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: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.
arXiv:2604. 12474v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: In many robotic tasks, agents must traverse a sequence of spatial regions to complete a mission.
arXiv:2606. 16480v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robots deployed in the real world must plan motions across diverse scenarios without per-scenario retuning.
arXiv:2608. 01151v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: In this paper, we consider stochastic optimal control problems with infinite-horizon joint chance constraints.
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.
arXiv:2304.10041v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This work investigates formal policy synthesis for continuous-state stochastic dynamic systems subject to high-level specifications expressed in li...
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.
Effective model-based reinforcement learning in stochastic environments requires planning that accounts for predictive uncertainty. Propagating full state distributions analytically offers a principled way to do this, but has traditionally required restrictive policy or reward structures to remain tractable.
arXiv:2608. 02519v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Effective model-based reinforcement learning in stochastic environments requires planning that accounts for predictive uncertainty.
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.
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.
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.