activity
20242026
most citedWhy Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning Works: Relation to Dual Control

1 citations · 1 across the 2 of their papers we have counts for

collaborators

9 papers

cs.LG20261 cited

Why Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning Works: Relation to Dual Control

Nathan P. Lawrence, Ali Mesbah

Goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (RL) concerns the problem of training an agent to maximize the probability of reaching target goal states. This paper presents an analysis o…

cs.LG2026

Error whitening: Why Gauss-Newton outperforms Newton

Maricela Best McKay, Nathan P. Lawrence, Brian Wetton +1

The Gauss-Newton matrix is widely viewed as a positive semidefinite approximation of the Hessian, yet mounting empirical evidence shows that Gauss-Newton descent outperforms Newton…

math.OC2026

The Separation Principle and the Dual-Certainty Equivalence Gap in Model Predictive Control

Tren Baltussen, Nathan P. Lawrence, Alexander Katriniok +2

Dual control addresses the trade-off between exploitation and exploration, where control inputs both regulate the system and generate informative data for estimation and identifica…

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…

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…

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…