arXiv AI

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.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 1

Uncertainty-Driven Replay Memory for Reinforcement Learning

The paper introduces Uncertainty-Driven Replay Memory (UDRM), a new experience replay buffer for reinforcement learning that prioritizes storing transitions with high uncertainty estimates. Unlike traditional buffers that rely on temporal difference error or transition distributions, UDRM updates its contents based on uncertainty derived from the RL model during training. Experiments show that this uncertainty-aware buffer leads to higher rewards during training compared to other uncertainty-aware RL frameworks.

By Sheeraja Rajakrishnan, Alexander G. Ororbia, Travis Desell, Daniel E. Krutz