12,274 research outputs found
Fast Model Identification via Physics Engines for Data-Efficient Policy Search
This paper presents a method for identifying mechanical parameters of robots
or objects, such as their mass and friction coefficients. Key features are the
use of off-the-shelf physics engines and the adaptation of a Bayesian
optimization technique towards minimizing the number of real-world experiments
needed for model-based reinforcement learning. The proposed framework
reproduces in a physics engine experiments performed on a real robot and
optimizes the model's mechanical parameters so as to match real-world
trajectories. The optimized model is then used for learning a policy in
simulation, before real-world deployment. It is well understood, however, that
it is hard to exactly reproduce real trajectories in simulation. Moreover, a
near-optimal policy can be frequently found with an imperfect model. Therefore,
this work proposes a strategy for identifying a model that is just good enough
to approximate the value of a locally optimal policy with a certain confidence,
instead of wasting effort on identifying the most accurate model. Evaluations,
performed both in simulation and on a real robotic manipulation task, indicate
that the proposed strategy results in an overall time-efficient, integrated
model identification and learning solution, which significantly improves the
data-efficiency of existing policy search algorithms.Comment: IJCAI 1
Efficient Large-scale Approximate Nearest Neighbor Search on the GPU
We present a new approach for efficient approximate nearest neighbor (ANN)
search in high dimensional spaces, extending the idea of Product Quantization.
We propose a two-level product and vector quantization tree that reduces the
number of vector comparisons required during tree traversal. Our approach also
includes a novel highly parallelizable re-ranking method for candidate vectors
by efficiently reusing already computed intermediate values. Due to its small
memory footprint during traversal, the method lends itself to an efficient,
parallel GPU implementation. This Product Quantization Tree (PQT) approach
significantly outperforms recent state of the art methods for high dimensional
nearest neighbor queries on standard reference datasets. Ours is the first work
that demonstrates GPU performance superior to CPU performance on high
dimensional, large scale ANN problems in time-critical real-world applications,
like loop-closing in videos
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