Related papers: Constrained Stein Variational Trajectory Optimizat…
This paper proposes a novel technique called "successive stochastic smoothing" that optimizes nonsmooth and discontinuous functions while considering various constraints. Our methodology enables local and global optimization, making it a…
Sampling from an unnormalized target distribution is an essential problem with many applications in probabilistic inference. Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) has been shown to be a powerful method that iteratively updates a set of…
The Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) algorithm is a deterministic particle method for sampling. However, a mean-field analysis reveals that the gradient flow corresponding to the SVGD algorithm (i.e., the Stein Variational Gradient…
We introduce and study a novel problem of computing a shortest path tree with a minimum number of non-terminals. It can be viewed as an (unweighted) Steiner Shortest Path Tree (SSPT) that spans a given set of terminal vertices by shortest…
Stochastic gradient methods (SGMs) have been extensively used for solving stochastic problems or large-scale machine learning problems. Recent works employ various techniques to improve the convergence rate of SGMs for both convex and…
This paper presents a novel method for reformulating non-differentiable collision avoidance constraints into smooth nonlinear constraints using strong duality of convex optimization. We focus on a controlled object whose goal is to avoid…
Coordinating the motions of multiple autonomous vehicles (AVs) requires planning frameworks that ensure safety while making efficient use of space and time. This paper presents a new approach, termed variable-time-step spatio-temporal…
Reliability-based topology optimization (RBTO) requires repeated estimation of small failure probabilities and their gradients, making conventional nested Monte Carlo approaches computationally prohibitive for large scale structural…
Transportation service providers that dispatch drivers and vehicles to riders start to support both on-demand ride requests posted in real time and rides scheduled in advance, leading to new challenges which, to the best of our knowledge,…
Safe corridor-based Trajectory Optimization (TO) presents an appealing approach for collision-free path planning of autonomous robots, offering global optimality through its convex formulation. The safe corridor is constructed based on the…
Trajectory planning for connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) has the potential to improve operational efficiency and vehicle fuel economy in traffic systems. Despite abundant studies in this research area, most of them only consider…
Safe and efficient assistive planning for visually impaired scenarios remains challenging, since existing methods struggle with multi-objective optimization, generalization, and interpretability. In response, this paper proposes a…
Vehicle trajectory optimization is essential to ensure vehicles travel efficiently and safely. This paper presents an infrastructure assisted constrained connected automated vehicles (CAVs) trajectory optimization method on curved roads.…
Stochastic optimization algorithms with variance reduction have proven successful for minimizing large finite sums of functions. Unfortunately, these techniques are unable to deal with stochastic perturbations of input data, induced for…
Trajectory optimization (TO) is an efficient tool to generate a redundant manipulator's joint trajectory following a 6-dimensional Cartesian path. The optimization performance largely depends on the quality of initial trajectories. However,…
The constrained version of the standard online convex optimization (OCO) framework, called COCO is considered, where on every round, a convex cost function and a convex constraint function are revealed to the learner after it chooses the…
Gradient-related first-order methods have become the workhorse of large-scale numerical optimization problems. Many of these problems involve nonconvex objective functions with multiple saddle points, which necessitates an understanding of…
Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) [Liu and Wang, 2016] performs approximate Bayesian inference by representing the posterior with a set of particles. However, SVGD suffers from variance collapse, i.e. poor predictions due to…
Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is an algorithm for sampling from a target density which is known up to a multiplicative constant. Although SVGD is a popular algorithm in practice, its theoretical study is limited to a few recent…
Trajectory optimization (TO) aims to find a sequence of valid states while minimizing costs. However, its fine validation process is often costly due to computationally expensive collision searches, otherwise coarse searches lower the…