Physically Structured Neural Networks for Smooth and Contact Dynamics
· Talk · University College London
Abstract. A neural network’s architecture encodes key information and inductive biases that are used to guide its predictions. In this talk, we discuss recent work which leverages the perspective of neural ordinary differential equations to design network architectures that encode the structures of classical mechanics. We examine the cases of both smooth dynamics and non-smooth contact dynamics. The architectures obtained are easy to understand, show excellent performance and data-efficiency on simple benchmark tasks, and are a promising emerging tool for use in robot learning and related areas.