Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 28 (NIPS 2015)
Manuel Watter, Jost Springenberg, Joschka Boedecker, Martin Riedmiller
We introduce Embed to Control (E2C), a method for model learning and control of non-linear dynamical systems from raw pixel images. E2C consists of a deep generative model, belonging to the family of variational autoencoders, that learns to generate image trajectories from a latent space in which the dynamics is constrained to be locally linear. Our model is derived directly from an optimal control formulation in latent space, supports long-term prediction of image sequences and exhibits strong performance on a variety of complex control problems.