Related papers: Adaptive importance sampling for control and infer…
Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) control is a widely used sampling-based method for trajectory optimization, yet its convergence properties remain only partially understood. This paper provides a direct convergence analysis using…
Sampling-based model-predictive controllers have become a powerful optimization tool for planning and control problems in various challenging environments. In this paper, we show how the default choice of uncorrelated Gaussian distributions…
This paper proposes a new importance sampling (IS) that is tailored to quasi-Monte Carlo (QMC) integration over $\mathbb{R}^s$. IS introduces a multiplicative adjustment to the integrand by compensating the sampling from the proposal…
There has been a recent focus in reinforcement learning on addressing continuous state and action problems by optimizing parameterized policies. PI2 is a recent example of this approach. It combines a derivation from first principles of…
The discrete time path integral Monte Carlo (PIMC) with a one-particle density matrix approximation is applied to study the quantum phase transition in the coupled double-well chain. To improve the convergence properties, the exact action…
We give a probabilistic interpretation of the Monte Carlo scheme proposed by Fahim, Touzi and Warin [Ann. Appl. Probab. 21 (2011) 1322-1364] for fully nonlinear parabolic PDEs, and hence generalize it to the path-dependent (or…
Recently path integral methods have been developed for stochastic optimal control for a wide class of models with non-linear dynamics in continuous space-time. Path integral methods find the control that minimizes the expected cost-to-go.…
Sampling-based controllers, such as Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) methods, offer substantial flexibility but often suffer from high variance and low sample efficiency. To address these challenges, we introduce a hybrid…
Importance sampling is a popular variance reduction method for Monte Carlo estimation, where a notorious question is how to design good proposal distributions. While in most cases optimal (zero-variance) estimators are theoretically…
Sampling-based model predictive control (MPC) is effective for nonlinear systems but often produces non-smooth control inputs due to random sampling. To address this issue, we extend the model predictive path integral (MPPI) framework with…
This work introduces a novel paradigm for solving optimal control problems for hybrid dynamical systems under uncertainties. Robotic systems having contact with the environment can be modeled as hybrid systems. Controller design for hybrid…
We propose an improved Path Integral Monte Carlo (PIMC) algorithm called Harmonic PIMC (H-PIMC) and its generalization, Mixed PIMC (M-PIMC). PIMC is a powerful tool for studying quantum condensed phases. However, it often suffers from a low…
Piecewise deterministic Markov processes (PDMPs) can be used to model complex dynamical industrial systems. The counterpart of this modeling capability is their simulation cost, which makes reliability assessment untractable with standard…
In this paper, we open up new avenues for visual servoing systems built upon the Path Integral (PI) optimal control theory, in which the non-linear partial differential equation (PDE) can be transformed into an expectation over all possible…
We extend the Datamodels framework from supervised learning to Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) control. Whereas Datamodels estimate sample influence via regression on a fixed dataset, we instead learn to predict influence directly…
Importance sampling is a Monte Carlo method which designs estimators of expectations under a target distribution using weighted samples from a proposal distribution. When the target distribution is complex, such as multimodal distributions…
Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) control is a type of sampling-based model predictive control that simulates thousands of trajectories and uses these trajectories to synthesize optimal controls on-the-fly. In practice, however, MPPI…
In solving simulation-based stochastic root-finding or optimization problems that involve rare events, such as in extreme quantile estimation, running crude Monte Carlo can be prohibitively inefficient. To address this issue, importance…
We propose an importance sampling (IS)-based transport map Hamiltonian Monte Carlo procedure for performing full Bayesian analysis in general nonlinear high-dimensional hierarchical models. Using IS techniques to construct a transport map,…
Importance sampling (IS) is a Monte Carlo technique for the approximation of intractable distributions and integrals with respect to them. The origin of IS dates from the early 1950s. In the last decades, the rise of the Bayesian paradigm…