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Peter Karkus

16 accepted papers

2026

Learning Multiple Initial Solutions to Optimization Problems

ICRA 2026poster

Sequentially solving similar optimization problems under strict runtime constraints is essential for many applications, such as robot control, autonomous driving, and portfolio management. The performance of local optimization methods in these settings is sensitive to the initial solution: poor init…

2025

Closed-Loop Supervised Fine-Tuning of Tokenized Traffic Models

CVPR 2025poster

Traffic simulation aims to learn a policy for traffic agents that, when unrolled in closed-loop, faithfully recovers the joint distribution of trajectories observed in the real world. Inspired by large language models, tokenized multi-agent policies have recently become the state-of-the-art in traff…

2025

STORM: Spatio-TempOral Reconstruction Model For Large-Scale Outdoor Scenes

ICLR 2025poster

We present STORM, a spatio-temporal reconstruction model designed for reconstructing dynamic outdoor scenes from sparse observations. Existing dynamic reconstruction methods often rely on per-scene optimization, dense observations across space and time, and strong motion supervision, resulting in le…

2024

DTPP: Differentiable Joint Conditional Prediction and Cost Evaluation for Tree Policy Planning in Autonomous Driving

ICRA 2024poster

Motion prediction and cost evaluation are vital components in the decision-making system of autonomous vehicles. However, existing methods often ignore the importance of cost learning and treat them as separate modules. In this study, we employ a tree-structured policy planner and propose a differen…

Cited by 30SourcecodeScholar
2024

DistillNeRF: Perceiving 3D Scenes from Single-Glance Images by Distilling Neural Fields and Foundation Model Features

NeurIPS 2024poster

We propose DistillNeRF, a self-supervised learning framework addressing the challenge of understanding 3D environments from limited 2D observations in outdoor autonomous driving scenes. Our method is a generalizable feedforward model that predicts a rich neural scene representation from sparse, sing…

2023

Planning with Occluded Traffic Agents using Bi-Level Variational Occlusion Models

ICRA 2023poster

Reasoning with occluded traffic agents is a significant open challenge for planning for autonomous vehicles. Recent deep learning models have shown impressive results for predicting occluded agents based on the behaviour of nearby visible agents; however, as we show in experiments, these models are…

Cited by 13SourceScholar
2023

Receding Horizon Planning with Rule Hierarchies for Autonomous Vehicles

ICRA 2023poster

Autonomous vehicles must often contend with conflicting planning requirements, e.g., safety and comfort could be at odds with each other if avoiding a collision calls for slamming the brakes. To resolve such conflicts, assigning importance ranking to rules (i.e., imposing a rule hierarchy) has been…

Cited by 13SourcecodeScholar
2023

Tree-structured Policy Planning with Learned Behavior Models

ICRA 2023poster

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) need to reason about the multimodal behavior of neighboring agents while planning their own motion. Many existing trajectory planners seek a single trajectory that performs well under all plausible futures simultaneously, ignoring bi-directional interactions and thus leadin…

Cited by 31SourceScholar
2022

DiffStack: A Differentiable and Modular Control Stack for Autonomous Vehicles

CoRL 2022poster

Autonomous vehicle (AV) stacks are typically built in a modular fashion, with explicit components performing detection, tracking, prediction, planning, control, etc. While modularity improves reusability, interpretability, and generalizability, it also suffers from compounding errors, information bo…

Cited by 55SourceScholar
2020

Differentiable Mapping Networks: Learning Structured Map Representations for Sparse Visual Localization

ICRA 2020poster

Mapping and localization, preferably from a small number of observations, are fundamental tasks in robotics. We address these tasks by combining spatial structure (differentiable mapping) and end-to-end learning in a novel neural network architecture: the Differentiable Mapping Network (DMN). The DM…

Cited by 13SourceScholar
2020

Discriminative Particle Filter Reinforcement Learning for Complex Partial observations

ICLR 2020poster

Deep reinforcement learning is successful in decision making for sophisticated games, such as Atari, Go, etc. However, real-world decision making often requires reasoning with partial information extracted from complex visual observations. This paper presents Discriminative Particle Filter Reinfor…

Cited by 45SourcecodeScholar
2019

Differentiable Algorithm Networks for Composable Robot Learning

RSS 2019poster

This paper introduces the Differentiable Algorithm Network (DAN), a composable architecture for robot learning systems. A DAN is composed of neural network modules, each encoding a differentiable robot algorithm and an associated model; and it is trained end-to-end from data. DAN combines the streng…

Cited by 81SourcePDFScholar
2019

Factored Contextual Policy Search with Bayesian optimization

ICRA 2019poster

Scarce data is a major challenge to scaling robot learning to truly complex tasks, as we need to generalize locally learned policies over different task contexts. Contextual policy search offers data-efficient learning and generalization by explicitly conditioning the policy on a parametric context…

Cited by 8SourceScholar
2017

QMDP-Net: Deep Learning for Planning under Partial Observability

NeurIPS 2017poster

This paper introduces the QMDP-net, a neural network architecture for planning under partial observability. The QMDP-net combines the strengths of model-free learning and model-based planning. It is a recurrent policy network, but it represents a policy for a parameterized set of tasks by connecting…