Xuesu Xiao, Tingnan Zhang, Krzysztof Choromanski et al.
Despite decades of research, existing navigation systems still face real-world challenges when deployed in the wild, e.g., in cluttered home environments or in human-occupied public spaces. To address this, we present a new class of implicit control policies combining the benefits of imitation learning with the robust handling of system constraints from Model Predictive Control (MPC). Our approach, called Performer-MPC, uses a learned cost function parameterized by vision context embeddings provided by Performers -- a low-rank implicit-attention Transformer. We jointly train the cost function and construct the controller relying on it, effectively solving end-to-end the corresponding bi-level optimization problem. We show that the resulting policy improves standard MPC performance by leveraging a few expert demonstrations of the desired navigation behavior in different challenging real-world scenarios. Compared with a standard MPC policy, Performer-MPC achieves >40% better goal reached in cluttered environments and >65% better on social metrics when navigating around humans.
Carlos Bravo-Prieto, Julien Baglio, Marco Cè et al.
We propose and assess an alternative quantum generator architecture in the context of generative adversarial learning for Monte Carlo event generation, used to simulate particle physics processes at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). We validate this methodology by implementing the quantum network on artificial data generated from known underlying distributions. The network is then applied to Monte Carlo-generated datasets of specific LHC scattering processes. The new quantum generator architecture leads to a generalization of the state-of-the-art implementations, achieving smaller Kullback-Leibler divergences even with shallow-depth networks. Moreover, the quantum generator successfully learns the underlying distribution functions even if trained with small training sample sets; this is particularly interesting for data augmentation applications. We deploy this novel methodology on two different quantum hardware architectures, trapped-ion and superconducting technologies, to test its hardware-independent viability.