Papers for

automatic control system developers

Papers whose findings have a practical use for this group, as judged from the abstract. Open a paper to read what it means in practice.

Control geometry straightening improves efficiency of latent space planning

Control-Geometry Straightening for Sampling-Based Latent Planning

Abstract: Joint-embedding predictive architectures enable planning with latent world models, but accurate transition prediction alone does not ensure that the planning objective is easy to optimize. We introduce Control-Geometry Straightening (CGS), a single auxiliary loss that learns planner-friendly representations by directly straightening control geometry for sampling-efficient planning. CGS matches pairwise cosine similarities among actions to those among corresponding latent differences only using local transitions from pixel-action pairs. The loss can be applied across world-model architectures using end-to-end learned or pretrained representations. Under linear-dynamics, our theoretical analysis connects this objective to temporal straightening and more balanced terminal-cost curvature across the full planning horizon, yielding finite-budget guarantees for MPPI, local contraction results for CEM, and convergence bounds for gradient descent. Across four control environments and multiple planners, CGS improves planning with fewer sampled candidates and refinement steps, achieving success-rate gains up to 20 and 12.6 percentage points over LeWorldModel (LeWM) and its temporal-straightening variant (LeWM+TS), respectively, with sampling-based planners using 128 candidates per update. Probes, comparisons with DINO-WM architecture, and planner-side ablations clarify how latent motion organization, state dependence, and dynamical context shape planning behavior. Straightening control geometry thus makes good action sequences easier to find under limited planning budgets.

Mon 28 SeptMachine Learning
The gist
Planning the next actions in complex environments can be tricky even when we have a good prediction of what might happen. The authors introduce a method that reshapes the way actions relate to changes in the world’s hidden, simplified description (latent space) to make planning easier. Their approach aligns the similarity of actions with the similarity of resulting changes in the latent space, making it simpler to find good action sequences with fewer tries. This technique works across different models and improves success rates in controlling simulated systems.
Open → 2609.35603v1