Accelerating Gaussian Variational Inference for Motion Planning Under Uncertainty

This work addresses motion planning under uncertainty as a stochastic optimal control problem. The path distribution induced by the optimal controller corresponds to a posterior path distribution with a known form. To approximate this posterior, we frame an optimization problem in the space of Gaussian distributions, which aligns with the Gaussian Variational Inference Motion Planning (GVIMP) paradigm introduced in \cite{yu2023gaussian}. In this framework, the computation bottleneck lies in evaluating the expectation of collision costs over a dense discretized trajectory and computing the marginal covariances. This work exploits the sparse motion planning factor graph, which allows for parallel computing collision costs and Gaussian Belief Propagation (GBP) marginal covariance computation, to introduce a computationally efficient approach to solving GVIMP. We term the novel paradigm as the Parallel Gaussian Variational Inference Motion Planning (P-GVIMP). We validate the proposed framework on various robotic systems, demonstrating significant speed acceleration achieved by leveraging Graphics Processing Units (GPUs) for parallel computation. An open-sourced implementation is presented at https://github.com/hzyu17/VIMP.

Path Integral Control for Hybrid Dynamical Systems

This work introduces a novel paradigm for solving optimal control problems for hybrid dynamical systems under uncertainties. Robotic systems having contact with the environment can be modeled as hybrid systems. Controller design for hybrid systems under disturbances is complicated by the discontinuous jump dynamics, mode changes with inconsistent state dimensions, and variations in jumping timing and states caused by noise. We formulate this problem into a stochastic control problem with hybrid transition constraints and propose the Hybrid Path Integral (H-PI) framework to obtain the optimal controller. Despite random mode changes across stochastic path samples, we show that the ratio between hybrid path distributions with varying drift terms remains analogous to the smooth path distributions. We then show that the optimal controller can be obtained by evaluating a path integral with hybrid constraints. Importance sampling for path distributions with hybrid dynamics constraints is introduced to reduce the variance of the path integral evaluation, where we leverage the recently developed Hybrid iterative-Linear-Quadratic-Regulator (H-iLQR) controller to induce a hybrid path distribution proposal with low variance. The proposed method is validated through numerical experiments on various hybrid systems and extensive ablation studies. All the sampling processes are conducted in parallel on a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU).

Improving Neural Optimal Transport via Displacement Interpolation

Optimal Transport (OT) theory investigates the cost-minimizing transport map that moves a source distribution to a target distribution. Recently, several approaches have emerged for learning the optimal transport map for a given cost function using neural networks. We refer to these approaches as the OT Map. OT Map provides a powerful tool for diverse machine learning tasks, such as generative modeling and unpaired image-to-image translation. However, existing methods that utilize max-min optimization often experience training instability and sensitivity to hyperparameters. In this paper, we propose a novel method to improve stability and achieve a better approximation of the OT Map by exploiting displacement interpolation, dubbed Displacement Interpolation Optimal Transport Model (DIOTM). We derive the dual formulation of displacement interpolation at specific time $t$ and prove how these dual problems are related across time. This result allows us to utilize the entire trajectory of displacement interpolation in learning the OT Map. Our method improves the training stability and achieves superior results in estimating optimal transport maps. We demonstrate that DIOTM outperforms existing OT-based models on image-to-image translation tasks.

Plug-and-Play Controllable Generation for Discrete Masked Models

This article makes discrete masked models for the generative modeling of discrete data controllable. The goal is to generate samples of a discrete random variable that adheres to a posterior distribution, satisfies specific constraints, or optimizes a reward function. This methodological development enables broad applications across downstream tasks such as class-specific image generation and protein design. Existing approaches for controllable generation of masked models typically rely on task-specific fine-tuning or additional modifications, which can be inefficient and resource-intensive. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel plug-and-play framework based on importance sampling that bypasses the need for training a conditional score. Our framework is agnostic to the choice of control criteria, requires no gradient information, and is well-suited for tasks such as posterior sampling, Bayesian inverse problems, and constrained generation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach through extensive experiments, showcasing its versatility across multiple domains, including protein design.

Generative Factor Chaining: Coordinated Manipulation with Diffusion-based Factor Graph

Learning to plan for multi-step, multi-manipulator tasks is notoriously difficult because of the large search space and the complex constraint satisfaction problems. We present Generative Factor Chaining~(GFC), a composable generative model for planning. GFC represents a planning problem as a spatial-temporal factor graph, where nodes represent objects and robots in the scene, spatial factors capture the distributions of valid relationships among nodes, and temporal factors represent the distributions of skill transitions. Each factor is implemented as a modular diffusion model, which are composed during inference to generate feasible long-horizon plans through bi-directional message passing. We show that GFC can solve complex bimanual manipulation tasks and exhibits strong generalization to unseen planning tasks with novel combinations of objects and constraints. More details can be found at: https://generative-fc.github.io/

Masked Diffusion Models are Secretly Time-Agnostic Masked Models and Exploit Inaccurate Categorical Sampling

Masked diffusion models (MDMs) have emerged as a popular research topic for generative modeling of discrete data, thanks to their superior performance over other discrete diffusion models, and are rivaling the auto-regressive models (ARMs) for language modeling tasks. The recent effort in simplifying the masked diffusion framework further leads to alignment with continuous-space diffusion models and more principled training and sampling recipes. In this paper, however, we reveal that both training and sampling of MDMs are theoretically free from the time variable, arguably the key signature of diffusion models, and are instead equivalent to masked models. The connection on the sampling aspect is drawn by our proposed first-hitting sampler (FHS). Specifically, we show that the FHS is theoretically equivalent to MDMs' original generation process while significantly alleviating the time-consuming categorical sampling and achieving a 20$\times$ speedup. In addition, our investigation challenges previous claims that MDMs can surpass ARMs in generative perplexity. We identify, for the first time, an underlying numerical issue, even with the 32-bit floating-point precision, which results in inaccurate categorical sampling. We show that the numerical issue lowers the effective temperature both theoretically and empirically, leading to unfair assessments of MDMs' generation results in the previous literature.

Provable Benefit of Annealed Langevin Monte Carlo for Non-log-concave Sampling

We address the outstanding problem of sampling from an unnormalized density that may be non-log-concave and multimodal. To enhance the performance of simple Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) methods, techniques of annealing type have been widely used. However, quantitative theoretical guarantees of these techniques are under-explored. This study takes a first step toward providing a non-asymptotic analysis of annealed MCMC. Specifically, we establish, for the first time, an oracle complexity of $\widetilde{O}\left(\frac{d\beta^2{\cal A}^2}{\varepsilon^6}\right)$ for simple annealed Langevin Monte Carlo algorithm to achieve $\varepsilon^2$ accuracy in Kullback-Leibler divergence to the target distribution $\pi\propto{\rm e}^{-V}$ on $\mathbb{R}^d$ with $\beta$-smooth potential $V$. Here, ${\cal A}$ represents the action of a curve of probability measures interpolating the target distribution $\pi$ and a readily sampleable distribution.

QueST: Self-Supervised Skill Abstractions for Learning Continuous Control

Generalization capabilities, or rather a lack thereof, is one of the most important unsolved problems in the field of robot learning, and while several large scale efforts have set out to tackle this problem, unsolved it remains. In this paper, we hypothesize that learning temporal action abstractions using latent variable models (LVMs), which learn to map data to a compressed latent space and back, is a promising direction towards low-level skills that can readily be used for new tasks. Although several works have attempted to show this, they have generally been limited by architectures that do not faithfully capture shareable representations. To address this we present Quantized Skill Transformer (QueST), which learns a larger and more flexible latent encoding that is more capable of modeling the breadth of low-level skills necessary for a variety of tasks. To make use of this extra flexibility, QueST imparts causal inductive bias from the action sequence data into the latent space, leading to more semantically useful and transferable representations. We compare to state-of-the-art imitation learning and LVM baselines and see that QueST's architecture leads to strong performance on several multitask and few-shot learning benchmarks. Further results and videos are available at https://quest-model.github.io/

Novel clustered federated learning based on local loss

This paper proposes LCFL, a novel clustering metric for evaluating clients' data distributions in federated learning. LCFL aligns with federated learning requirements, accurately assessing client-to-client variations in data distribution. It offers advantages over existing clustered federated learning methods, addressing privacy concerns, improving applicability to non-convex models, and providing more accurate classification results. LCFL does not require prior knowledge of clients' data distributions. We provide a rigorous mathematical analysis, demonstrating the correctness and feasibility of our framework. Numerical experiments with neural network instances highlight the superior performance of LCFL over baselines on several clustered federated learning benchmarks.

Diffusion Policy Attacker: Crafting Adversarial Attacks for Diffusion-based Policies

Diffusion models (DMs) have emerged as a promising approach for behavior cloning (BC). Diffusion policies (DP) based on DMs have elevated BC performance to new heights, demonstrating robust efficacy across diverse tasks, coupled with their inherent flexibility and ease of implementation. Despite the increasing adoption of DP as a foundation for policy generation, the critical issue of safety remains largely unexplored. While previous attempts have targeted deep policy networks, DP used diffusion models as the policy network, making it ineffective to be attacked using previous methods because of its chained structure and randomness injected. In this paper, we undertake a comprehensive examination of DP safety concerns by introducing adversarial scenarios, encompassing offline and online attacks, and global and patch-based attacks. We propose DP-Attacker, a suite of algorithms that can craft effective adversarial attacks across all aforementioned scenarios. We conduct attacks on pre-trained diffusion policies across various manipulation tasks. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that DP-Attacker has the capability to significantly decrease the success rate of DP for all scenarios. Particularly in offline scenarios, DP-Attacker can generate highly transferable perturbations applicable to all frames. Furthermore, we illustrate the creation of adversarial physical patches that, when applied to the environment, effectively deceive the model. Video results are put in: https://sites.google.com/view/diffusion-policy-attacker.