluates four control strategies—rule-based, model predictive control (MPC), reinforcement learning without forecasts (RL‑NF), and reinforcement learning with forecasts (RL‑F)—for a renewable‑powered hydrogen supply chain. Using a unified, physically realistic simulation that includes electrolyzer constraints, storage dynamics, and grid limits, the authors find that MPC delivers the best economic performance by leveraging short‑term forecasts, while RL‑NF performs robustly without future information. RL‑F does not consistently outperform RL‑NF, indicating that forecast uncertainty and added state complexity can hinder forecast‑augmented learning.

By Mahammad Valiyev
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 18

Improving Online Reinforcement Learning via Bidirectional Behavior Prior Distillation

The paper introduces Bidirectional Behavior Prior Distillation (B2PD), a method that uses action‑value priors to train a conditional variational autoencoder for generating high‑value behavior support. These expert behavior priors are then distilled into the online reinforcement learning agent, reducing inefficient exploration and stabilizing policy updates. Experiments on state‑ and pixel‑based tasks show that B2PD improves sample efficiency while maintaining stable learning dynamics.

By Gong Gao, Xiao Lai, Jiaji Shen, Ning Jia, Xianhui Liu, Weidong Zhao
arXiv AI
Aug 25

Continual Uncertainty Learning for Robust Control of Nonlinear Systems with Multiple Heterogeneous Uncertainties

The paper introduces Continual Uncertainty Learning (CUL), a curriculum-based continual learning framework that decomposes robust control of nonlinear systems with multiple heterogeneous uncertainties into a sequence of tasks. By progressively expanding and diversifying plant uncertainties and applying memory-efficient anti-forgetting regularization, CUL enables a policy to acquire strategies for each uncertainty sequentially while a model-based controller provides a shared baseline performance. Applied to an active vibration controller for automotive powertrains, the approach demonstrates robustness to structural nonlinearities and dynamic variations, improving control performance and sample efficiency.

By Heisei Yonezawa, Ansei Yonezawa, Itsuro Kajiwara