Foundations of Reinforcement Learning and Control:Connections and New Perspectives

Reinforcement learning and control theory are two adjacent scientific fields that focus on optimizing the controller of unknown dynamical systems using feedback. While both fields have common roots in dynamic programming, they have evolved with distinct methodologies, goals, and cultures. Despite decades of mutual influence, a significant gap persists between the two communities. This tutorial introduces adaptive control, actor-critic reinforcement algorithms, and a new way to combine these two paradigms for data-driven decision making on a classical locomotion control problem. Our aim is to provide a foundation for understanding the core differences between the two approaches and insights to help experts in each field better understand and engage with the tools and approaches of the other.

Real2Sim2Real for Vision-Language-Action Manipulation: An AMD ROCm-Based Pipeline

Physical AI -- the integration of large vision-language-action (VLA) models with embodied agents that act in the real world -- has emerged as the next major frontier for AI, echoed by industry leaders such as Jensen Huang (``the next big thing is Physical AI, AI with a body,'' GTC Paris, June 2025) and Dr. Lisa Su (`we're entering the world of Physical AI ... this is where AI enters the real world,' CES 2026). This paper presents an end-to-end, fully AMD-accelerated technology stack for embodied manipulation, spanning data-center training silicon, Radeon PRO simulation/rendering GPUs, and Ryzen AI edge compute, unified by the open ROCm software stack. We demonstrate that training and deploying VLA-based manipulation policies does not require a CUDA-locked ecosystem. Four progressive demonstrations are presented: (1) a Sim-to-Real manipulation pipeline trained with SmolVLA and deployed on a physical Franka arm; (2) a semantic, language-grounded object-selection task (`one-of-three'); (3) a Real2Sim synthetic-data generation pipeline that fuses 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) reconstructions of real scenes with the Genesis physics engine; and (4) large-scale reinforcement learning for quadruped and humanoid locomotion benchmarked across multiple hardware platforms. All pipelines run natively on ROCm + PyTorch on RDNA4 (Radeon AI PRO R9700) and RDNA3.5 (Radeon PRO W7900) hardware and are reproducible on the free Radeon Cloud Platform.

Towards Miniature Humanoid Tele-Loco-Manipulation Using Virtual Reality and Reinforcement Learning

Full-sized humanoid robot capabilities have grown exponentially in recent years, aiming towards general-purpose deployment in human environments. A popular control method used by manufacturers utilizes Virtual Reality for upper-body teleoperation and Reinforcement Learning for lower-body balance and locomotion control. As a result, a single remote operator can see, manipulate, and navigate about a real, distant physical environment. This powerful control stack is often relegated to expensive full-sized robots, many of which are inaccessible to the research community. Miniature humanoids are more prevalent, but employ less biomimicry in their design (e.g. fewer sensors, Degrees of Freedom, etc) and lack similar developments. This paper describes a compliant full-body telepresence control stack developed from the ground up for miniature humanoids. Framework experimentation on ROBOTIS OP3 hardware showcases walking at speeds up to 0.45 m/s independent of arm motions. Tele-loco-manipulation is demonstrated via a cube relocation experiment with an expert human operator. On average, the teleoperated system moved 2 different 40 g cubes within 10 mins, walking a total distance of 5 m. Overall, the developed system shows potential for miniature humanoid tele-loco-manipulation.

DynaWM: Dynamics-Aware Distillation with World Model and Momentum Targets for Smooth Locomotion over Continuous Stairs

Recent advances in control have enabled bipedal-wheeled robots to traverse slopes and single-step obstacles, yet long staircase traversal remains challenging as current teacher-student frameworks suffer from weakened dynamics-aware representations and incomplete terrain geometry encoding. To bridge this gap, we propose DynaWM, a dynamics-aware representation learning framework. To enhance terrain encoding capability and enable transparent assessment, we introduce a world model as a regularizer to enforce forward-dynamics awareness, preserving comprehensive terrain geometry while facilitating hierarchical encoding visualization. To stabilize knowledge transfer, we employ a momentum target encoder to provide consistent distillation targets, preventing dimensional collapse from non-stationary teacher updates. Evaluation of the learned representations through Principal Component Analysis (PCA) visualization and quantitative metrics reveals that our encoder hierarchically captures terrain geometry with higher terrain encoding capability, leading to enhanced terrain adaptability and motion smoothness. Experimental results in simulation and real hardware demonstrate that our method achieves superior terrain adaptability and motion smoothness, enabling bipedal-wheeled robots to overcome diverse continuous stairs, as shown in Fig. 1.

DF-ExpEnse: Diffusion Filtered Exploration for Sample Efficient Finetuning

A natural recipe for intelligent robotic decision-making is initializing from pretrained generative control policies, which have summarized offline experience, and adapting them to self-collected online experience. We present DF-ExpEnse, an exploration technique that improves the quality of online experience collection, thus increasing finetuning sample-efficiency. DF-ExpEnse leverages the multimodal modeling capabilities of the generative control policy to create an expressive and tractably evaluatable candidate set. It then utilizes an ensemble of critics to identify the action that best balances quality with high exploration interest. In fleet settings, DF-ExpEnse further enables cross-agent communication to facilitate collaborative exploration as a group. DF-ExpEnse can be seamlessly integrated with existing strategies that finetune pretrained generative control policies via reinforcement learning. We experimentally validate consistent sample-efficiency benefits through DF-ExpEnse across a variety of manipulation and locomotion tasks, compared to default finetuning and alternative action selection schemes. Project can be found at https://df-expense.github.io.

Knowledge Reutilization in Meta-Reinforcement Learning

Meta-reinforcement learning enables fast adaptation by extracting shared structure from related tasks, but existing end-to-end methods often couple task inference with embodiment-specific control. This coupling can obscure non-parametric task semantics, reduce sample efficiency, and limit cross-agent reuse. We propose a meta-knowledge reutilization framework that learns task-level knowledge on a dynamics-simplified agent and transfers it to heterogeneous agents. The framework uses a Bayesian non-parametric prior to organize latent task modes and a high-level policy to generate task-level magnitude guidance. To bridge reusable task knowledge with different embodiments, we introduce a semantic-magnitude interface and a lightweight temporal adaptor, which convert frozen meta-knowledge into temporally aligned subgoals for embodiment-specific low-level controllers. Experiments on multiple locomotion agents show that our framework reduces final-step tracking error by 94.75% -- 99.79% compared with recent state-of-the-art baselines and achieves comparable deployment performance with about 23.8% of their interaction data.