{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/mpc-net-a-first-principles-guided-policy","title":"MPC-Net: A First Principles Guided Policy Search","arxiv_id":"1909.05197","date":"2019-09-11","proceeding":null,"authors":["Jan Carius","Farbod Farshidian","Marco Hutter"],"abstract":"We present an Imitation Learning approach for the control of dynamical systems with a known model. Our policy search method is guided by solutions from MPC. Typical policy search methods of this kind minimize a distance metric between the guiding demonstrations and the learned policy. Our loss function, however, corresponds to the minimization of the control Hamiltonian, which derives from the principle of optimality. Therefore, our algorithm directly attempts to solve the optimality conditions with a parameterized class of control laws. Additionally, the proposed loss function explicitly encodes the constraints of the optimal control problem and we provide numerical evidence that its minimization achieves improved constraint satisfaction. We train a mixture-of-expert neural network architecture for controlling a quadrupedal robot and show that this policy structure is well suited for such multimodal systems. The learned policy can successfully stabilize different gaits on the real walking robot from less than 10 min of demonstration data.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.05197v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.05197v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"mpc-net-a-first-principles-guided-policy","repo_url":"https://github.com/leggedrobotics/MPC-Net","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"imitation-learning","task_name":"Imitation Learning"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=1909.05197","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"1909.05197"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/leggedrobotics/MPC-Net","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran_honours":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":0,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"f36933dd8240a95e","entry":"num_samples_per_trajectory_point","repo":"leggedrobotics/MPC-Net","repo_kind":"official","path":"ballbot_learner.py","file_url":"https://github.com/leggedrobotics/MPC-Net/blob/HEAD/ballbot_learner.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_honours","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"HONOURS","metamorphic_tier":"well_formed","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"f36933dd8240a95e"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}