arXiv Machine Learning

Solving Markov Decision Processes with Future Information via MPC

arXiv:2606. 24991v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: 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.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 23

Solving Markov Decision Processes with Future Information via MPC

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 Machine Learning
Jul 17

SafeOR-Gym: A Benchmark Suite for Safe Reinforcement Learning Algorithms on Practical Operations Research Problems

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 Machine Learning
1d ago

Towards Optimal Policy Improvement

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
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