Related papers: Second-Order Stein Variational Dynamic Optimizatio…
Many Imitation and Reinforcement Learning approaches rely on the availability of expert-generated demonstrations for learning policies or value functions from data. Obtaining a reliable distribution of trajectories from motion planners is…
We present Constrained Stein Variational Trajectory Optimization (CSVTO), an algorithm for performing trajectory optimization with constraints on a set of trajectories in parallel. We frame constrained trajectory optimization as a novel…
Planning for sequential robotics tasks often requires integrated symbolic and geometric reasoning. TAMP algorithms typically solve these problems by performing a tree search over high-level task sequences while checking for kinematic and…
Combinatorial black-box optimization in high-dimensional settings demands a careful trade-off between exploiting promising regions of the search space and preserving sufficient exploration to identify multiple optima. Although…
Particle based optimization algorithms have recently been developed as sampling methods that iteratively update a set of particles to approximate a target distribution. In particular Stein variational gradient descent has gained attention…
Many core problems in robotics can be framed as constrained optimization problems. Often on these problems, the robotic system has uncertainty, or it would be advantageous to identify multiple high quality feasible solutions. To enable…
We consider the problem of efficiently computing the maximum likelihood estimator in Generalized Linear Models (GLMs) when the number of observations is much larger than the number of coefficients ($n \gg p \gg 1$). In this regime,…
An algorithm is presented for momentum gradient descent optimization based on the first-order differential equation of the Newtonian dynamics. The fictitious mass is introduced to the dynamics of momentum for regularizing the adaptive…
We propose a general purpose variational inference algorithm that forms a natural counterpart of gradient descent for optimization. Our method iteratively transports a set of particles to match the target distribution, by applying a form of…
Traditional preamble detection algorithms have low accuracy in the grant-based random access scheme in massive machine-type communication (mMTC). We present a novel preamble detection algorithm based on Stein variational gradient descent…
We present a finite-time analysis of two smoothed functional stochastic approximation algorithms for simulation-based optimization. The first is a two time-scale gradient-based method, while the second is a three time-scale Newton-based…
Model predictive control (MPC) schemes have a proven track record for delivering aggressive and robust performance in many challenging control tasks, coping with nonlinear system dynamics, constraints, and observational noise. Despite their…
Trajectory optimization considers the problem of deciding how to control a dynamical system to move along a trajectory which minimizes some cost function. Differential Dynamic Programming (DDP) is an optimal control method which utilizes a…
This paper presents an optimization-based receding horizon trajectory planning algorithm for dynamical systems operating in unstructured and cluttered environments. The proposed approach is a two-step procedure that uses a motion planning…
In this paper, a novel stochastic extra-step quasi-Newton method is developed to solve a class of nonsmooth nonconvex composite optimization problems. We assume that the gradient of the smooth part of the objective function can only be…
We introduce a new second-order inertial optimization method for machine learning called INNA. It exploits the geometry of the loss function while only requiring stochastic approximations of the function values and the generalized…
We present a new particle filtering algorithm for nonlinear systems in the discrete-time setting. Our algorithm is based on the Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) framework, which is a general approach to sample from a target…
Bayesian inference problems require sampling or approximating high-dimensional probability distributions. The focus of this paper is on the recently introduced Stein variational gradient descent methodology, a class of algorithms that rely…
Optimizing 3D k-space sampling trajectories for efficient MRI is important yet challenging. This work proposes a generalized framework for optimizing 3D non-Cartesian sampling patterns via data-driven optimization. We built a differentiable…
Differential Dynamic Programming (DDP) is an efficient trajectory optimization algorithm relying on second-order approximations of a system's dynamics and cost function, and has recently been applied to optimize systems with time-invariant…