arXiv AI

Contraction-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Nonlinear Control with Statistical Robustness

arXiv:2506. 15700v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Control contraction metrics (CCMs)-defined by Riemannian metrics under which a closed-loop system is incrementally exponentially stable-offer a constructive framework for synthesizing contracting policies in nonlinear path-tracking problems.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 31

REFINE-DP: Diffusion Policy Fine-tuning for Humanoid Loco-manipulation via Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2603. 13707v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Humanoid loco-manipulation requires coordinated task-space motion planning with stable loco-manipulation command tracking under complex robot-environment dynamics and long-horizon tasks.

By Zhaoyuan Gu, Yipu Chen, Zimeng Chai, Alfred Cueva, Thong Nguyen, Yifan Wu, Huishu Xue, Minji Kim, Isaac Legene, Fukang Liu, KyoungMok Kim, Ayan Barula, Yongxin Chen, Ye Zhao
arXiv AI
Jul 2

Learning Gait-Aware Quadruped Locomotion with Temporal Logic Specifications

arXiv:2607. 00442v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning (RL) for quadruped locomotion commonly depends on fixed, hand-crafted, and Markovian reward functions that limit both interpretability of learned policies and lack explicit control over gait behaviors.

By Merve Atasever, Cagan Bakirci, Alfredo Reina Corona, Keyan Azbijari, Jyotirmoy V. Deshmukh
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
Jun 2

Coherent Off-Policy Improvement of Large Behavior Models with Learned Rewards

arXiv:2606. 02194v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Distilling expert demonstration data into large generative models using behavioral cloning is a scalable approach to learning capable policies for robotic control, particularly for dexterous manipulation.

By Christian Scherer, Joe Watson, Theo Gruner, Daniel Palenicek, Ingmar Posner, Jan Peters
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 17

Reinforcement Learning for Real-Time Vision-Language-Action Policies

The paper presents Real‑Time EXPO‑FT, a reinforcement learning framework that fine‑tunes large Vision‑Language‑Action models for real‑time robotic control. It separates slow, expressive action generation from fast, reactive edits, allowing a lightweight policy to adjust actions based on the latest observation. Experiments on the Kinetix benchmark and four dynamic real‑world tasks show that Real‑Time EXPO‑FT achieves superior performance, improving policy success rates from 42% to 97% with only ten minutes of online data and no human intervention.

By Perry Dong, Kuo-Han Hung, Dorsa Sadigh, Chelsea Finn