Related papers: A Path-Dependent Variational Framework for Increme…
We consider the problem of an autonomous agent equipped with multiple sensors, each with different sensing precision and energy costs. The agent's goal is to explore the environment and gather information subject to its resource constraints…
One of the main challenges in the field of embodied artificial intelligence is the open-ended autonomous learning of complex behaviours. Our approach is to use task-independent, information-driven intrinsic motivation(s) to support…
Efficient and robust path planning hinges on combining all accessible information sources. In particular, the task of path planning for robotic environmental exploration and monitoring depends highly on the current belief of the world. To…
The safe deployment of autonomous vehicles relies on their ability to effectively react to environmental changes. This can require maneuvering on varying surfaces which is still a difficult problem, especially for slippery terrains. To…
Classical navigation systems typically operate using a fixed set of hand-picked parameters (e.g. maximum speed, sampling rate, inflation radius, etc.) and require heavy expert re-tuning in order to work in new environments. To mitigate this…
Unsupervised exploration and representation learning become increasingly important when learning in diverse and sparse environments. The information-theoretic principle of empowerment formalizes an unsupervised exploration objective through…
We consider the setting where a collection of time series, modeled as random processes, evolve in a causal manner, and one is interested in learning the graph governing the relationships of these processes. A special case of wide interest…
Randomized sampling based algorithms are widely used in robot motion planning due to the problem's intractability, and are experimentally effective on a wide range of problem instances. Most variants bias their sampling using various…
Animals execute goal-directed behaviours despite the limited range and scope of their sensors. To cope, they explore environments and store memories maintaining estimates of important information that is not presently available. Recently,…
Understanding the behavior of road users is of vital importance for the development of trajectory prediction systems. In this context, the latest advances have focused on recurrent structures, establishing the social interaction between the…
We study a combinatorial problem inspired by the following scenario: fully autonomous vehicles drive on a multi-lane ($m \geq 2$) road. Each vehicle heads to its own destination and is allowed to exit the road only through a single…
In this work, we investigate an indirect approach for the numerical solution of optimal control problems via neural networks. A customized neural network is constructed, where optimal state, co-state and control trajectories are…
Path planning for 3D solid objects is a challenging problem, requiring a search in a six-dimensional configuration space, which is, nevertheless, essential in many robotic applications such as bin-picking and assembly. The commonly used…
This paper investigates Path planning Among Movable Obstacles (PAMO), which seeks a minimum cost collision-free path among static obstacles from start to goal while allowing the robot to push away movable obstacles (i.e., objects) along its…
Geometric methods for solving open-world off-road navigation tasks, by learning occupancy and metric maps, provide good generalization but can be brittle in outdoor environments that violate their assumptions (e.g., tall grass).…
We consider the estimation of large covariance and precision matrices from high-dimensional sub-Gaussian or heavier-tailed observations with slowly decaying temporal dependence. The temporal dependence is allowed to be long-range so with…
We study episodic reinforcement learning in Markov decision processes when the agent receives additional feedback per step in the form of several transition observations. Such additional observations are available in a range of tasks…
Tiering is an essential technique for building large-scale information retrieval systems. While the selection of documents for high priority tiers critically impacts the efficiency of tiering, past work focuses on optimizing it with respect…
Deploying Lagrangian drifters that facilitate the state estimation of the underlying flow field within a future time interval is practically important. However, the uncertainty in estimating the flow field prevents using standard…
The idea of reusing or transferring information from previously learned tasks (source tasks) for the learning of new tasks (target tasks) has the potential to significantly improve the sample efficiency of a reinforcement learning agent. In…