More Like this

1. Composable Geometric Motion Policies using Multi-Task Pullback Bundle Dynamical Systems

   Bylard, A.; Bonalli, R.; Pavone, M. (January 2021, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation)

   null (Ed.)

   Despite decades of work in fast reactive planning and control, challenges remain in developing reactive motion policies on non-Euclidean manifolds and enforcing constraints while avoiding undesirable potential function local minima. This work presents a principled method for designing and fusing desired robot task behaviors into a stable robot motion policy, leveraging the geometric structure of non-Euclidean manifolds, which are prevalent in robot configuration and task spaces. Our Pullback Bundle Dynamical Systems (PBDS) framework drives desired task behaviors and prioritizes tasks using separate position-dependent and position/velocity-dependent Riemannian metrics, respectively, thus simplifying individual task design and modular composition of tasks. For enforcing constraints, we provide a class of metric-based tasks, eliminating local minima by imposing non-conflicting potential functions only for goal region attraction. We also provide a geometric optimization problem for combining tasks inspired by Riemannian Motion Policies (RMPs) that reduces to a simple least-squares problem, and we show that our approach is geometrically well-defined. We demonstrate the PBDS framework on the sphere S2 and at 300-500 Hz on a manipulator arm, and we provide task design guidance and an open-source Julia library implementation. Overall, this work presents a fast, easy-to-use framework for generating motion policies without unwanted potential function local minima on general manifolds. 

   more » « less
2. Robust Optimal Transport with Applications in Generative Modeling and Domain Adaptation

   Balaji, Yogesh; Chellappa, Rama; Feizi, Soheil (January 2020, Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems Foundation (NeurIPS))

   null (Ed.)

   Optimal Transport (OT) distances such as Wasserstein have been used in several areas such as GANs and domain adaptation. OT, however, is very sensitive to outliers (samples with large noise) in the data since in its objective function, every sample, including outliers, is weighed similarly due to the marginal constraints. To remedy this issue, robust formulations of OT with unbalanced marginal constraints have previously been proposed. However, employing these methods in deep learning problems such as GANs and domain adaptation is challenging due to the instability of their dual optimization solvers. In this paper, we resolve these issues by deriving a computationally-efficient dual form of the robust OT optimization that is amenable to modern deep learning applications. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our formulation in two applications of GANs and domain adaptation. Our approach can train state-of-the-art GAN models on noisy datasets corrupted with outlier distributions. In particular, our optimization computes weights for training samples reflecting how difficult it is for those samples to be generated in the model. In domain adaptation, our robust OT formulation leads to improved accuracy compared to the standard adversarial adaptation methods. 

   more » « less
3. Accelerated Optimization on Riemannian Manifolds via Discrete Constrained Variational Integrators

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s00332-022-09795-9  

   Duruisseaux, Valentin; Leok, Melvin (April 2022, Journal of Nonlinear Science)

   Abstract A variational formulation for accelerated optimization on normed vector spaces was recently introduced in Wibisono et al. (PNAS 113:E7351–E7358, 2016), and later generalized to the Riemannian manifold setting in Duruisseaux and Leok (SJMDS, 2022a). This variational framework was exploited on normed vector spaces in Duruisseaux et al. (SJSC 43:A2949–A2980, 2021) using time-adaptive geometric integrators to design efficient explicit algorithms for symplectic accelerated optimization, and it was observed that geometric discretizations which respect the time-rescaling invariance and symplecticity of the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian flows were substantially less prone to stability issues, and were therefore more robust, reliable, and computationally efficient. As such, it is natural to develop time-adaptive Hamiltonian variational integrators for accelerated optimization on Riemannian manifolds. In this paper, we consider the case of Riemannian manifolds embedded in a Euclidean space that can be characterized as the level set of a submersion. We will explore how holonomic constraints can be incorporated in discrete variational integrators to constrain the numerical discretization of the Riemannian Hamiltonian system to the Riemannian manifold, and we will test the performance of the resulting algorithms by solving eigenvalue and Procrustes problems formulated as optimization problems on the unit sphere and Stiefel manifold. 

   more » « less
4. Iterative Alignment Flows

   Zhou, Zeyu; Gong, Ziyu; Ravikumar, Pradeep; Inouye, David I. (March 2022, International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS))

   The unsupervised task of aligning two or more distributions in a shared latent space has many applications including fair representations, batch effect mitigation, and unsupervised domain adaptation. Existing flow-based approaches estimate multiple flows independently, which is equivalent to learning multiple full generative models. Other approaches require adversarial learning, which can be computationally expensive and challenging to optimize. Thus, we aim to jointly align multiple distributions while avoiding adversarial learning. Inspired by efficient alignment algorithms from optimal transport (OT) theory for univariate distributions, we develop a simple iterative method to build deep and expressive flows. Our method decouples each iteration into two subproblems: 1) form a variational approximation of a distribution divergence and 2) minimize this variational approximation via closed-form invertible alignment maps based on known OT results. Our empirical results give evidence that this iterative algorithm achieves competitive distribution alignment at low computational cost while being able to naturally handle more than two distributions. 

   more » « less
5. Iterative Alignment Flows

   Zhou, Z.; Gong, Z.; Ravikumar, P.; Inouye, D. (March 2022, International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Statistics (AISTATS))

   The unsupervised task of aligning two or more distributions in a shared latent space has many applications including fair representations, batch effect mitigation, and unsupervised domain adaptation. Existing flow-based approaches estimate multiple flows independently, which is equivalent to learning multiple full generative models. Other approaches require adversarial learning, which can be computationally expensive and challenging to optimize. Thus, we aim to jointly align multiple distributions while avoiding adversarial learning. Inspired by efficient alignment algorithms from optimal transport (OT) theory for univariate distributions, we develop a simple iterative method to build deep and expressive flows. Our method decouples each iteration into two subproblems: 1) form a variational approximation of a distribution divergence and 2) minimize this variational approximation via closed-form invertible alignment maps based on known OT results. Our empirical results give evidence that this iterative algorithm achieves competitive distribution alignment at low computational cost while being able to naturally handle more than two distributions. 

   more » « less