arXiv research

Geometric optics describes wave behavior near convex obstacles.

Method recovers obstacles from travel times on curved surfaces.

We consider the broken ray transform on Riemann surfaces in the presence of an obstacle, following earlier work of Mukhometov. If the surface has nonpositive curvature and the obstacle is strictly convex, we show that a function is determined by its integrals over broken geodesic rays that reflect on the boundary of th…

Rigidity of travel times for convex obstacles in Riemannian manifolds is proven.

Same travelling times imply identical obstacles in Riemannian manifolds.

The paper deals with some problems related to recovering information about an obstacle in an Euclidean space from certain measurements of lengths of generalized geodesics in the exterior of the obstacle. The main result is that if two obstacles satisfy some generic regularity conditions and have (almost) the same trave…

Study proves uniqueness for ray transform on surfaces with obstacles.

In this paper, we analyze a real-valued reflected backward stochastic differential equation (RBSDE) with an unbounded obstacle and an unbounded terminal condition when its generator $f$ has quadratic growth in the $z$-variable. In particular, we obtain existence, comparison, and stability results, and consider the opti…

Billiard trajectories in curved spaces have predictable travel times.

Study anisotropic obstacle problem for minimal surfaces using Cahn-Hoffman transform.

Anisotropic obstacle problems and Stefan problem studied with evolving surfaces.

In structured prediction problems where we have indirect supervision of the output, maximum marginal likelihood faces two computational obstacles: non-convexity of the objective and intractability of even a single gradient computation. In this paper, we bypass both obstacles for a class of what we call linear indirectl…

We show that a tensor field of any rank integrates to zero over all broken rays if and only if it is a symmetrized covariant derivative of a lower order tensor which satisfies a symmetry condition at the reflecting part of the boundary and vanishes on the rest. This is done in a geometry with non-positive sectional cur…

The paper studies constraint maps with singularities and free boundaries, proving continuity near singularities and optimality.

Training neural networks involves solving large-scale non-convex optimization problems. This task has long been believed to be extremely difficult, with fear of local minima and other obstacles motivating a variety of schemes to improve optimization, such as unsupervised pretraining. However, modern neural networks are…

We define and study a discrete process that generalizes the convex-layer decomposition of a planar point set. Our process, which we call "homotopic curve shortening" (HCS), starts with a closed curve (which might self-intersect) in the presence of a set $P\subset \mathbb R^2$ of point obstacles, and evolves in discrete…

While optimizing convex objective (loss) functions has been a powerhouse for machine learning for at least two decades, non-convex loss functions have attracted fast growing interests recently, due to many desirable properties such as superior robustness and classification accuracy, compared with their convex counterpa…

Develops a learning model predictive controller for competitive racing.

It was proved in \cite{NS1} that obstacles $K$ in $\R^d$ that are finite disjoint unions of strictly convex domains with $C^3$ boundaries are uniquely determined by the travelling times of billiard trajectories in their exteriors and also by their so called scattering length spectra. However the case $d = 2$ is not pro…

Large-scale machine learning models are often trained by parallel stochastic gradient descent algorithms. However, the communication cost of gradient aggregation and model synchronization between the master and worker nodes becomes the major obstacle for efficient learning as the number of workers and the dimension of …

Non-convex optimization problems often arise from probabilistic modeling, such as estimation of posterior distributions. Non-convexity makes the problems intractable, and poses various obstacles for us to design efficient algorithms. In this work, we attack non-convexity by first introducing the concept of \emph{probab…

Study finds a limiting distribution for free path lengths on flat surfaces with circular obstacles.

Study on elastic curves pinned at the boundary, focusing on minimizers and their interaction with obstacles.

Study of mean curvature flow with obstacles using singular perturbation.

New approach for obstacle avoidance in robotics using learned representations.

The paper finds local minimizers for obstacle avoidance on curved spaces.

New method tackles geodesically convex optimization with polynomial convergence.

The paper simplifies conditions for optimal paths on manifolds avoiding obstacles.

The paper tackles MAP inference over non-convex constraints in safety-critical settings.

We consider an obstacle problem for elastic curves with fixed ends. We attempt to extend the graph approach provided in [8]. More precisely, we investigate nonexistence of graph solutions for special obstacles and extend the class of admissible curves in a way that an existence result can be obtained by a penalization …

We show short time existence and uniqueness of $\C^{1,1}$ solutions to the mean curvature flow with obstacles, when the obstacles are of class $\C^{1,1}$. If the initial interface is a periodic graph we show long time existence of the evolution and convergence to a minimal constrained hypersurface.

This paper presents preliminary work on learning the search heuristic for the optimal motion planning for automated driving in urban traffic. Previous work considered search-based optimal motion planning framework (SBOMP) that utilized numerical or model-based heuristics that did not consider dynamic obstacles. Optimal…

In this paper we study Backward Stochastic Differential Equations with two reflecting right continuous with left limits obstacles (or barriers) when the noise is given by Brownian motion and a Poisson random measure mutually independent. The jumps of the obstacle processes could be either predictable or inaccessible. W…

Many mobile robots rely on 2D laser scanners for localization, mapping, and navigation. However, those sensors are unable to correctly provide distance to obstacles such as glass panels and tables whose actual occupancy is invisible at the height the sensor is measuring. In this work, instead of estimating the distance…

Billiard trajectories (broken generalised geodesics) are considered in the exterior of an obstacle $K$ with smooth boundary on an arbitrary Riemannian manifold. We prove a generalisation of the well-known Santalo's formula. As a consequence, it is established that if the set of trapped points has positive measure, then…

We consider the problem of evolving hypersurfaces by mean curvature flow in the presence of obstacles, that is domains which the flow is not allowed to enter. In this paper, we treat the case of complete graphs and explain how the approach of M. Saez and the second author yields a global weak solution to the original p…

A framework for navigating environments with spatially correlated obstacles and uncertain blockage status.

GP-ND avoids obstacles in trajectory planning using Gaussian Process regression.

Develops RL for dynamic risk assessment in stochastic optimization.

Flow adjusts curvature to avoid a fixed region, proving bounds and regularity.

Study motion planning for points avoiding obstacles in a plane.

The Heston stochastic volatility process is a degenerate diffusion process where the degeneracy in the diffusion coefficient is proportional to the square root of the distance to the boundary of the half-plane. The generator of this process with killing, called the elliptic Heston operator, is a second-order, degenerat…

We prove that if two non-trapping obstacles in $\mathbb{R}^n$ satisfy some rather weak non-degeneracy conditions and the scattering rays in their exteriors have (almost) the same travelling times or (almost) the same scattering length spectrum, then they coincide.

Paper studies optimal control for a specific geometric problem.

Study on semiconcavity of solutions to gradient obstacle problems on compact manifolds.

We develop some of the basic theory for the obstacle problem on Riemannian Manifolds, and we use it to establish a mean value theorem. Our mean value theorem works for a very wide class of Riemannian manifolds and has no weights at all within the integral.

Coordinated defensive escorts can aid a navigating payload by positioning themselves in order to maintain the safety of the payload from obstacles. In this paper, we present a novel, end-to-end solution for coordinating an escort team for protecting high-value payloads. Our solution employs deep reinforcement learning …

By introducing a shape manifold as a solution set to solve inverse obstacle scattering problems we allow the reconstruction of general, not necessarily star-shaped curves. The bending energy is used as a stabilizing term in Tikhonov regularization to gain independence of the parametrization. Moreover, we discuss how se…