The paper proposes a new loss scheme that simultaneously supervises zeroth- and first-order actions to improve policy performance and control robustness in data-driven decision-making methods such as imitation learning and reinforcement learning. The approach provides formal theoretical guarantees, works with any off-the-shelf policy model, and can be added as a lightweight plug‑and‑play module to existing offline RL frameworks. Experiments on OGBench and D4RL show significant gains in performance, robustness, and out‑of‑distribution generalization, especially in low‑data settings.
By Peng Cheng, Yunxian Hou, Zhi Zhou, Qian Zhang, Chang Huang, Xianyuan Zhan
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:2606. 01363v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) infers information about the environment from a learned dynamics model and bears the potential to address open problems such as data efficient and safe learning in robotics.
By Bernd Frauenknecht, Devdutt Subhasish, Artur Eisele, Friedrich Solowjow, Sebastian Trimpe
Reinforcement learning (RL) enables the synthesis of control policies directly from data, making it highly appealing for complex cyber-physical systems (CPSs) and robotics. A persistent challenge, however, is ensuring strict, hard safety constraints during the active learning phase.
arXiv:2606. 31320v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safe online reinforcement learning requires policies to respect safety constraints while maintaining smooth optimization dynamics.
By Hongpeng Cao, Liqun Zhao, Yuliang Gu, Naira Hovakimyan, Lui Sha, Marco Caccamo
arXiv:2608. 10332v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Differentiable predictive control (DPC), a self-supervised learning approach for approximating explicit model predictive control (MPC) policies, offers significant computational advantages over online optimization-based MPC.
By Guangyu Wu, J\'an Drgo\v{n}a
arXiv:2507.04356v3 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Research, innovation and practical capital investment have been increasing rapidly toward the realization of autonomous physical agents. This...
By Vyacheslav Kungurtsev, Alessandro Di Frenna, Gustav Sir, Monicah Cherop Naibei, Haozhe Tian, Homayoun Hamedmoghadam, Akhil Anand, Sebastien Gros
The paper introduces a continuous‑time policy gradient framework that works with discrete observation data. It derives performance difference lemmas and policy gradient formulas for randomized and parametrized policies, proving exponential convergence for an entropy‑regularized policy flow and providing explicit convergence bounds for discrete updates. By integrating with PhiBE, the authors create model‑free actor‑critic algorithms that maintain the continuous‑time structure, and demonstrate their effectiveness on both linear‑quadratic and nonlinear robotic control tasks.
By Martin Hernandez, Xinyan Qing, Mo Zhou, Yuhua Zhu
Sampling-Based Safe Reinforcement Learning (SBSRL) is a model‑based RL algorithm that enforces safety by jointly constraining a finite set of dynamics samples, approximating a worst‑case optimization over uncertain dynamics. It introduces an exploration strategy that limits epistemic uncertainty, removing the need for explicit exploration bonuses. The authors provide high‑probability safety guarantees and a finite‑time sample complexity bound, and demonstrate safe, efficient exploration in both simulation and real robotic hardware, with extensions to deep‑ensemble implementations for high‑dimensional continuous control.
By Luca Vignola, Bruce D. Lee, Manish Prajapat, Manuel Wendl, Melanie Zeilinger, Andreas Krause, Yarden As
arXiv:2607. 15003v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: The deployment of autonomous cyber-physical systems in safety-critical environments requires closed-loop control strategies (i.
By Riccardo Curcio, Toni Mancini, Enrico Tronci
arXiv:2601. 19612v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Safe exploration is a key requirement for reinforcement learning (RL) agents to learn and adapt online, beyond controlled (e.
By Manuel Wendl, Yarden As, Manish Prajapat, Anton Pollak, Stelian Coros, Andreas Krause
The paper presents a method for safe learning-based control that uses function-based uncertainty quantification. By modeling the unknown function as a random function and generating independent realizations, the authors construct uncertainty tubes via the scenario approach that hold with high probability. These tubes, which rely only on sampled realizations, can handle discontinuities and are integrated into a safe Bayesian optimization algorithm to tune control parameters on a real Furuta pendulum.
By Abdullah Tokmak, Toni Karvonen, Thomas B. Sch\"on, Dominik Baumann