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Mathias Lechner

34 accepted papers

2026

ZIP-RC: Zero-overhead Inference-time Prediction of Reward and Cost for Adaptive and Interpretable Generation

ICLR 2026poster

Large language models excel at reasoning but lack key aspects of introspection, including the ability to anticipate their own success and the computation required to achieve it. Humans use real-time introspection to decide how much effort to invest, when to make multiple attempts, when to stop, and…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2025

SafeDiffuser: Safe Planning with Diffusion Probabilistic Models

ICLR 2025poster

Diffusion models have shown promise in data-driven planning. While these planners are commonly employed in applications where decisions are critical, they still lack established safety guarantees. In this paper, we address this limitation by introducing SafeDiffuser, a method to equip diffusion mode…

Cited by 36SourcePDFScholar
2024

Large Scale Dataset Distillation with Domain Shift

ICML 2024poster

Dataset Distillation seeks to summarize a large dataset by generating a reduced set of synthetic samples. While there has been much success at distilling small datasets such as CIFAR-10 on smaller neural architectures, Dataset Distillation methods fail to scale to larger high-resolution datasets and…

Cited by 3SourcePDFScholar
2024

Learning with Chemical versus Electrical Synapses Does it Make a Difference?

ICRA 2024poster

Bio-inspired neural networks have the potential to advance our understanding of neural computation and improve the state-of-the-art of AI systems. Bio-electrical synapses directly transmit neural signals, by enabling fast current flow between neurons. In contrast, bio-chemical synapses transmit neur…

Cited by 7SourceScholar
2024

Leveraging Low-Rank and Sparse Recurrent Connectivity for Robust Closed-Loop Control

ICLR 2024spotlight

Developing autonomous agents that can interact with changing environments is an open challenge in machine learning. Robustness is particularly important in these settings as agents are often fit offline on expert demonstrations but deployed online where they must generalize to the closed feedback lo…

Cited by 0SourcePDFScholar
2024

Overparametrization helps offline-to-online generalization of closed-loop control from pixels

ICRA 2024poster

There is an ever-growing zoo of modern neural network models that can efficiently learn end-to-end control from visual observations. These advanced deep models, ranging from convolutional to Vision Transformers, from small to gigantic networks, have been extensively tested on offline image classific…

Cited by 0SourceScholar
2024

State-Free Inference of State-Space Models: The *Transfer Function* Approach

ICML 2024poster

We approach designing a state-space model for deep learning applications through its dual representation, the *transfer function*, and uncover a highly efficient sequence parallel inference algorithm that is *state-free*: unlike other proposed algorithms, state-free inference does not incur any sign…

2024

Understanding Reconstruction Attacks with the Neural Tangent Kernel and Dataset Distillation

ICLR 2024poster

Modern deep learning requires large volumes of data, which could contain sensitive or private information that cannot be leaked. Recent work has shown for homogeneous neural networks a large portion of this training data could be reconstructed with only access to the trained network parameters. Whil…

Cited by 10SourcePDFScholar
2023

Compositional Policy Learning in Stochastic Control Systems with Formal Guarantees

NeurIPS 2023poster

Reinforcement learning has shown promising results in learning neural network policies for complicated control tasks. However, the lack of formal guarantees about the behavior of such policies remains an impediment to their deployment. We propose a novel method for learning a composition of neural n…

2023

Dataset Distillation with Convexified Implicit Gradients

ICML 2023poster

We propose a new dataset distillation algorithm using reparameterization and convexification of implicit gradients (RCIG), that substantially improves the state-of-the-art. To this end, we first formulate dataset distillation as a bi-level optimization problem. Then, we show how implicit gradients c…

2023

Gigastep - One Billion Steps per Second Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning

NeurIPS 2023poster

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) research is faced with a trade-off: it either uses complex environments requiring large compute resources, which makes it inaccessible to researchers with limited resources, or relies on simpler dynamics for faster execution, which makes the transferability…

2023

Infrastructure-based End-to-End Learning and Prevention of Driver Failure

ICRA 2023poster

Intelligent intersection managers can improve safety by detecting dangerous drivers or failure modes in autonomous vehicles, warning oncoming vehicles as they approach an intersection. In this work, we present FailureNet, a recurrent neural network trained end-to-end on trajectories of both nominal…

Cited by 1SourceScholar
2023

Learning Control Policies for Stochastic Systems with Reach-Avoid Guarantees

AAAI 2023technical

We study the problem of learning controllers for discrete-time non-linear stochastic dynamical systems with formal reach-avoid guarantees. This work presents the first method for providing formal reach-avoid guarantees, which combine and generalize stability and safety guarantees, with a tolerable p…

2023

Liquid Structural State-Space Models

ICLR 2023poster

A proper parametrization of state transition matrices of linear state-space models (SSMs) followed by standard nonlinearities enables them to efficiently learn representations from sequential data, establishing the state-of-the-art on an extensive series of long-range sequence modeling benchmarks. I…

2023

On the Forward Invariance of Neural ODEs

ICML 2023poster

We propose a new method to ensure neural ordinary differential equations (ODEs) satisfy output specifications by using invariance set propagation. Our approach uses a class of control barrier functions to transform output specifications into constraints on the parameters and inputs of the learning s…

Cited by 8SourcePDFScholar
2023

On the Size and Approximation Error of Distilled Datasets

NeurIPS 2023poster

Dataset Distillation is the task of synthesizing small datasets from large ones while still retaining comparable predictive accuracy to the original uncompressed dataset. Despite significant empirical progress in recent years, there is little understanding of the theoretical limitations/guarantees o…

Cited by 5SourcePDFScholar
2023

Quantization-Aware Interval Bound Propagation for Training Certifiably Robust Quantized Neural Networks

AAAI 2023technical

We study the problem of training and certifying adversarially robust quantized neural networks (QNNs). Quantization is a technique for making neural networks more efficient by running them using low-bit integer arithmetic and is therefore commonly adopted in industry. Recent work has shown that floa…

2023

Revisiting the Adversarial Robustness-Accuracy Tradeoff in Robot Learning

RA-L 2023

Adversarial training (i.e., training on adversarially perturbed input data) is a well-studied method for making neural networks robust to potential adversarial attacks during inference. However, the improved robustness does not come for free but rather is accompanied by a decrease in overall model a

Cited by 12SourceScholar
2023

Towards Cooperative Flight Control Using Visual-Attention

IROS 2023poster

The cooperation of a human pilot with an autonomous agent during flight control realizes parallel autonomy. We propose an air-guardian system that facilitates cooperation between a pilot with eye tracking and a parallel end-to-end neural control system. Our vision-based air-guardian system combines…

Cited by 7SourceScholar
2022

GoTube: Scalable Statistical Verification of Continuous-Depth Models

AAAI 2022technical

We introduce a new statistical verification algorithm that formally quantifies the behavioral robustness of any time-continuous process formulated as a continuous-depth model. Our algorithm solves a set of global optimization (Go) problems over a given time horizon to construct a tight enclosure (Tu…

2022

Latent Imagination Facilitates Zero-Shot Transfer in Autonomous Racing

ICRA 2022poster

World models learn behaviors in a latent imagination space to enhance the sample-efficiency of deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. While learning world models for high-dimensional observations (e.g., pixel inputs) has become practicable on standard RL benchmarks and some games, their effect…

Cited by 52SourcecodeScholar
2022

Stability Verification in Stochastic Control Systems via Neural Network Supermartingales

AAAI 2022technical

We consider the problem of formally verifying almost-sure (a.s.) asymptotic stability in discrete-time nonlinear stochastic control systems. While verifying stability in deterministic control systems is extensively studied in the literature, verifying stability in stochastic control systems is an op…

Cited by 37SourcePDFScholar
2021

Adversarial Training is Not Ready for Robot Learning

ICRA 2021poster

Adversarial training is an effective method to train deep learning models that are resilient to norm-bounded perturbations, with the cost of nominal performance drop. While adversarial training appears to enhance the robustness and safety of a deep model deployed in open-world decision-critical appl…

Cited by 42SourceScholar
2021

Causal Navigation by Continuous-time Neural Networks

NeurIPS 2021poster

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 relationshi…

2021

Infinite Time Horizon Safety of Bayesian Neural Networks

NeurIPS 2021poster

Bayesian neural networks (BNNs) place distributions over the weights of a neural network to model uncertainty in the data and the network's prediction. We consider the problem of verifying safety when running a Bayesian neural network policy in a feedback loop with infinite time horizon systems. Com…

2021

Liquid Time-constant Networks

AAAI 2021technical

We introduce a new class of time-continuous recurrent neural network models. Instead of declaring a learning system's dynamics by implicit nonlinearities, we construct networks of linear first-order dynamical systems modulated via nonlinear interlinked gates. The resulting models represent dynamical…

2021

On the Verification of Neural ODEs with Stochastic Guarantees

AAAI 2021technical

We show that Neural ODEs, an emerging class of time-continuous neural networks, can be verified by solving a set of global-optimization problems. For this purpose, we introduce Stochastic Lagrangian Reachability (SLR), an abstraction-based technique for constructing a tight Reachtube (an over-approx…

Cited by 39SourcePDFScholar
2021

On-Off Center-Surround Receptive Fields for Accurate and Robust Image Classification

ICML 2021spotlight

Robustness to variations in lighting conditions is a key objective for any deep vision system. To this end, our paper extends the receptive field of convolutional neural networks with two residual components, ubiquitous in the visual processing system of vertebrates: On-center and off-center pathway…

2021

Scalable Verification of Quantized Neural Networks

AAAI 2021technical

Formal verification of neural networks is an active topic of research, and recent advances have significantly increased the size of the networks that verification tools can handle. However, most methods are designed for verification of an idealized model of the actual network which works over real a…

2020

A Natural Lottery Ticket Winner: Reinforcement Learning with Ordinary Neural Circuits

ICML 2020poster

We propose a neural information processing system obtained by re-purposing the function of a biological neural circuit model to govern simulated and real-world control tasks. Inspired by the structure of the nervous system of the soil-worm, C. elegans, we introduce ordinary neural circuits (ONCs), d…

Cited by 32SourcePDFScholar
2020

Gershgorin Loss Stabilizes the Recurrent Neural Network Compartment of an End-to-end Robot Learning Scheme

ICRA 2020poster

Traditional robotic control suits require profound task-specific knowledge for designing, building and testing control software. The rise of Deep Learning has enabled end-to-end solutions to be learned entirely from data, requiring minimal knowledge about the application area. We design a learning s…

Cited by 30SourceScholar
2019

Designing Worm-inspired Neural Networks for Interpretable Robotic Control

ICRA 2019poster

In this paper, we design novel liquid time-constant recurrent neural networks for robotic control, inspired by the brain of the nematode, C. elegans. In the worm's nervous system, neurons communicate through nonlinear time-varying synaptic links established amongst them by their particular wiring st…

Cited by 61SourceScholar