MSACL: Multi-Step Actor-Critic Learning with Lyapunov Certificates for Exponentially Stabilizing Control

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Zhang, Yongwei, Xing, Yuanzhe, Liang, Quanyi, Quan, Quan, She, Zhikun
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Zhang, Yongwei
Xing, Yuanzhe
Liang, Quanyi
Quan, Quan
She, Zhikun
author_facet Zhang, Yongwei
Xing, Yuanzhe
Liang, Quanyi
Quan, Quan
She, Zhikun
contents For stabilizing control tasks, model-free reinforcement learning (RL) approaches face numerous challenges, particularly regarding the issues of effectiveness and efficiency in complex high-dimensional environments with limited training data. To address these challenges, we propose Multi-Step Actor-Critic Learning with Lyapunov Certificates (MSACL), a novel approach that integrates exponential stability into off-policy maximum entropy reinforcement learning (MERL). In contrast to existing RL-based approaches that depend on elaborate reward engineering and single-step constraints, MSACL adopts intuitive reward design and exploits multi-step samples to enable exploratory actor-critic learning. Specifically, we first introduce Exponential Stability Labels (ESLs) to categorize training samples and propose a $λ$-weighted aggregation mechanism to learn Lyapunov certificates. Based on these certificates, we further design a stability-aware advantage function to guide policy optimization, thereby promoting rapid Lyapunov descent and robust state convergence. We evaluate MSACL across six benchmarks, comprising four stabilizing and two high-dimensional tracking tasks. Experimental results demonstrate its consistent performance improvements over both standard RL baselines and state-of-the-art Lyapunov-based RL algorithms. Beyond rapid convergence, MSACL exhibits robustness against environmental uncertainties and generalization to unseen reference signals. The source code and benchmarking environments are available at \href{https://github.com/YuanZhe-Xing/MSACL}{https://github.com/YuanZhe-Xing/MSACL}.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_24955
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MSACL: Multi-Step Actor-Critic Learning with Lyapunov Certificates for Exponentially Stabilizing Control
Zhang, Yongwei
Xing, Yuanzhe
Liang, Quanyi
Quan, Quan
She, Zhikun
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Robotics
Systems and Control
For stabilizing control tasks, model-free reinforcement learning (RL) approaches face numerous challenges, particularly regarding the issues of effectiveness and efficiency in complex high-dimensional environments with limited training data. To address these challenges, we propose Multi-Step Actor-Critic Learning with Lyapunov Certificates (MSACL), a novel approach that integrates exponential stability into off-policy maximum entropy reinforcement learning (MERL). In contrast to existing RL-based approaches that depend on elaborate reward engineering and single-step constraints, MSACL adopts intuitive reward design and exploits multi-step samples to enable exploratory actor-critic learning. Specifically, we first introduce Exponential Stability Labels (ESLs) to categorize training samples and propose a $λ$-weighted aggregation mechanism to learn Lyapunov certificates. Based on these certificates, we further design a stability-aware advantage function to guide policy optimization, thereby promoting rapid Lyapunov descent and robust state convergence. We evaluate MSACL across six benchmarks, comprising four stabilizing and two high-dimensional tracking tasks. Experimental results demonstrate its consistent performance improvements over both standard RL baselines and state-of-the-art Lyapunov-based RL algorithms. Beyond rapid convergence, MSACL exhibits robustness against environmental uncertainties and generalization to unseen reference signals. The source code and benchmarking environments are available at \href{https://github.com/YuanZhe-Xing/MSACL}{https://github.com/YuanZhe-Xing/MSACL}.
title MSACL: Multi-Step Actor-Critic Learning with Lyapunov Certificates for Exponentially Stabilizing Control
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Robotics
Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24955