6 accepted papers
Contact forces introduce discontinuities into robot dynamics that severely limit the use of simulators for gradient-based optimization. Penalty-based simulators such as MuJoCo, soften contact resolution to enable gradient computation. However, realistically simulating hard contacts requires stiff so…
Realistic simulation is critical for applications ranging from robotics to animation. Video generation models have emerged as a way to capture real-world physics from data, but they often face challenges in maintaining spatial consistency and object permanence, relying on memory mechanisms to compen…
Automatic differentiation (AD) frameworks such as JAX and PyTorch have enabled gradient-based optimization for a wide range of scientific fields. Yet, many ''hard'' primitives in these libraries such as thresholding, Boolean logic, discrete indexing, and sorting operations yield zero or undefined gr…
Generating intelligent robot behavior in contact-rich settings is a research problem where zeroth-order methods currently prevail. A major contributor to the success of such methods is their robustness in the face of non-smooth and discontinuous optimization landscapes that are characteristic of con
Many settings in machine learning require the selection of a rotation representation. However, choosing a suitable representation from the many available options is challenging. This paper acts as a survey and guide through rotation representations. We walk through their properties that harm or bene…
If a robot's dynamics are difficult to model solely through analytical mechanics, it is an attractive option to directly learn it from data. Yet, solely data-driven approaches require considerable amounts of data for training and do not extrapolate well to unseen regions of the system's state space.…