63 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
Simultaneous Learning of Nonlinear Manifold and Dynamical Models for High-dimensional Time Series
The goal of this work is to learn a parsimonious and informative representation for high-dimensional time series. Conceptually, this comprises two distinct yet tightly coupled tasks: learning a low-dimensional manifold and modeling the dynamical process. These two tasks have a complementary relationship as the temporal constraints provide valuable neighborhood information for dimensionality reduction and conversely, the low-dimensional space allows dynamics to be learnt efficiently. Solving these two tasks simultaneously allows important information to be exchanged mutually. If nonlinear models are required to capture the rich complexity of time series, then the learning problem becomes harder as the nonlinearities in both tasks are coupled. The proposed solution approximates the nonlinear manifold and dynamics using piecewise linear models. The interactions among the linear models are captured in a graphical model. By exploiting the model structure, efficient inference and learning algorithms are obtained without oversimplifying the model of the underlying dynamical process. Evaluation of the proposed framework with competing approaches is conducted in three sets of experiments: dimensionality reduction and reconstruction using synthetic time series, video synthesis using a dynamic texture database, and human motion synthesis, classification and tracking on a benchmark data set. In all experiments, the proposed approach provides superior performance.National Science Foundation (IIS 0308213, IIS 0329009, CNS 0202067
Linear State-Space Model with Time-Varying Dynamics
This paper introduces a linear state-space model with time-varying dynamics.
The time dependency is obtained by forming the state dynamics matrix as a
time-varying linear combination of a set of matrices. The time dependency of
the weights in the linear combination is modelled by another linear Gaussian
dynamical model allowing the model to learn how the dynamics of the process
changes. Previous approaches have used switching models which have a small set
of possible state dynamics matrices and the model selects one of those matrices
at each time, thus jumping between them. Our model forms the dynamics as a
linear combination and the changes can be smooth and more continuous. The model
is motivated by physical processes which are described by linear partial
differential equations whose parameters vary in time. An example of such a
process could be a temperature field whose evolution is driven by a varying
wind direction. The posterior inference is performed using variational Bayesian
approximation. The experiments on stochastic advection-diffusion processes and
real-world weather processes show that the model with time-varying dynamics can
outperform previously introduced approaches.Comment: The final publication is available at Springer via
http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-44851-9_2
HP-GAN: Probabilistic 3D human motion prediction via GAN
Predicting and understanding human motion dynamics has many applications,
such as motion synthesis, augmented reality, security, and autonomous vehicles.
Due to the recent success of generative adversarial networks (GAN), there has
been much interest in probabilistic estimation and synthetic data generation
using deep neural network architectures and learning algorithms.
We propose a novel sequence-to-sequence model for probabilistic human motion
prediction, trained with a modified version of improved Wasserstein generative
adversarial networks (WGAN-GP), in which we use a custom loss function designed
for human motion prediction. Our model, which we call HP-GAN, learns a
probability density function of future human poses conditioned on previous
poses. It predicts multiple sequences of possible future human poses, each from
the same input sequence but a different vector z drawn from a random
distribution. Furthermore, to quantify the quality of the non-deterministic
predictions, we simultaneously train a motion-quality-assessment model that
learns the probability that a given skeleton sequence is a real human motion.
We test our algorithm on two of the largest skeleton datasets: NTURGB-D and
Human3.6M. We train our model on both single and multiple action types. Its
predictive power for long-term motion estimation is demonstrated by generating
multiple plausible futures of more than 30 frames from just 10 frames of input.
We show that most sequences generated from the same input have more than 50\%
probabilities of being judged as a real human sequence. We will release all the
code used in this paper to Github
On human motion prediction using recurrent neural networks
Human motion modelling is a classical problem at the intersection of graphics
and computer vision, with applications spanning human-computer interaction,
motion synthesis, and motion prediction for virtual and augmented reality.
Following the success of deep learning methods in several computer vision
tasks, recent work has focused on using deep recurrent neural networks (RNNs)
to model human motion, with the goal of learning time-dependent representations
that perform tasks such as short-term motion prediction and long-term human
motion synthesis. We examine recent work, with a focus on the evaluation
methodologies commonly used in the literature, and show that, surprisingly,
state-of-the-art performance can be achieved by a simple baseline that does not
attempt to model motion at all. We investigate this result, and analyze recent
RNN methods by looking at the architectures, loss functions, and training
procedures used in state-of-the-art approaches. We propose three changes to the
standard RNN models typically used for human motion, which result in a simple
and scalable RNN architecture that obtains state-of-the-art performance on
human motion prediction.Comment: Accepted at CVPR 1
Fitting Jump Models
We describe a new framework for fitting jump models to a sequence of data.
The key idea is to alternate between minimizing a loss function to fit multiple
model parameters, and minimizing a discrete loss function to determine which
set of model parameters is active at each data point. The framework is quite
general and encompasses popular classes of models, such as hidden Markov models
and piecewise affine models. The shape of the chosen loss functions to minimize
determine the shape of the resulting jump model.Comment: Accepted for publication in Automatic
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