Related papers: Stochastic Optimal Control for Collective Variable…

The task of sampling from a probability density can be approached as transporting a tractable density function to the target, known as dynamical measure transport. In this work, we tackle it through a principled unified framework using…

Molecular dynamics (MD) simulation is widely used to study protein conformations and dynamics. However, conventional simulation suffers from being trapped in some local energy minima that are hard to escape. Thus, most computational time is…

Stochastic particle-optimization sampling (SPOS) is a recently-developed scalable Bayesian sampling framework that unifies stochastic gradient MCMC (SG-MCMC) and Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) algorithms based on Wasserstein…

In this paper, we propose a stochastic optimization method that adaptively controls the sample size used in the computation of gradient approximations. Unlike other variance reduction techniques that either require additional storage or the…

The optimal control problem of stochastic systems is commonly solved via robust or scenario-based optimization methods, which are both challenging to scale to long optimization horizons. We cast the optimal control problem of a stochastic…

Many enhanced sampling techniques rely on the identification of a number of collective variables that describe all the slow modes of the system. By constructing a bias potential in this reduced space one is then able to sample efficiently…

Stochastic equations play an important role in computational science, due to their ability to treat a wide variety of complex statistical problems. However, current algorithms are strongly limited by their sampling variance, which scales…

Sampling-based methods have become a cornerstone of contemporary approaches to Model Predictive Control (MPC), as they make no restrictions on the differentiability of the dynamics or cost function and are straightforward to parallelize.…

Controlling polymorphism in molecular crystals is crucial in the pharmaceutical, dye, and pesticide industries. However, its theoretical description is extremely challenging, due to the associated long timescales ($ > 1 \, \mu s$). We…

Cross-entropy method model predictive control (CEM--MPC) is a powerful gradient-free technique for nonlinear optimal control, but its performance is often limited by the reliance on random sampling. This conventional approach can lead to…

Control of machine learning models has emerged as an important paradigm for a broad range of robotics applications. In this paper, we present a sampling-based nonlinear model predictive control (NMPC) approach for control of neural network…

We characterize the Schr\"odinger bridge problems by a family of Mckean-Vlasov stochastic control problems with no terminal time distribution constraint. In doing so, we use the theory of Hilbert space embeddings of probability measures and…

This paper presents a novel Stochastic Optimal Control (SOC) method based on Model Predictive Path Integral control (MPPI), named Stein Variational Guided MPPI (SVG-MPPI), designed to handle rapidly shifting multimodal optimal action…

We present a method to sample Markov-chain trajectories constrained to both the initial and final conditions, which we term Markov bridges. The trajectories are conditioned to end in a specific state at a given time. We derive the master…

Traditional approaches to motion modeling for skid-steer robots struggle with capturing nonlinear tire-terrain dynamics, especially during high-speed maneuvers. In this paper, we tackle such nonlinearities by enhancing a dynamic unicycle…

Four-wheel independent drive and steering vehicle (4WIDS Vehicle, Swerve Drive Robot) has the ability to move in any direction by its eight degrees of freedom (DoF) control inputs. Although the high maneuverability enables efficient…

We present a sampling-based control approach that can generate smooth actions for general nonlinear systems without external smoothing algorithms. Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) control has been utilized in numerous robotic…

Many real-world multi-agent systems exhibit nonlinear dynamics and complex inter-agent interactions. As these systems increase in scale, the main challenges arise from achieving scalability and handling nonconvexity. To address these…

Stochastic Gradient Boosting (SGB) is a widely used approach to regularization of boosting models based on decision trees. It was shown that, in many cases, random sampling at each iteration can lead to better generalization performance of…

For a nonlinear stochastic path planning problem, sampling-based algorithms generate thousands of random sample trajectories to find the optimal path while guaranteeing safety by Lagrangian penalty methods. However, the sampling-based…