InstructMPC: A Human-LLM-in-the-Loop Framework for Context-Aware Control

Abstract: Model Predictive Control (MPC) is a powerful control strategy widely utilized in domains like energy management, building control, and autonomous systems. However, its effectiveness in real-world settings is challenged by the need to incorporate context-specific predictions and expert instructions, which traditional MPC often neglects. We propose InstructMPC, a novel framework that addresses this gap by integrating real-time human instructions through a LLM to produce context-aware predictions for MPC. Our method employs a Language-to-Distribution (L2D) module to translate contextual information into predictive disturbance trajectories, which are then incorporated into the MPC optimization. Unlike existing context-aware and language-based MPC models, InstructMPC enables dynamic human-LLM interaction and fine-tunes the L2D module in a closed loop with theoretical performance guarantees, achieving a regret bound of $O(\sqrt{T\log T})$ for linear dynamics when optimized via advanced fine-tuning methods such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) using a tailored loss function.