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Primal-dual methods in online optimization give several of the state-of-the art results in both of the most common models: adversarial and stochastic/random order. Here we try to provide a more unified analysis of primal-dual algorithms to…
Autonomous vehicle (AV) motion planning problems often involve non-convex constraints, which present a major barrier to applying model predictive control (MPC) in real time on embedded hardware. This paper presents an approach for…
Sparse optimization problems are ubiquitous in many fields such as statistics, signal/image processing and machine learning. This has led to the birth of many iterative algorithms to solve them. A powerful strategy to boost the performance…
Whether rigid or compliant, contact interactions are inherent to robot motions, enabling them to move or manipulate things. Contact interactions result from complex physical phenomena, that can be mathematically cast as Nonlinear…
Many scientific and engineering applications feature nonsmooth convex minimization problems over convex sets. In this paper, we address an important instance of this broad class where we assume that the nonsmooth objective is equipped with…
Most of the optimal guidance problems can be formulated as nonconvex optimization problems, which can be solved indirectly by relaxation, convexification, or linearization. Although these methods are guaranteed to converge to the global…
Trajectory optimization offers mature tools for motion planning in high-dimensional spaces under dynamic constraints. However, when facing complex configuration spaces, cluttered with obstacles, roboticists typically fall back to…
We propose a sequential quadratic programming (SQP) method that can incorporate adaptive sampling for stochastic nonsmooth nonconvex optimization problems with upper-C^2 objectives. Upper-$\Ctwo$ functions can be viewed as…
The problem of constrained Markov decision process (CMDP) is investigated, where an agent aims to maximize the expected accumulated discounted reward subject to multiple constraints on its utilities/costs. A new primal-dual approach is…
Sparsity constrained minimization captures a wide spectrum of applications in both machine learning and signal processing. This class of problems is difficult to solve since it is NP-hard and existing solutions are primarily based on…
The primary goal of motion planning is to generate safe and efficient trajectories for vehicles. Traditionally, motion planning models are trained using imitation learning to mimic the behavior of human experts. However, these models often…
Symmetry is one of the most fundamental geometric cues in computer vision, and detecting it has been an ongoing challenge. With the recent advances in vision-language models,~i.e., CLIP, we investigate whether a pre-trained CLIP model can…
Many nonconvex problems in robotics can be relaxed into convex formulations via Semi-Definite Programming (SDP) that can be solved to global optimality. The practical quality of these solutions, however, critically depends on rounding them…
In this article, a globally convergent sequential quadratic programming (SQP) method is developed for multi-objective optimization problems with inequality type constraints. A feasible descent direction is obtained using a linear…
State-of-the-art robotics simulators operate in discrete time. This requires users to choose a time step, which is both critical and challenging: large steps can produce non-physical artifacts, while small steps force the simulation to run…
This paper addresses a distributed convex optimization problem with a class of coupled constraints, which arise in a multi-agent system composed of multiple communities modeled by cliques. First, we propose a fully distributed…
Linear models for control and motion generation of humanoid robots have received significant attention in the past years, not only due to their well known theoretical guarantees, but also because of practical computational advantages.…
Motion planning is a crucial component of autonomous robot driving. While various trajectory datasets exist, effectively utilizing them for a target domain remains challenging due to differences in agent interactions and environmental…
In this paper we provide an algorithm for solving constrained composite primal-dual monotone inclusions, i.e., monotone inclusions in which a priori information on primal-dual solutions is represented via closed convex sets. The proposed…
Physics-based simulation is essential for developing and evaluating robot manipulation policies, particularly in scenarios involving deformable objects and complex contact interactions. However, existing simulators often struggle to balance…