2,565 research outputs found
Hierarchical Decomposition of Nonlinear Dynamics and Control for System Identification and Policy Distillation
The control of nonlinear dynamical systems remains a major challenge for
autonomous agents. Current trends in reinforcement learning (RL) focus on
complex representations of dynamics and policies, which have yielded impressive
results in solving a variety of hard control tasks. However, this new
sophistication and extremely over-parameterized models have come with the cost
of an overall reduction in our ability to interpret the resulting policies. In
this paper, we take inspiration from the control community and apply the
principles of hybrid switching systems in order to break down complex dynamics
into simpler components. We exploit the rich representational power of
probabilistic graphical models and derive an expectation-maximization (EM)
algorithm for learning a sequence model to capture the temporal structure of
the data and automatically decompose nonlinear dynamics into stochastic
switching linear dynamical systems. Moreover, we show how this framework of
switching models enables extracting hierarchies of Markovian and
auto-regressive locally linear controllers from nonlinear experts in an
imitation learning scenario.Comment: 2nd Annual Conference on Learning for Dynamics and Contro
Online Discrimination of Nonlinear Dynamics with Switching Differential Equations
How to recognise whether an observed person walks or runs? We consider a
dynamic environment where observations (e.g. the posture of a person) are
caused by different dynamic processes (walking or running) which are active one
at a time and which may transition from one to another at any time. For this
setup, switching dynamic models have been suggested previously, mostly, for
linear and nonlinear dynamics in discrete time. Motivated by basic principles
of computations in the brain (dynamic, internal models) we suggest a model for
switching nonlinear differential equations. The switching process in the model
is implemented by a Hopfield network and we use parametric dynamic movement
primitives to represent arbitrary rhythmic motions. The model generates
observed dynamics by linearly interpolating the primitives weighted by the
switching variables and it is constructed such that standard filtering
algorithms can be applied. In two experiments with synthetic planar motion and
a human motion capture data set we show that inference with the unscented
Kalman filter can successfully discriminate several dynamic processes online
A Disentangled Recognition and Nonlinear Dynamics Model for Unsupervised Learning
This paper takes a step towards temporal reasoning in a dynamically changing
video, not in the pixel space that constitutes its frames, but in a latent
space that describes the non-linear dynamics of the objects in its world. We
introduce the Kalman variational auto-encoder, a framework for unsupervised
learning of sequential data that disentangles two latent representations: an
object's representation, coming from a recognition model, and a latent state
describing its dynamics. As a result, the evolution of the world can be
imagined and missing data imputed, both without the need to generate high
dimensional frames at each time step. The model is trained end-to-end on videos
of a variety of simulated physical systems, and outperforms competing methods
in generative and missing data imputation tasks.Comment: NIPS 201
The Neural Particle Filter
The robust estimation of dynamically changing features, such as the position
of prey, is one of the hallmarks of perception. On an abstract, algorithmic
level, nonlinear Bayesian filtering, i.e. the estimation of temporally changing
signals based on the history of observations, provides a mathematical framework
for dynamic perception in real time. Since the general, nonlinear filtering
problem is analytically intractable, particle filters are considered among the
most powerful approaches to approximating the solution numerically. Yet, these
algorithms prevalently rely on importance weights, and thus it remains an
unresolved question how the brain could implement such an inference strategy
with a neuronal population. Here, we propose the Neural Particle Filter (NPF),
a weight-less particle filter that can be interpreted as the neuronal dynamics
of a recurrently connected neural network that receives feed-forward input from
sensory neurons and represents the posterior probability distribution in terms
of samples. Specifically, this algorithm bridges the gap between the
computational task of online state estimation and an implementation that allows
networks of neurons in the brain to perform nonlinear Bayesian filtering. The
model captures not only the properties of temporal and multisensory integration
according to Bayesian statistics, but also allows online learning with a
maximum likelihood approach. With an example from multisensory integration, we
demonstrate that the numerical performance of the model is adequate to account
for both filtering and identification problems. Due to the weightless approach,
our algorithm alleviates the 'curse of dimensionality' and thus outperforms
conventional, weighted particle filters in higher dimensions for a limited
number of particles
Hidden Parameter Recurrent State Space Models For Changing Dynamics Scenarios
Recurrent State-space models (RSSMs) are highly expressive models for
learning patterns in time series data and system identification. However, these
models assume that the dynamics are fixed and unchanging, which is rarely the
case in real-world scenarios. Many control applications often exhibit tasks
with similar but not identical dynamics which can be modeled as a latent
variable. We introduce the Hidden Parameter Recurrent State Space Models
(HiP-RSSMs), a framework that parametrizes a family of related dynamical
systems with a low-dimensional set of latent factors. We present a simple and
effective way of learning and performing inference over this Gaussian graphical
model that avoids approximations like variational inference. We show that
HiP-RSSMs outperforms RSSMs and competing multi-task models on several
challenging robotic benchmarks both on real-world systems and simulations.Comment: Published at the International Conference on Learning
Representations, ICLR 202
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