Related papers: PISTO: Proximal Inference for Stochastic Trajector…

Multi-vehicle trajectory planning (MVTP) is one of the key challenges in multi-robot systems (MRSs) and has broad applications across various fields. This paper presents ESCoT, an enhanced step-based coordinate trajectory planning method…

Sparse high dimensional graphical model selection is a popular topic in contemporary machine learning. To this end, various useful approaches have been proposed in the context of $\ell_1$-penalized estimation in the Gaussian framework.…

This paper considers the problem of minimizing a convex expectation function over a closed convex set, coupled with a set of inequality convex expectation constraints. We present a new stochastic approximation type algorithm, namely the…

The Expectation Maximization (EM) algorithm is of key importance for inference in latent variable models including mixture of regressors and experts, missing observations. This paper introduces a novel EM algorithm, called…

Probabilistic sampling-based algorithms, such as the probabilistic roadmap (PRM) and the rapidly-exploring random tree (RRT) algorithms, represent one of the most successful approaches to robotic motion planning, due to their strong…

Contact-implicit trajectory optimization (CITO) is an effective method to plan complex trajectories for various contact-rich systems including manipulation and locomotion. CITO formulates a mathematical program with complementarity…

Consider the problem of minimizing the expected value of a (possibly nonconvex) cost function parameterized by a random (vector) variable, when the expectation cannot be computed accurately (e.g., because the statistics of the random…

Over the last 20 years significant effort has been dedicated to the development of sampling-based motion planning algorithms such as the Rapidly-exploring Random Trees (RRT) and its asymptotically optimal version (e.g. RRT*). However,…

The accelerated composite optimization method FISTA (Beck, Teboulle 2009) is suboptimal by a constant factor, and we present a new method OptISTA that improves FISTA by a constant factor of 2. The performance estimation problem (PEP) has…

We develop an implementable stochastic proximal point (SPP) method for a class of weakly convex, composite optimization problems. The proposed stochastic proximal point algorithm incorporates a variance reduction mechanism and the resulting…

The stochastic proximal point (SPP) methods have gained recent attention for stochastic optimization, with strong convergence guarantees and superior robustness to the classic stochastic gradient descent (SGD) methods showcased at little to…

We propose a novel stochastic optimization algorithm called STOchastic Recursive Momentum for Compositional (STORM-Compositional) optimization that minimizes the composition of expectations of two stochastic functions, the latter being an…

Distributionally robust optimization (DRO) problems are increasingly seen as a viable method to train machine learning models for improved model generalization. These min-max formulations, however, are more difficult to solve. We therefore…

We propose a stochastic approximation method for approximating the efficient frontier of chance-constrained nonlinear programs. Our approach is based on a bi-objective viewpoint of chance-constrained programs that seeks solutions on the…

Bisimulation metrics are powerful tools for measuring similarities between stochastic processes, and specifically Markov chains. Recent advances have uncovered that bisimulation metrics are, in fact, optimal-transport distances, which has…

We introduce SPRING, a novel stochastic proximal alternating linearized minimization algorithm for solving a class of non-smooth and non-convex optimization problems. Large-scale imaging problems are becoming increasingly prevalent due to…

We present new algorithms and fast implementations to find efficient approximations for modelling stochastic processes. For many numerical computations it is essential to develop finite approximations for stochastic processes. While the…

Low-thrust trajectory design relies heavily on repeated evaluations of fuel consumption and transfer feasibility, which require expensive optimal control solutions. In this work, we show these quantities can be accurately approximated by…

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…

This paper introduces a method for Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) control that optimizes sample generation towards an optimal trajectory through Stein Variational Gradient Descent (SVGD). MPPI relies upon predictive rollout of…