Topic 09 of 17

Reinforcement learning & control in robotics

Reinforcement learning trains control policies by trial and error against a reward, and in robotics it lives alongside classical optimal control such as model-predictive control and safety filters like control barrier functions. RL dominates locomotion; classical control still anchors safety-critical layers.

180papers in 2026-07

15.4%of all cs.RO that month

-1.43ppshare change, last 6 vs prior 12 months

24-month volume

arXiv query: cat:cs.RO AND (abs:"reinforcement learning" OR abs:"model predictive control")

Presented at reading clubs

These already have a slide kit, so they are the fastest ones to pick up and present.

2026-01-07

Diffusion-DRF: Free, Rich, and Differentiable Reward for Video Diffusion Fine-Tuning

Yifan Wang, Yanyu Li, Gordon Guocheng Qian +3 · 2 citations

club pickReinforcement learning & control Video & generative modeling

2025-12-31

Dream2Flow: Bridging Video Generation and Open-World Manipulation with 3D Object Flow

Karthik Dharmarajan, Wenlong Huang, Jiajun Wu +2 · 30 citations

club pickReinforcement learning & control Hardware & morphology co-design

2025-11-20

Dexterity from Smart Lenses: Multi-Fingered Robot Manipulation with In-the-Wild Human Demonstrations

Irmak Guzey, Haozhi Qi, Julen Urain +10 · 16 citations

club pickDexterous manipulation Egocentric & human data

2025-09-29

Training Agents Inside of Scalable World Models

Danijar Hafner, Wilson Yan, Timothy Lillicrap · 117 citations

club pickWorld models Reinforcement learning & control

2023-01-10

Mastering Diverse Domains through World Models

Danijar Hafner, Jurgis Pasukonis, Jimmy Ba +1 · 1,333 citations

club pickWorld models Reinforcement learning & control

2022-06-28

DayDreamer: World Models for Physical Robot Learning

Philipp Wu, Alejandro Escontrela, Danijar Hafner +2 · 553 citations

club pickCoRLWorld models Humanoids & locomotion

2022-06-08

Deep Hierarchical Planning from Pixels

Danijar Hafner, Kuang-Huei Lee, Ian Fischer +1 · 145 citations

club pickNeurIPSWorld models Humanoids & locomotion

2020-10-05

Mastering Atari with Discrete World Models

Danijar Hafner, Timothy Lillicrap, Mohammad Norouzi +1 · 1,321 citations

club pickICLRWorld models Humanoids & locomotion

2019-12-03

Dream to Control: Learning Behaviors by Latent Imagination

Danijar Hafner, Timothy Lillicrap, Jimmy Ba +1 · 2,186 citations

club pickICLRWorld models Reinforcement learning & control

2018-03-27

World Models

David Ha, Jürgen Schmidhuber · 1,987 citations

club pickWorld models Reinforcement learning & control

Recent work

2026-09-09

Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous UAV Exploration in Wildfire Response

Caden Chandra, Jerry Ng

Reinforcement learning & control Navigation & mobility

2026-09-09

Learning Terrain-Adaptive Humanoid Locomotion on Granular Terrain

Junnosuke Kamohara, Feiyang Wu, Andy Ningan Zong +4

Humanoids & locomotion Reinforcement learning & control

2026-09-09

Assembling Two Parts in One Hand

Liuao Pei, Tianyue Wu, Hui Zhang +2

CoRL 2026Dexterous manipulation Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks

2026-09-09

HaWMPO: Hallucination-Aware World Model-based Policy Optimization for Generalist Robot Policy

Zengjue Chen, Peidong Liu, Jiawei Li +1

World models Vision-language-action

2026-09-09

ViBe: Visual Behavior Adaptation for Perceptive Humanoid Whole-Body Control

Lokesh Krishna, Sarvesh Venkatesan, An Zhang +1

Humanoids & locomotion Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks

2026-09-09

Decision Transformer for UAV-Mounted RIS-Assisted Dynamic D2D Communications

Yaxuan Liu

Reinforcement learning & control Navigation & mobility

2026-09-09

HiRAD: A Flexible Large-Scale AGV Routing System

Yunjie Huang, Ruizhong Wu, Mengxuan Zhang +3

Reinforcement learning & control

2026-09-09

A Risk-Sensitive and Uncertainty-Aware Decision-Making and Control Framework for Safe and Robust Autonomous Driving

Zhuoren Li, Ran Yu, Weiqi Zhang +4

Reinforcement learning & control Navigation & mobility

2026-09-09

Compact Visuotactile World Models for Lifting: Prediction, Reward Alignment, and Force Constraints

Qinzhen Ma, Sida Peng

World models Tactile & force sensing

2026-09-08

Actuator Dynamics Curricula for Narrow-Viability Tasks in Legged Robot Learning

Kousheek Chakraborty, Chandan K. Rajendra, Ayham Alharbat +1

CoRL 2026Humanoids & locomotion Reinforcement learning & control

2026-09-08

Unthrottling the Tanh Jacobian in SAC: A Negative Result on Bang-Bang Control and MetaDrive

Faiq Shamass

Reinforcement learning & control

2026-09-08

A Decade of Bayesian Optimization for Controller Tuning and Robot Learning: Tutorial, Review, and Future Prospects

David Stenger, Paul Brunzema, Johanna Menn +3

Reinforcement learning & control

2026-09-08

AccelMPC: High-Rate, Low-Power FPGA-Accelerated Model Predictive Control for Tiny Drones

Andrea Grillo, Brian Plancher

Reinforcement learning & control Navigation & mobility

2026-09-08

No Free Checker: A Survey of Verifiers for Robot Policies

Yang Wan, Xihang Yue, Zhirui Liu +7

World models Vision-language-action

2026-09-08

Model Predictive Control of Tensegrity Robots via Contact-Aware Graph Neural Dynamics Model

Nelson Chen, Patrick Meng, Charles Tang +5

Tactile & force sensing Reinforcement learning & control

2026-09-08

CAST: Alternating State-Value Targets and Expanded Policy Gradients for Model-Based Reinforcement Learning

Pietro Noah Crestaz, Mohamed Yassine Kabouri, Nicolas Mansard +1

Humanoids & locomotion Reinforcement learning & control

2026-09-08

Graph-Based Safe Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Agent Systems with Time-Varying Topology

Xiao Sizhe, Dong Lijing, Bai Rui +1

Reinforcement learning & control Navigation & mobility

2026-09-08

Learning to build covering structures with continuous adjustments

Gabriel Vallat, Maryam Kamgarpour, Stefana Parascho

IROS 2026Reinforcement learning & control Navigation & mobility

2026-09-08

SUN: Reaching for Novelty in Reinforcement Learning

Wenyan Yang, Arsenii Mustafin, Dominik Baumann +2

Reinforcement learning & control Navigation & mobility

2026-09-08

Bridging Language and Physics: Automated Design of Continuum Robots with Large Language Models

Jingyi Chen, Mohan Zhang, Laura Yao +5

RoboticsDexterous manipulation Humanoids & locomotion

2026-09-07

Learning to Fly: Stable Vision-Guided UAV Servoing with Compact Target-Centric Cues and Reinforcement Learning

Saurbh Singh Jamwal, Nived Chebrolu

Reinforcement learning & control Navigation & mobility

2026-09-07

mjorbit: A Simulation Framework for Space Robotics

John Z. Zhang, Joris Verhagen, Fausto Vega +2

Reinforcement learning & control Hardware & morphology co-design

2026-09-07

Decentralized Safe Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning via Predictive Shielding

Yacine El Yamani, Hanna Krasowski, Elena Vanneaux

Reinforcement learning & control Safety & evaluation

2026-09-07

Anti-Gravity Walking by a Flying Humanoid Robot via Thrust-Rate Input Whole-Body Model Predictive Control

Kazuki Sugihara, Kei Okada

Humanoids & locomotion Reinforcement learning & control

2026-09-07

Zero-Shot Sim-to-Real Contact-Rich Assembly via Proprioception-Anchored Cross-Modal Pretraining

Yuhan Wang, Yurou Chen, Hongye Jiang +1

Tactile & force sensing Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks

2026-09-07

SMaRT-Tug: Structured Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Physics-Based Tugboat-Barge Collaborative Manipulation

Junkai Lu, Jiadong Zhao, Jiacheng Zhang +8

Tactile & force sensing Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks

2026-09-07

Phase-and-First-Arrival VLM Feedback for Sparse-Reward Reinforcement Learning in Surgical Manipulation

Wanli Liuchen, Fangyuan Wang, Bin Li +4

Dexterous manipulation Reinforcement learning & control

2026-09-07

From LLM-Generated Specifications to Learned Quadruped Locomotion

Merve Atasever, Keyan Azbijari, Cagan Bakirci +5

Humanoids & locomotion Reinforcement learning & control

2026-09-07

WM-Craftnet: World Synesthesia Model for Generalizable and Robust Dexterous In-Hand Manipulation

Jie Yin, Zeyuan Zhao, Xiaojing Tan +3

World models Dexterous manipulation

2026-09-07

Mind the Phase: Effective Rank and Representation Health in Legged Locomotion

Felipe Tommaselli, Thiago H. Segreto, Juliano D. Negri +2

CoRL 2026Humanoids & locomotion Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks

2026-09-07

Distributed Secure Learning Control for Large-scale Multirobots under Stealthy Actuator Attacks

Xinglong Zhang, Qingwen Ma, Cong Li +5

Reinforcement learning & control Hardware & morphology co-design

2026-09-07

Noisy-Space Policy Gradient for Diffusion Policies in Offline Reinforcement Learning

Mahmoud Selim, Cristina Cipriani, Karl H. Johansson

ICML 2026Reinforcement learning & control

2026-09-06

SkillX: Unified Multi-Skill Policy Learning for Humanoid Soccer

Zhangchen Ye, Enxuan Ruan, Yifei Bao +10

CoRL 2026Humanoids & locomotion Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks

2026-09-06

OcclusionCBF: Backup Control Barrier Functions for Safe Navigation Among Hidden Dynamic Obstacles

Taekyung Kim, Hun Kuk Park, Renya Wada +3

Reinforcement learning & control 3D & spatial reasoning

2026-09-06

Geometric Distributional Control: Learning Progress with Partial Structural Knowledge

Tong Wu

Reinforcement learning & control Navigation & mobility

2026-09-05

MobileVLA-R1 2.0: RL-Enhanced Reasoning for Mobile Robot Control

Ting Huang, Yue Huang, Zeyu Zhang +2

Vision-language-action Humanoids & locomotion

2026-09-05

SCoCaT: Success Conditioned Constrained Reinforcement Learning for Spacecraft Docking

Aman Arora, Ricard Marsal I Castan, Matteo El-Hariry +1

CoRL 2026Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks Reinforcement learning & control

2026-09-05

FALCON-S: Fixed-wing ground-effect Aerodynamics Simulator and Flight Control Learning Suite

Matteo El Hariry, Pedro Lima, Andrej Orsula +2

Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks Reinforcement learning & control

2026-09-05

How to Learn from What a Human Would Avoid? Intervention-Aware World Models with Real-World RL for Dexterous Manipulation

Jiaju Yin, Zhenhui Zhang, Lixin Xu +5

CoRL 2026World models Dexterous manipulation

2026-09-04

Information-Guided Safe Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Gas Source Localization using sUAS

Sachin Giri, Thomas Zhao, Matthew Huynh +1

Reinforcement learning & control Navigation & mobility

577 papers in this corpus carry the reinforcement learning & control tag. How tagging works.