Deep learning has been widely used within learning algorithms for robotics. One disadvantage of deep networks is that these networks are black-box representations. Therefore, the learned approximations ignore the existing knowledge of physics or robotics. Especially for learning dynamics models, these black-box models are not desirable as the underlying principles are well understood and the standard deep networks can learn dynamics that violate these principles. To learn dynamics models with deep networks that guarantee physically plausible dynamics, we introduce physics-inspired deep networks that combine first principles from physics with deep learning. We incorporate Lagrangian mechanics within the model learning such that all approximated models adhere to the laws of physics and conserve energy. Deep Lagrangian Networks (DeLaN) parametrize the system energy using two networks. The parameters are obtained by minimizing the squared residual of the Euler-Lagrange differential equation. Therefore, the resulting model does not require specific knowledge of the individual system, is interpretable, and can be used as a forward, inverse, and energy model. Previously these properties were only obtained when using system identification techniques that require knowledge of the kinematic structure. We apply DeLaN to learning dynamics models and apply these models to control simulated and physical rigid body systems. The results show that the proposed approach obtains dynamics models that can be applied to physical systems for real-time control. Compared to standard deep networks, the physics-inspired models learn better models and capture the underlying structure of the dynamics.
Fitting parametric models of human bodies, hands or faces to sparse input signals in an accurate, robust, and fast manner has the promise of significantly improving immersion in AR and VR scenarios. A common first step in systems that tackle these problems is to regress the parameters of the parametric model directly from the input data. This approach is fast, robust, and is a good starting point for an iterative minimization algorithm. The latter searches for the minimum of an energy function, typically composed of a data term and priors that encode our knowledge about the problem's structure. While this is undoubtedly a very successful recipe, priors are often hand defined heuristics and finding the right balance between the different terms to achieve high quality results is a non-trivial task. Furthermore, converting and optimizing these systems to run in a performant way requires custom implementations that demand significant time investments from both engineers and domain experts. In this work, we build upon recent advances in learned optimization and propose an update rule inspired by the classic Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm. We show the effectiveness of the proposed neural optimizer on the problems of 3D body surface estimation from a head-mounted device and face fitting from 2D landmarks. Our method can easily be applied to new model fitting problems and offers a competitive alternative to well tuned 'traditional' model fitting pipelines, both in terms of accuracy and speed.
The need to approximate functions is ubiquitous in science, either due to empirical constraints or high computational cost of accessing the function. In high-energy physics, the precise computation of the scattering cross-section of a process requires the evaluation of computationally intensive integrals. A wide variety of methods in machine learning have been used to tackle this problem, but often the motivation of using one method over another is lacking. Comparing these methods is typically highly dependent on the problem at hand, so we specify to the case where we can evaluate the function a large number of times, after which quick and accurate evaluation can take place. We consider four interpolation and three machine learning techniques and compare their performance on three toy functions, the four-point scalar Passarino-Veltman $D_0$ function, and the two-loop self-energy master integral $M$. We find that in low dimensions ($d = 3$), traditional interpolation techniques like the Radial Basis Function perform very well, but in higher dimensions ($d=5, 6, 9$) we find that multi-layer perceptrons (a.k.a neural networks) do not suffer as much from the curse of dimensionality and provide the fastest and most accurate predictions.
Implicit functions represented as deep learning approximations are powerful for reconstructing 3D surfaces. However, they can only produce static surfaces that are not controllable, which provides limited ability to modify the resulting model by editing its pose or shape parameters. Nevertheless, such features are essential in building flexible models for both computer graphics and computer vision. In this work, we present methodology that combines detail-rich implicit functions and parametric representations in order to reconstruct 3D models of people that remain controllable and accurate even in the presence of clothing. Given sparse 3D point clouds sampled on the surface of a dressed person, we use an Implicit Part Network (IP-Net)to jointly predict the outer 3D surface of the dressed person, the and inner body surface, and the semantic correspondences to a parametric body model. We subsequently use correspondences to fit the body model to our inner surface and then non-rigidly deform it (under a parametric body + displacement model) to the outer surface in order to capture garment, face and hair detail. In quantitative and qualitative experiments with both full body data and hand scans we show that the proposed methodology generalizes, and is effective even given incomplete point clouds collected from single-view depth images. Our models and code can be downloaded from //virtualhumans.mpi-inf.mpg.de/ipnet.
Accurate models of robot dynamics are critical for safe and stable control and generalization to novel operational conditions. Hand-designed models, however, may be insufficiently accurate, even after careful parameter tuning. This motivates the use of machine learning techniques to approximate the robot dynamics over a training set of state-control trajectories. The dynamics of many robots, including ground, aerial, and underwater vehicles, are described in terms of their SE(3) pose and generalized velocity, and satisfy conservation of energy principles. This paper proposes a Hamiltonian formulation over the SE(3) manifold of the structure of a neural ordinary differential equation (ODE) network to approximate the dynamics of a rigid body. In contrast to a black-box ODE network, our formulation guarantees total energy conservation by construction. We develop energy shaping and damping injection control for the learned, potentially under-actuated SE(3) Hamiltonian dynamics to enable a unified approach for stabilization and trajectory tracking with various platforms, including pendulum, rigid-body, and quadrotor systems.
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) and Deep Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) have achieved significant success across a wide range of domains, such as game AI, autonomous vehicles, robotics and finance. However, DRL and deep MARL agents are widely known to be sample-inefficient and millions of interactions are usually needed even for relatively simple game settings, thus preventing the wide application in real-industry scenarios. One bottleneck challenge behind is the well-known exploration problem, i.e., how to efficiently explore the unknown environments and collect informative experiences that could benefit the policy learning most. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive survey on existing exploration methods in DRL and deep MARL for the purpose of providing understandings and insights on the critical problems and solutions. We first identify several key challenges to achieve efficient exploration, which most of the exploration methods aim at addressing. Then we provide a systematic survey of existing approaches by classifying them into two major categories: uncertainty-oriented exploration and intrinsic motivation-oriented exploration. The essence of uncertainty-oriented exploration is to leverage the quantification of the epistemic and aleatoric uncertainty to derive efficient exploration. By contrast, intrinsic motivation-oriented exploration methods usually incorporate different reward agnostic information for intrinsic exploration guidance. Beyond the above two main branches, we also conclude other exploration methods which adopt sophisticated techniques but are difficult to be classified into the above two categories. In addition, we provide a comprehensive empirical comparison of exploration methods for DRL on a set of commonly used benchmarks. Finally, we summarize the open problems of exploration in DRL and deep MARL and point out a few future directions.
This book develops an effective theory approach to understanding deep neural networks of practical relevance. Beginning from a first-principles component-level picture of networks, we explain how to determine an accurate description of the output of trained networks by solving layer-to-layer iteration equations and nonlinear learning dynamics. A main result is that the predictions of networks are described by nearly-Gaussian distributions, with the depth-to-width aspect ratio of the network controlling the deviations from the infinite-width Gaussian description. We explain how these effectively-deep networks learn nontrivial representations from training and more broadly analyze the mechanism of representation learning for nonlinear models. From a nearly-kernel-methods perspective, we find that the dependence of such models' predictions on the underlying learning algorithm can be expressed in a simple and universal way. To obtain these results, we develop the notion of representation group flow (RG flow) to characterize the propagation of signals through the network. By tuning networks to criticality, we give a practical solution to the exploding and vanishing gradient problem. We further explain how RG flow leads to near-universal behavior and lets us categorize networks built from different activation functions into universality classes. Altogether, we show that the depth-to-width ratio governs the effective model complexity of the ensemble of trained networks. By using information-theoretic techniques, we estimate the optimal aspect ratio at which we expect the network to be practically most useful and show how residual connections can be used to push this scale to arbitrary depths. With these tools, we can learn in detail about the inductive bias of architectures, hyperparameters, and optimizers.
The difficulty in specifying rewards for many real-world problems has led to an increased focus on learning rewards from human feedback, such as demonstrations. However, there are often many different reward functions that explain the human feedback, leaving agents with uncertainty over what the true reward function is. While most policy optimization approaches handle this uncertainty by optimizing for expected performance, many applications demand risk-averse behavior. We derive a novel policy gradient-style robust optimization approach, PG-BROIL, that optimizes a soft-robust objective that balances expected performance and risk. To the best of our knowledge, PG-BROIL is the first policy optimization algorithm robust to a distribution of reward hypotheses which can scale to continuous MDPs. Results suggest that PG-BROIL can produce a family of behaviors ranging from risk-neutral to risk-averse and outperforms state-of-the-art imitation learning algorithms when learning from ambiguous demonstrations by hedging against uncertainty, rather than seeking to uniquely identify the demonstrator's reward function.
Few-shot Learning aims to learn classifiers for new classes with only a few training examples per class. Existing meta-learning or metric-learning based few-shot learning approaches are limited in handling diverse domains with various number of labels. The meta-learning approaches train a meta learner to predict weights of homogeneous-structured task-specific networks, requiring a uniform number of classes across tasks. The metric-learning approaches learn one task-invariant metric for all the tasks, and they fail if the tasks diverge. We propose to deal with these limitations with meta metric learning. Our meta metric learning approach consists of task-specific learners, that exploit metric learning to handle flexible labels, and a meta learner, that discovers good parameters and gradient decent to specify the metrics in task-specific learners. Thus the proposed model is able to handle unbalanced classes as well as to generate task-specific metrics. We test our approach in the `$k$-shot $N$-way' few-shot learning setting used in previous work and new realistic few-shot setting with diverse multi-domain tasks and flexible label numbers. Experiments show that our approach attains superior performances in both settings.
Efficient exploration remains a major challenge for reinforcement learning. One reason is that the variability of the returns often depends on the current state and action, and is therefore heteroscedastic. Classical exploration strategies such as upper confidence bound algorithms and Thompson sampling fail to appropriately account for heteroscedasticity, even in the bandit setting. Motivated by recent findings that address this issue in bandits, we propose to use Information-Directed Sampling (IDS) for exploration in reinforcement learning. As our main contribution, we build on recent advances in distributional reinforcement learning and propose a novel, tractable approximation of IDS for deep Q-learning. The resulting exploration strategy explicitly accounts for both parametric uncertainty and heteroscedastic observation noise. We evaluate our method on Atari games and demonstrate a significant improvement over alternative approaches.
Deep learning (DL) is a high dimensional data reduction technique for constructing high-dimensional predictors in input-output models. DL is a form of machine learning that uses hierarchical layers of latent features. In this article, we review the state-of-the-art of deep learning from a modeling and algorithmic perspective. We provide a list of successful areas of applications in Artificial Intelligence (AI), Image Processing, Robotics and Automation. Deep learning is predictive in its nature rather then inferential and can be viewed as a black-box methodology for high-dimensional function estimation.