CATS: Smooth Control of Deep Reinforcement Learning Policies via Temporal Regularization

The authors propose the CATS method, which combines a temporal penalty with linear ramp-up to suppress action oscillations in deep reinforcement learning policies. The paper proves that the temporal penalty can bound the expected action differences between current states that share the same successor state, thereby producing a spatial smoothing effect. In simulations and real-world environments, the method is verified to significantly reduce action oscillations without degrading task performance, with very low computational overhead. The work was submitted to ICRA 2027.