Related papers: Stein Variational Ergodic Surface Coverage with SE…
Optimization algorithms are pivotal in advancing various scientific and industrial fields but often encounter obstacles such as trapping in local minima, saddle points, and plateaus (flat regions), which makes the convergence to reasonable…
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…
Exploration requires that robots reason about numerous ways to cover a space in response to dynamically changing conditions. However, in continuous domains there are potentially infinitely many options for robots to explore which can prove…
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…
We introduce a new trajectory optimization method for robotic grasping based on a point-cloud representation of robots and task spaces. In our method, robots are represented by 3D points on their link surfaces. The task space of a robot is…
In this project, we propose a Variational Inference algorithm to approximate posterior distributions. Building on prior methods, we develop the Gradient-Steered Stein Variational Gradient Descent (G-SVGD) approach. This method introduces a…
In search and surveillance applications in robotics, it is intuitive to spatially distribute robot trajectories with respect to the probability of locating targets in the domain. Ergodic coverage is one such approach to trajectory planning…
Generating 3D content from a single image remains a fundamentally challenging and ill-posed problem due to the inherent absence of geometric and textural information in occluded regions. While state-of-the-art generative models can…
While grasp detection is an important part of any robotic manipulation pipeline, reliable and accurate grasp detection in $SE(3)$ remains a research challenge. Many robotics applications in unstructured environments such as the home or…
Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) is a prominent particle-based variational inference method used for sampling a target distribution. SVGD has attracted interest for application in machine-learning techniques such as Bayesian…
Stochastic gradient descent (SGD) holds as a classical method to build large scale machine learning models over big data. A stochastic gradient is typically calculated from a limited number of samples (known as mini-batch), so it…
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…
Stein variational gradient descent (SVGD) is a particle-based inference algorithm that leverages gradient information for efficient approximate inference. In this work, we enhance SVGD by leveraging preconditioning matrices, such as the…
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…
3D Gaussian Splatting has emerged as an alternative 3D representation for novel view synthesis, benefiting from its high-quality rendering results and real-time rendering speed. However, the 3D Gaussians learned by 3D-GS have ambiguous…
Navigating an arbitrary-shaped ground robot safely in cluttered environments remains a challenging problem. The existing trajectory planners that account for the robot's physical geometry severely suffer from the intractable runtime. To…
Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD) is a highly efficient method to sample from an unnormalized probability distribution. However, the SVGD update relies on gradients of the log-density, which may not always be available. Existing…
Designs generated by density-based topology optimization (TO) exhibit jagged and/or smeared boundaries, which forms an obstacle to their integration with existing CAD tools. Addressing this problem by smoothing or manual design adjustments…
Autonomous robotic exploration in remote and extreme environments allows scientists to model complex transport phenomena and collective behaviors described by continuously deforming flow fields. Although these environments are naturally…
Bayesian computation plays an important role in modern machine learning and statistics to reason about uncertainty. A key computational challenge in Bayesian inference is to develop efficient techniques to approximate, or draw samples from…