12 accepted papers
Data assimilation for nonlinear state space models (SSMs) is inherently challenging due to non-Gaussian posteriors. We propose Deep Bayesian Filtering (DBF), a novel approach to data assimilation in nonlinear SSMs. DBF introduces latent variables $h_t$ in addition to physical variables $z_t$, ensuri…
Robots operating in the real world face significant but unavoidable issues in object localization that must be dealt with. A typical approach to address this is the addition of compliance mechanisms to hardware to absorb and compensate for some of these errors. However, for fine-grained manipulation
Variational autoencoders (VAEs) are one of the deep generative models that have experienced enormous success over the past decades. However, in practice, they suffer from a problem called posterior collapse, which occurs when the posterior distribution coincides, or collapses, with the prior taking…
A problem that plagues robotic grasping is the misalignment of the object and gripper due to difficulties in precise localization, actuation, etc. Under-actuated robotic hands with compliant mechanisms are used to adapt and compensate for these inaccuracies. However, these mechanisms come at the cos…
Teleoperation is often limited by the ability of an operator to react and predict the behavior of the robot as it interacts with the environment. For example, to grasp small objects on a table, the teleoperator needs to predict the position of the fingertips before the fingers are closed to avoid th
Food packing industry workers typically pick a target amount of food by hand from a food tray and place them in containers. Since menus are diverse and change frequently, robots must adapt and learn to handle new foods in a short time-span. Learning to grasp a specific amount of granular food requir…
Deep learning models for semantic segmentation rely on expensive, large-scale, manually annotated datasets. Labelling is a tedious process that can take hours per image. Automatically annotating video sequences by propagating sparsely labeled frames through time is a more scalable alternative. In th…
In this paper we target the problem of transferring policies across multiple environments with different dynamics parameters and motor noise variations, by introducing a framework that decouples the processes of policy learning and system identification. Efficiently transferring learned policies to…
Tensor decomposition methods are widely used for model compression and fast inference in convolutional neural networks (CNNs). Although many decompositions are conceivable, only CP decomposition and a few others have been applied in practice, and no extensive comparisons have been made between avail…
What is the role of unlabeled data in an inference problem, when the presumed underlying distribution is adversarially perturbed? To provide a concrete answer to this question, this paper unifies two major learning frameworks: Semi-Supervised Learning (SSL) and Distributionally Robust Learning (DRL)…
Many continuous control tasks have bounded action spaces. When policy gradient methods are applied to such tasks, out-of-bound actions need to be clipped before execution, while policies are usually optimized as if the actions are not clipped. We propose a policy gradient estimator that exploits the…
Factorized information criterion (FIC) is a recently developed approximation technique for the marginal log-likelihood, which provides an automatic model selection framework for a few latent variable models (LVMs) with tractable inference algorithms. This paper reconsiders FIC and fills theoretical…