Debashish Chakravarty

Shreya Bhatt, Aayush Jain, Parv Maheshwari et al.

The following paper is a reproducibility report for "Path Planning using Neural A* Search" published in ICML2 2021 as part of the ML Reproducibility Challenge 2021. The original paper proposes the Neural A* planner, and claims it achieves an optimal balance between the reduction of node expansions and path accuracy. We verify this claim by reimplementing the model in a different framework and reproduce the data published in the original paper. We have also provided a code-flow diagram to aid comprehension of the code structure. As extensions to the original paper, we explore the effects of (1) generalizing the model by training it on a shuffled dataset, (2) introducing dropout, (3) implementing empirically chosen hyperparameters as trainable parameters in the model, (4) altering the network model to Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) to introduce stochasticity, (5) modifying the encoder from Unet to Unet++, (6) incorporating cost maps obtained from the Neural A* module in other variations of A* search.

Rohit Ranjan, Himadri Bhakta, Animesh Jha et al.

This report covers our reproduction effort of the paper 'Differentiable Spatial Planning using Transformers' by Chaplot et al. . In this paper, the problem of spatial path planning in a differentiable way is considered. They show that their proposed method of using Spatial Planning Transformers outperforms prior data-driven models and leverages differentiable structures to learn mapping without a ground truth map simultaneously. We verify these claims by reproducing their experiments and testing their method on new data. We also investigate the stability of planning accuracy with maps with increased obstacle complexity. Efforts to investigate and verify the learnings of the Mapper module were met with failure stemming from a paucity of computational resources and unreachable authors.