Geometric Pareto Control: Physics-Supervised Pareto Representation Learning via Riemannian Energy-Gradient Flow

Abstract

We study multi-objective sequential control problems in physical systems whose dynamics and operational constraints are known or can be represented by accurate physics-based models. Although reinforcement learning has been widely explored in such settings, standard policy learning still faces high-dimensional action search, fixed or externally supplied objective trade-offs, retraining under changed priorities, and hard feasibility requirements at deployment. Our premise is that known physics and constraints expose a compressible action structure: they allow GPC to construct a homotopy latent space over which Pareto-relevant actions can be navigated rather than searched directly. The resulting feasible Pareto control geometry is organized before deployment, so online control becomes navigation over this structure rather than retraining a policy or repeatedly solving a nonlinear program. We propose Geometric Pareto Control (GPC), which embeds the supported family of dynamically feasible Pareto-optimal control responses into a continuous latent homotopy space using offline scalarized optimization under the known dynamics. At deployment, the measured physical state induces a semantic priority coordinate on this space, and GPC follows a geometry-aware flow on the learned map to decode a feasible action in closed loop. We state formal assumptions under which decoded actions remain feasible and the navigation error does not accumulate over the rollout horizon. Across analytical control, safe multi-agent navigation, and optimal power flow, GPC improves over strong optimization and safe-RL baselines in safety, feasibility, and real-time multi-objective performance, attaining full empirical feasibility at millisecond-scale decision cost. These results show that known dynamics and constraints can construct an offline Pareto control geometry that can be navigated online under changing priorities.