VISTA 2.0: An Open, Data-driven Simulator for Multimodal Sensing and Policy Learning for Autonomous Vehicles

Simulation has the potential to transform the development of robust algorithms for mobile agents deployed in safety-critical scenarios. However, the poor photorealism and lack of diverse sensor modalities of existing simulation engines remain key hurdles towards realizing this potential. Here, we present VISTA, an open source, data-driven simulator that integrates multiple types of sensors for autonomous vehicles. Using high fidelity, real-world datasets, VISTA represents and simulates RGB cameras, 3D LiDAR, and event-based cameras, enabling the rapid generation of novel viewpoints in simulation and thereby enriching the data available for policy learning with corner cases that are difficult to capture in the physical world. Using VISTA, we demonstrate the ability to train and test perception-to-control policies across each of the sensor types and showcase the power of this approach via deployment on a full scale autonomous vehicle. The policies learned in VISTA exhibit sim-to-real transfer without modification and greater robustness than those trained exclusively on real-world data.

BarrierNet: A Safety-Guaranteed Layer for Neural Networks

This paper introduces differentiable higher-order control barrier functions (CBF) that are end-to-end trainable together with learning systems. CBFs are usually overly conservative, while guaranteeing safety. Here, we address their conservativeness by softening their definitions using environmental dependencies without loosing safety guarantees, and embed them into differentiable quadratic programs. These novel safety layers, termed a BarrierNet, can be used in conjunction with any neural network-based controller, and can be trained by gradient descent. BarrierNet allows the safety constraints of a neural controller be adaptable to changing environments. We evaluate them on a series of control problems such as traffic merging and robot navigations in 2D and 3D space, and demonstrate their effectiveness compared to state-of-the-art approaches.

Is Bang-Bang Control All You Need? Solving Continuous Control with Bernoulli Policies

Reinforcement learning (RL) for continuous control typically employs distributions whose support covers the entire action space. In this work, we investigate the colloquially known phenomenon that trained agents often prefer actions at the boundaries of that space. We draw theoretical connections to the emergence of bang-bang behavior in optimal control, and provide extensive empirical evaluation across a variety of recent RL algorithms. We replace the normal Gaussian by a Bernoulli distribution that solely considers the extremes along each action dimension - a bang-bang controller. Surprisingly, this achieves state-of-the-art performance on several continuous control benchmarks - in contrast to robotic hardware, where energy and maintenance cost affect controller choices. Since exploration, learning,and the final solution are entangled in RL, we provide additional imitation learning experiments to reduce the impact of exploration on our analysis. Finally, we show that our observations generalize to environments that aim to model real-world challenges and evaluate factors to mitigate the emergence of bang-bang solutions. Our findings emphasize challenges for benchmarking continuous control algorithms, particularly in light of potential real-world applications.

Model Based Control of Soft Robots: A Survey of the State of the Art and Open Challenges

Continuum soft robots are mechanical systems entirely made of continuously deformable elements. This design solution aims to bring robots closer to invertebrate animals and soft appendices of vertebrate animals (e.g., an elephant's trunk, a monkey's tail). This work aims to introduce the control theorist perspective to this novel development in robotics. We aim to remove the barriers to entry into this field by presenting existing results and future challenges using a unified language and within a coherent framework. Indeed, the main difficulty in entering this field is the wide variability of terminology and scientific backgrounds, making it quite hard to acquire a comprehensive view on the topic. Another limiting factor is that it is not obvious where to draw a clear line between the limitations imposed by the technology not being mature yet and the challenges intrinsic to this class of robots. In this work, we argue that the intrinsic effects are the continuum or multi-body dynamics, the presence of a non-negligible elastic potential field, and the variability in sensing and actuation strategies.

Compressing Neural Networks: Towards Determining the Optimal Layer-wise Decomposition

We present a novel global compression framework for deep neural networks that automatically analyzes each layer to identify the optimal per-layer compression ratio, while simultaneously achieving the desired overall compression. Our algorithm hinges on the idea of compressing each convolutional (or fully-connected) layer by slicing its channels into multiple groups and decomposing each group via low-rank decomposition. At the core of our algorithm is the derivation of layer-wise error bounds from the Eckart Young Mirsky theorem. We then leverage these bounds to frame the compression problem as an optimization problem where we wish to minimize the maximum compression error across layers and propose an efficient algorithm towards a solution. Our experiments indicate that our method outperforms existing low-rank compression approaches across a wide range of networks and data sets. We believe that our results open up new avenues for future research into the global performance-size trade-offs of modern neural networks. Our code is available at https://github.com/lucaslie/torchprune.

GoTube: Scalable Stochastic Verification of Continuous-Depth Models

We introduce a new stochastic verification algorithm that formally quantifies the behavioral robustness of any time-continuous process formulated as a continuous-depth model. The algorithm solves a set of global optimization (Go) problems over a given time horizon to construct a tight enclosure (Tube) of the set of all process executions starting from a ball of initial states. We call our algorithm GoTube. Through its construction, GoTube ensures that the bounding tube is conservative up to a desired probability. GoTube is implemented in JAX and optimized to scale to complex continuous-depth models. Compared to advanced reachability analysis tools for time-continuous neural networks, GoTube provably does not accumulate over-approximation errors between time steps and avoids the infamous wrapping effect inherent in symbolic techniques. We show that GoTube substantially outperforms state-of-the-art verification tools in terms of the size of the initial ball, speed, time-horizon, task completion, and scalability, on a large set of experiments. GoTube is stable and sets the state-of-the-art for its ability to scale up to time horizons well beyond what has been possible before.

Multi-Objective Graph Heuristic Search for Terrestrial Robot Design

We present methods for co-designing rigid robots over control and morphology (including discrete topology) over multiple objectives. Previous work has addressed problems in single-objective robot co-design or multi-objective control. However, the joint multi-objective co-design problem is extremely important for generating capable, versatile, algorithmically designed robots. In this work, we present Multi-Objective Graph Heuristic Search, which extends a single-objective graph heuristic search from previous work to enable a highly efficient multi-objective search in a combinatorial design topology space. Core to this approach, we introduce a new universal, multi-objective heuristic function based on graph neural networks that is able to effectively leverage learned information between different task trade-offs. We demonstrate our approach on six combinations of seven terrestrial locomotion and design tasks, including one three-objective example. We compare the captured Pareto fronts across different methods and demonstrate that our multi-objective graph heuristic search quantitatively and qualitatively outperforms other techniques.

Closed-form Continuous-Depth Models

Continuous-depth neural models, where the derivative of the model's hidden state is defined by a neural network, have enabled strong sequential data processing capabilities. However, these models rely on advanced numerical differential equation (DE) solvers resulting in a significant overhead both in terms of computational cost and model complexity. In this paper, we present a new family of models, termed Closed-form Continuous-depth (CfC) networks, that are simple to describe and at least one order of magnitude faster while exhibiting equally strong modeling abilities compared to their ODE-based counterparts. The models are hereby derived from the analytical closed-form solution of an expressive subset of time-continuous models, thus alleviating the need for complex DE solvers all together. In our experimental evaluations, we demonstrate that CfC networks outperform advanced, recurrent models over a diverse set of time-series prediction tasks, including those with long-term dependencies and irregularly sampled data. We believe our findings open new opportunities to train and deploy rich, continuous neural models in resource-constrained settings, which demand both performance and efficiency.

Sparse Flows: Pruning Continuous-depth Models

Continuous deep learning architectures enable learning of flexible probabilistic models for predictive modeling as neural ordinary differential equations (ODEs), and for generative modeling as continuous normalizing flows. In this work, we design a framework to decipher the internal dynamics of these continuous depth models by pruning their network architectures. Our empirical results suggest that pruning improves generalization for neural ODEs in generative modeling. Moreover, pruning finds minimal and efficient neural ODE representations with up to 98\% less parameters compared to the original network, without loss of accuracy. Finally, we show that by applying pruning we can obtain insightful information about the design of better neural ODEs.We hope our results will invigorate further research into the performance-size trade-offs of modern continuous-depth models.

Causal Navigation by Continuous-time Neural Networks

Imitation learning enables high-fidelity, vision-based learning of policies within rich, photorealistic environments. However, such techniques often rely on traditional discrete-time neural models and face difficulties in generalizing to domain shifts by failing to account for the causal relationships between the agent and the environment. In this paper, we propose a theoretical and experimental framework for learning causal representations using continuous-time neural networks, specifically over their discrete-time counterparts. We evaluate our method in the context of visual-control learning of drones over a series of complex tasks, ranging from short- and long-term navigation, to chasing static and dynamic objects through photorealistic environments. Our results demonstrate that causal continuous-time deep models can perform robust navigation tasks, where advanced recurrent models fail. These models learn complex causal control representations directly from raw visual inputs and scale to solve a variety of tasks using imitation learning.