Receding-Horizon Control via Drifting Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Foffano, Daniele, Russo, Alessio, Proutiere, Alexandre
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Foffano, Daniele
Russo, Alessio
Proutiere, Alexandre
author_facet Foffano, Daniele
Russo, Alessio
Proutiere, Alexandre
contents We study the problem of trajectory optimization in settings where the system dynamics are unknown and it is not possible to simulate trajectories through a surrogate model. When an offline dataset of trajectories is available, an agent could directly learn a trajectory generator by distribution matching. However, this approach only recovers the behavior distribution in the dataset, and does not in general produce a model that minimizes a desired cost criterion. In this work, we propose Drifting MPC, an offline trajectory optimization framework that combines drifting generative models with receding-horizon planning under unknown dynamics. The goal of Drifting MPC is to learn, from an offline dataset of trajectories, a conditional distribution over trajectories that is both supported by the data and biased toward optimal plans. We show that the resulting distribution learned by Drifting MPC is the unique solution of an objective that trades off optimality with closeness to the offline prior. Empirically, we show that Drifting MPC can generate near-optimal trajectories while retaining the one-step inference efficiency of drifting models and substantially reducing generation time relative to diffusion-based baselines.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_04528
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Receding-Horizon Control via Drifting Models
Foffano, Daniele
Russo, Alessio
Proutiere, Alexandre
Artificial Intelligence
We study the problem of trajectory optimization in settings where the system dynamics are unknown and it is not possible to simulate trajectories through a surrogate model. When an offline dataset of trajectories is available, an agent could directly learn a trajectory generator by distribution matching. However, this approach only recovers the behavior distribution in the dataset, and does not in general produce a model that minimizes a desired cost criterion. In this work, we propose Drifting MPC, an offline trajectory optimization framework that combines drifting generative models with receding-horizon planning under unknown dynamics. The goal of Drifting MPC is to learn, from an offline dataset of trajectories, a conditional distribution over trajectories that is both supported by the data and biased toward optimal plans. We show that the resulting distribution learned by Drifting MPC is the unique solution of an objective that trades off optimality with closeness to the offline prior. Empirically, we show that Drifting MPC can generate near-optimal trajectories while retaining the one-step inference efficiency of drifting models and substantially reducing generation time relative to diffusion-based baselines.
title Receding-Horizon Control via Drifting Models
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.04528