Empowerment MPCExpert
A Unified Framework for Empowerment and Predictive Control
This preprint presents a controller that turns empowerment, an information-theoretic measure of future controllability, into an objective for sampling-based model predictive control. It uses the same action distribution for probing and executed control and needs only first-order derivatives. On simulated pendulum swing-up tasks with sparse rewards, combining this intrinsic objective with a task cost improved success rates up to 100%, while task cost alone failed.