# Feasibility-Aware Security-Constrained Unit Commitment via Hybrid Soft Actor-Critic with Quantum-Sampled Features

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.26345 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.26345/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Quantum reinforcement learning, one of 15 directions in Deep reinforcement learning methods.
- Builds on 13 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Jun 2026.

## Placed in

- Deep reinforcement learning methods / [Quantum reinforcement learning](https://mlsanity.com/deeprl/quantum-reinforcement-learning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Soft Actor-Critic: Off-Policy Maximum Entropy Deep Reinforcement Learning with a Stochastic Actor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01290/) (2018)
- [Supervised learning with quantum enhanced feature spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.11326/) (2018)
- [Learning to Solve Large-Scale Security-Constrained Unit Commitment Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.01697/) (2019)
- [JuMP 1.0: Recent improvements to a modeling language for mathematical optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.03866/) (2022)
- [Is learning for the unit commitment problem a low-hanging fruit?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11687/) (2021)
- [An Optimization Method-Assisted Ensemble Deep Reinforcement Learning Algorithm to Solve Unit Commitment Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04249/) (2022)
- [Qubit-Efficient Quantum Annealing for Stochastic Unit Commitment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15917/) (2025)
- [Leveraging Quantum Computing for Accelerated Classical Algorithms in Power Systems Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19112/) (2025)
- [A New Hybrid Quantum-Classical Algorithm for Solving the Unit Commitment Problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.00145/) (2025)
- [D2-UC: A Distributed-Distributed Quantum-Classical Framework for Unit Commitment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.03104/) (2025)
- [A Survey on Applications of Quantum Computing for Unit Commitment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01777/) (2026)
- [Structure-Aware Commitment Reduction for Network-Constrained Unit Commitment with Solver-Preserving Guarantees](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.02788/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Security-constrained unit commitment (SCUC) couples binary commitment, economic dispatch, reserves, and network security over a multiperiod horizon, which makes an exact solution expensive at realistic system sizes. This paper proposes a three-layer hybrid framework in which a Bernoulli hybrid soft actor-critic (HSAC) policy proposes hourly commitments, a quantum-sampled auxiliary channel augments the state, and a native SCUC mixed-integer linear program recovers dispatch and security variables after only a limited subset of commitment binaries is enforced. The method is therefore solver-compatible rather than an end-to-end replacement for exact optimization. We formalize the SCUC-to-reinforcement-learning interface, derive the temporal coverage induced by the fixed cap, and conduct representative experiments on the 14-, 57-, and 118-bus cases. The results show stable, low-cost recovery in the 14-bus case; a very low screen-rejection rate in the 57-bus case, consistent with learned feasibility generalization under fixed intertemporal SCUC constraints; and a clear coverage bottleneck in the 118-bus case once the enforcement cap no longer spans a complete commitment period. The 118-bus case runtime traces nevertheless remain tightly clustered for accepted episodes, indicating that the policy still captures a repeatable recovery pattern across most episodes. The study, therefore, identifies the dominant limitation of the current implementation as the amount of useful commitment information that reaches the recovery model under an exploratory Bernoulli actor and a small enforcement cap, and shows how that limitation governs scalability.