Learning to Plan, Planning to Learn: Adaptive Hierarchical RL-MPC for Sample-Efficient Decision Making

arXiv:2512.17091v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose a new approach for solving planning problems with a hierarchical structure, fusing reinforcement learning and MPC planning. Our formulation tightly and elegantly couples the two planning paradigms. It leverages reinforcement learning actions to inform the MPPI sampler, and adaptively aggregates MPPI samples to inform the value estimation. The resulting adaptive process leverages further MPPI exploration where value estimates ar