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Autores principales: Hellard, Théotime Le, Tiofack, Franki Nguimatsia, Lidec, Quentin Le, Carpentier, Justin
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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Acceso en línea:https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.19011
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author Hellard, Théotime Le
Tiofack, Franki Nguimatsia
Lidec, Quentin Le
Carpentier, Justin
author_facet Hellard, Théotime Le
Tiofack, Franki Nguimatsia
Lidec, Quentin Le
Carpentier, Justin
contents Trajectory Optimization (TO) solvers exploit known system dynamics to compute locally optimal trajectories through iterative improvements. A downside is that each new problem instance is solved independently; therefore, convergence speed and quality of the solution found depend on the initial trajectory proposed. To improve efficiency, a natural approach is to warm-start TO with initial guesses produced by a learned policy trained on trajectories previously generated by the solver. Diffusion-based policies have recently emerged as expressive imitation learning models, making them promising candidates for this role. Yet, a counterintuitive challenge comes from the local optimality of TO demonstrations: when a policy is rolled out, small non-optimal deviations may push it into situations not represented in the training data, triggering compounding errors over long horizons. In this work, we focus on learning-based warm-starting for gradient-based TO solvers that also provide feedback gains. Exploiting this specificity, we derive a first-order loss for Sobolev learning of diffusion-based policies using both trajectories and feedback gains. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that the resulting policy avoids compounding errors, and so can learn from very few trajectories to provide initial guesses reducing solving time by $2\times$ to $20 \times$. Incorporating first-order information enables predictions with fewer diffusion steps, reducing inference latency.
format Preprint
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publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Accelerating trajectory optimization with Sobolev-trained diffusion policies
Hellard, Théotime Le
Tiofack, Franki Nguimatsia
Lidec, Quentin Le
Carpentier, Justin
Machine Learning
Robotics
Trajectory Optimization (TO) solvers exploit known system dynamics to compute locally optimal trajectories through iterative improvements. A downside is that each new problem instance is solved independently; therefore, convergence speed and quality of the solution found depend on the initial trajectory proposed. To improve efficiency, a natural approach is to warm-start TO with initial guesses produced by a learned policy trained on trajectories previously generated by the solver. Diffusion-based policies have recently emerged as expressive imitation learning models, making them promising candidates for this role. Yet, a counterintuitive challenge comes from the local optimality of TO demonstrations: when a policy is rolled out, small non-optimal deviations may push it into situations not represented in the training data, triggering compounding errors over long horizons. In this work, we focus on learning-based warm-starting for gradient-based TO solvers that also provide feedback gains. Exploiting this specificity, we derive a first-order loss for Sobolev learning of diffusion-based policies using both trajectories and feedback gains. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that the resulting policy avoids compounding errors, and so can learn from very few trajectories to provide initial guesses reducing solving time by $2\times$ to $20 \times$. Incorporating first-order information enables predictions with fewer diffusion steps, reducing inference latency.
title Accelerating trajectory optimization with Sobolev-trained diffusion policies
topic Machine Learning
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.19011