Model Predictive Control (MPC) is widely used in industrial and robotic systems for enforcing constraints and embedding domain knowledge through finite-horizon optimization-based planning. However, despite these strengths, an MPC scheme typically does not yield optimal policies for sequential decision-making problems formulated as Markov Decision Processes (MDPs).
arXiv:2604. 12474v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In many robotic tasks, agents must traverse a sequence of spatial regions to complete a mission.
By Lidor Erez, Shahaf S. Shperberg, Ayal Taitler
arXiv:2606. 16480v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robots deployed in the real world must plan motions across diverse scenarios without per-scenario retuning.
By Youngjae Min, Jovin D'sa, Faizan M. Tariq, David Isele, Navid Azizan, Sangjae Bae
arXiv:2605. 04568v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: State-of-the-art model-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches either use gradient-free, population-based methods for planning, learned policy networks, or a combination of policy networks and planning.
By Jonathan Spieler, Sven Behnke
arXiv:2608. 01151v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper, we consider stochastic optimal control problems with infinite-horizon joint chance constraints.
By Francesco Cordiano, Kanghui He, Bart De Schutter
arXiv:2607. 15457v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study robust peak-cost constrained reinforcement learning (RP-CRL), where the objective is to maximize expected reward while controlling the maximum cost encountered along a trajectory.
By Shilpa Mukhopadhyay, Sourav Ganguly, Santosh Mohan Rajkumar, Honghao Wei, Debdipta Goswami, Arnob Ghosh
arXiv:2607. 07252v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) enables the synthesis of control policies directly from data, making it highly appealing for complex cyber-physical systems (CPSs) and robotics.
By Georg Sch\"afer, Jakob Rehrl, Stefan Huber, Simon Hirlaender
arXiv:2603. 29499v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Classical proportional--integral--derivative (PID) control remains widely used in industrial control systems, while model predictive control (MPC) is actively studied to achieve higher performance for systems with nonlinear dynamics.
By Teruki Kato, Koshi Oishi, Seigo Ito
arXiv:2506. 02255v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Most existing safe reinforcement learning (RL) benchmarks focus on robotics and control tasks, offering limited relevance to high-stakes domains that involve structured constraints, mixed-integer decisions, and industrial complexity.
By Asha Ramanujam (Davidson School of Chemical Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN), Adam Elyoumi (Davidson School of Chemical Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN), Hao Chen (Davidson School of Chemical Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN), Sai Madhukiran Kompalli (Davidson School of Chemical Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN), Akshdeep Singh Ahluwalia (Davidson School of Chemical Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN), Shraman Pal (Davidson School of Chemical Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN), Dimitri J. Papageorgiou (Energy Sciences, ExxonMobil Technology and Engineering Company, Annandale, NJ), Can Li (Davidson School of Chemical Engineering, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN)
arXiv:2606. 10979v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Many Markov decision processes (MDPs) in operations research have feasible actions that are state dependent and defined implicitly by various operational constraints.
By Yi Chen (Lucy), Rushuai Yang (Lucy), Qiang Chen (Lucy), Dongyan (Lucy), Huo
The paper introduces a framework for optimal policy improvement in reinforcement learning, defining it as the best single update under given constraints. It shows that restricting improvement to a subset of states is equivalent to solving an induced Markov Decision Process, linking planning with explicit or implicit models to optimal policy improvement. The authors develop a novel operator for greedification under approximate evaluation, demonstrating empirical gains across several RL algorithms and settings.
By Yaniv Oren, Viliam Vadocz, Wiktor Zabka, Thomas Evers, Jan Robine, Wendelin B\"ohmer, Matthijs T. J. Spaan, Martha White, Hendrik Baier, Fenghui Yu
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