6 accepted papers
Quadruped locomotion provides a natural setting for understanding when model-free learning can outperform model-based control design, by exploiting data patterns to bypass the difficulty of optimizing over discrete contacts and the combinatorial explosion of mode changes. We give a principled analys…
The Maximum Entropy Reinforcement Learning (MaxEnt RL) framework is a leading approach for achieving efficient learning and robust performance across many RL tasks. However, MaxEnt methods have also been shown to struggle with performance-critical control problems in practice, where non-MaxEnt algor…
Reinforcement learning for control over continuous spaces typically uses high-entropy stochastic policies, such as Gaussian distributions, for local exploration and estimating policy gradient to optimize performance. Many robotic control problems deal with complex unstable dynamics, where applying a…
The deployment of Reinforcement Learning to robotics applications faces the difficulty of reward engineering. Therefore, approaches have focused on creating reward functions by Learning from Observations (LfO) which is the task of learning policies from expert trajectories that only contain state se…
The lack of stability guarantee restricts the practical use of learning-based methods in core control problems in robotics. We develop new methods for learning neural control policies and neural Lyapunov critic functions in the modelfree reinforcement learning (RL) setting. We use sample-based appro…
We propose new methods for learning control policies and neural network Lyapunov functions for nonlinear control problems, with provable guarantee of stability. The framework consists of a learner that attempts to find the control and Lyapunov functions, and a falsifier that finds counterexamples to…