collaborators

6 papers

cs.LG2026

Soft MPCritic: Amortized Model Predictive Value Iteration

Thomas Banker, Nathan P. Lawrence, Ali Mesbah

Reinforcement learning (RL) and model predictive control (MPC) offer complementary strengths, yet combining them at scale remains computationally challenging. We propose soft MPCri…

cs.LG2025

Model-free Reinforcement Learning for Model-based Control: Towards Safe, Interpretable and Sample-efficient Agents

Thomas Banker, Ali Mesbah

Training sophisticated agents for optimal decision-making under uncertainty has been key to the rapid development of modern autonomous systems across fields. Notably, model-free re…

cs.LG2025

MPCritic: A plug-and-play MPC architecture for reinforcement learning

Nathan P. Lawrence, Thomas Banker, Ali Mesbah

The reinforcement learning (RL) and model predictive control (MPC) communities have developed vast ecosystems of theoretical approaches and computational tools for solving optimal…

eess.SY2025

Local-Global Learning of Interpretable Control Policies: The Interface between MPC and Reinforcement Learning

Thomas Banker, Nathan P. Lawrence, Ali Mesbah

Making optimal decisions under uncertainty is a shared problem among distinct fields. While optimal control is commonly studied in the framework of dynamic programming, it is appro…

cs.LG2025

User Preference Meets Pareto-Optimality in Multi-Objective Bayesian Optimization

Joshua Hang Sai Ip, Ankush Chakrabarty, Ali Mesbah +1

Incorporating user preferences into multi-objective Bayesian optimization (MOBO) allows for personalization of the optimization procedure. Preferences are often abstracted in the f…

eess.SY2025

A view on learning robust goal-conditioned value functions: Interplay between RL and MPC

Nathan P. Lawrence, Philip D. Loewen, Michael G. Forbes +2

Reinforcement learning (RL) and model predictive control (MPC) offer a wealth of distinct approaches for automatic decision-making under uncertainty. Given the impact both fields h…