How pilots fly: An inverse optimal control problem approach
This paper is devoted to the general problem of reconstructing the cost from the observation of trajectories, in a problem of optimal control. It is motivated by the following applied problem, concerning HALE drones: one would like them to decide by themselves for their trajectories, and to behave at least as a good human pilot. This applied question is very similar to the problem of determining what is minimized in human locomotion. These starting points are the reasons for the particular classes of control systems and of costs under consideration. To summarize, our conclusion is that in general, inside these classes, three experiments visiting the same values of the control are needed to reconstruct the cost, and two experiments are in general not enough. The method is constructive. The proof of these results is mostly based upon the Thom's transversality theory.
We study the problem of learning a kernel matrix from an apriori kernel and training data. An unconstrained convex optimization formulation is proposed, with an arbitrary convex smooth loss function on kernel entries and a LogDet divergence for regularization. Since the number of variables is of order O(n), standard Newton and quasi-Newton methods are too time-consuming. An operator form Hessian is used to develop an O(n) trust-region inexact Newton method, where the Newton direction is computed using several conjugate gradient steps on the Hessian operator equation. On the uspst dataset, our algorithm can handle 2 million optimization variables within one hour. Experiments are shown for both linear (Mahalanobis) metric learning and for kernel learning. The convergence rate, speed and performance of several loss functions and algorithms are discussed.