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Rowan McAllister

12 accepted papers

2024

CARFF: Conditional Auto-encoded Radiance Field for 3D Scene Forecasting

ECCV 2024poster

"We propose , a method for predicting future 3D scenes given past observations. Our method maps 2D ego-centric images to a distribution over plausible 3D latent scene configurations and predicts the evolution of hypothesized scenes through time. Our latents condition a global Neural Radiance Field (…

Cited by 2SourcePDFScholar
2022

Control-Aware Prediction Objectives for Autonomous Driving

ICRA 2022poster

Autonomous vehicle software is typically structured as a modular pipeline of individual components (e.g., perception, prediction, and planning) to help separate concerns into interpretable sub-tasks. Even when end-to-end training is possible, each module has its own set of objectives used for safety…

Cited by 29SourceScholar
2022

S2Net: Stochastic Sequential Pointcloud Forecasting

ECCV 2022poster

"Predicting futures of surrounding agents is critical for autonomous systems such as self-driving cars. Instead of requiring accurate detection and tracking prior to trajectory prediction, an object agnostic Sequential Pointcloud Forecasting (SPF) task was proposed in prior work, which enables a for…

Cited by 22SourcePDFScholar
2021

Contingencies from Observations: Tractable Contingency Planning with Learned Behavior Models

ICRA 2021poster

Humans have a remarkable ability to accurately reason about future events, including the behaviors and states of mind of other agents. Consider driving a car through a busy intersection: it is necessary to reason about the physics of the vehicle, the intentions of other drivers, and their beliefs ab…

Cited by 40SourcecodeScholar
2021

Model-Based Meta-Reinforcement Learning for Flight With Suspended Payloads

RA-L 2021

Transporting suspended payloads is challenging for autonomous aerial vehicles because the payload can cause significant and unpredictable changes to the robot's dynamics. These changes can lead to suboptimal flight performance or even catastrophic failure. Although adaptive control and learning-base

Cited by 106SourcecodeScholar
2020

Can Autonomous Vehicles Identify, Recover From, and Adapt to Distribution Shifts?

ICML 2020poster

Out-of-training-distribution (OOD) scenarios are a common challenge of learning agents at deployment, typically leading to arbitrary deductions and poorly-informed decisions. In principle, detection of and adaptation to OOD scenes can mitigate their adverse effects. In this paper, we highlight the l…

2020

Deep Imitative Models for Flexible Inference, Planning, and Control

ICLR 2020poster

Imitation Learning (IL) is an appealing approach to learn desirable autonomous behavior. However, directing IL to achieve arbitrary goals is difficult. In contrast, planning-based algorithms use dynamics models and reward functions to achieve goals. Yet, reward functions that evoke desirable behavio…

Cited by 170SourcecodeScholar
2020

Safety Augmented Value Estimation From Demonstrations (SAVED): Safe Deep Model-Based RL for Sparse Cost Robotic Tasks

RA-L 2020

Reinforcement learning (RL) for robotics is challenging due to the difficulty in hand-engineering a dense cost function, which can lead to unintended behavior, and dynamical uncertainty, which makes exploration and constraint satisfaction challenging. We address these issues with a new model-based r

Cited by 105SourceScholar
2019

PRECOG: PREdiction Conditioned on Goals in Visual Multi-Agent Settings

ICCV 2019poster

For autonomous vehicles (AVs) to behave appropriately on roads populated by human-driven vehicles, they must be able to reason about the uncertain intentions and decisions of other drivers from rich perceptual information. Towards these capabilities, we present a probabilistic forecasting model of f…

Cited by 467PDFcodeScholar
2019

Robustness to Out-of-Distribution Inputs via Task-Aware Generative Uncertainty

ICRA 2019poster

Deep learning provides a powerful tool for robotic perception in the open world. However, real-world robotic systems, especially mobile robots, must be able to react intelligently and safely even in unexpected circumstances. This requires a system that knows what it knows, and can estimate its own u…

Cited by 48SourceScholar
2018

Deep Reinforcement Learning in a Handful of Trials using Probabilistic Dynamics Models

NeurIPS 2018spotlight

Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms can attain excellent sample efficiency, but often lag behind the best model-free algorithms in terms of asymptotic performance. This is especially true with high-capacity parametric function approximators, such as deep networks. In this paper, we st…

2017

Data-Efficient Reinforcement Learning in Continuous State-Action Gaussian-POMDPs

NeurIPS 2017poster

We present a data-efficient reinforcement learning method for continuous state-action systems under significant observation noise. Data-efficient solutions under small noise exist, such as PILCO which learns the cartpole swing-up task in 30s. PILCO evaluates policies by planning state-trajectories u…

Cited by 47SourcePDFScholar