TALK    [MERL Seminar Series 2024] Chuchu Fan presents talk titled Neural Certificates and LLMs in Large-Scale Autonomy Design

Date & Time:

Wednesday, May 29, 2024; 12:00 PM

Abstract:

Learning-enabled control systems have demonstrated impressive empirical performance on challenging control problems in robotics. However, this performance often arrives with the trade-off of diminished transparency and the absence of guarantees regarding the safety and stability of the learned controllers. In recent years, new techniques have emerged to provide these guarantees by learning certificates alongside control policies — these certificates provide concise, data-driven proofs that guarantee the safety and stability of the learned control system. These methods not only allow the user to verify the safety of a learned controller but also provide supervision during training, allowing safety and stability requirements to influence the training process itself. In this talk, we present two exciting updates on neural certificates. In the first work, we explore the use of graph neural networks to learn collision-avoidance certificates that can generalize to unseen and very crowded environments. The second work presents a novel reinforcement learning approach that can produce certificate functions with the policies while addressing the instability issues in the optimization process. Finally, if time permits, I will also talk about my group's recent work using LLM and domain-specific task and motion planners to allow natural language as input for robot planning.

Speaker:

Chuchu Fan
MIT

Dr. Chuchu Fan is an Assistant Professor in AeroAstro and LIDS at MIT. Before that, she was a postdoc researcher at Caltech and got her Ph.D. from ECE at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research group, Realm at MIT, works on using rigorous mathematics, including formal methods, machine learning, and control theory, for the design, analysis, and verification of safe autonomous systems. Chuchu is the recipient of the 2020 ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award, an NSF CAREER Award, and an AFOSR Young Investigator Program (YIP) Award.

MERL Host:

Abraham P. Vinod

Research Areas:

Artificial Intelligence, Control, Machine Learning