SAC-MoE: Reinforcement Learning with Mixture-of-Experts for Control of Hybrid Dynamical Systems with Uncertainty

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Main Authors: D'Souza, Leroy, Karthikeyan, Akash, Pant, Yash Vardhan, Fischmeister, Sebastian
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author D'Souza, Leroy
Karthikeyan, Akash
Pant, Yash Vardhan
Fischmeister, Sebastian
author_facet D'Souza, Leroy
Karthikeyan, Akash
Pant, Yash Vardhan
Fischmeister, Sebastian
contents Hybrid dynamical systems result from the interaction of continuous-variable dynamics with discrete events and encompass various systems such as legged robots, vehicles and aircrafts. Challenges arise when the system's modes are characterized by unobservable (latent) parameters and the events that cause system dynamics to switch between different modes are also unobservable. Model-based control approaches typically do not account for such uncertainty in the hybrid dynamics, while standard model-free RL methods fail to account for abrupt mode switches, leading to poor generalization. To overcome this, we propose SAC-MoE which models the actor of the Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) framework as a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) with a learned router that adaptively selects among learned experts. To further improve robustness, we develop a curriculum-based training algorithm to prioritize data collection in challenging settings, allowing better generalization to unseen modes and switching locations. Simulation studies in hybrid autonomous racing and legged locomotion tasks show that SAC-MoE outperforms baselines (up to 6x) in zero-shot generalization to unseen environments. Our curriculum strategy consistently improves performance across all evaluated policies. Qualitative analysis shows that the interpretable MoE router activates different experts for distinct latent modes.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_12361
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SAC-MoE: Reinforcement Learning with Mixture-of-Experts for Control of Hybrid Dynamical Systems with Uncertainty
D'Souza, Leroy
Karthikeyan, Akash
Pant, Yash Vardhan
Fischmeister, Sebastian
Robotics
Systems and Control
Hybrid dynamical systems result from the interaction of continuous-variable dynamics with discrete events and encompass various systems such as legged robots, vehicles and aircrafts. Challenges arise when the system's modes are characterized by unobservable (latent) parameters and the events that cause system dynamics to switch between different modes are also unobservable. Model-based control approaches typically do not account for such uncertainty in the hybrid dynamics, while standard model-free RL methods fail to account for abrupt mode switches, leading to poor generalization. To overcome this, we propose SAC-MoE which models the actor of the Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) framework as a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) with a learned router that adaptively selects among learned experts. To further improve robustness, we develop a curriculum-based training algorithm to prioritize data collection in challenging settings, allowing better generalization to unseen modes and switching locations. Simulation studies in hybrid autonomous racing and legged locomotion tasks show that SAC-MoE outperforms baselines (up to 6x) in zero-shot generalization to unseen environments. Our curriculum strategy consistently improves performance across all evaluated policies. Qualitative analysis shows that the interpretable MoE router activates different experts for distinct latent modes.
title SAC-MoE: Reinforcement Learning with Mixture-of-Experts for Control of Hybrid Dynamical Systems with Uncertainty
topic Robotics
Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.12361