arXiv subjects

Wooyoung Chung

Publications and source records attributed to Wooyoung Chung.

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Dynamics Aware Past-Future Information Bottleneck

The simplification of complex dynamical systems is essential for efficient estimation and control. A principled approach to this task is through the lens of information-theoretic compression. The Past-Future Information Bottleneck (PF-IB) provides a theoretical framework for compressing linear dynamical systems. However, the standard formulation often lacks structural consistency, yielding representations that are not realizable as dynamical systems. By constraining the objective to a specific manifold of block Hankel matrices, which we prove is a Lie group, we bridge the gap between PF-IB and realization theory. Our approach ensures that the resulting compressed dynamics are realizable, thereby enabling its direct application to estimation and control. We demonstrate our approach in numerical simulations.

cs.IT↗

arXiv2026

A Unified Framework for Empowerment and Predictive Control

Sampling-based model predictive control (MPC) is a powerful approach to trajectory optimization, but its performance depends on an informative cost function that often requires substantial domain knowledge to design. An alternative is to derive objectives directly from the system dynamics. Empowerment, defined as the channel capacity between an agent's inputs and its future state, provides such a goal-agnostic objective and has been shown to produce useful behaviors across a range of domains. However, existing empowerment-based controllers have two key limitations: empowerment is estimated using a virtual probing policy distinct from the executed control policy, obscuring its connection to the resulting behavior; and its computation typically requires second-order derivatives of the dynamics, limiting compatibility with standard MPC methods. We formulate empowerment using a single policy for both probing and acting, directly linking the empowerment objective to the executed behavior. The resulting objective requires only first-order derivatives and can be optimized with standard MPC solvers, either alone or in combination with a task-specific cost. We evaluate the proposed approach on classical control tasks and show that combining empowerment with task costs matches or exceeds the success rate achieved by either objective alone. Our formulation provides a practical bridge between standard MPC and intrinsically motivated control.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2026

Bellman Meets Lyapunov: Unsupervised Reinforcement Learning via Mastering Chaos

Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful paradigm for training agents, yet its success rests on domain expertise of human engineers who design informative reward signals for every new task. Unsupervised RL aims to reduce this engineering with intrinsic motivation (IM): reward signals that emerge from the agent environment interaction itself. Existing IM objectives, however, involve the selection of information variables, which re-introduces domain expertise the field has sought to eliminate. We introduce Forward CIP (F-CIP), an RL-native formulation of the Controllable Information Production (CIP) objective, which is defined by the system's dynamics alone and requires no such selection. We prove that F-CIP is compatible with RL and demonstrate its effectiveness with existing algorithms. Training agents with F-CIP results in unsupervised discovery of primitive behaviors such as balancing and maintaining controllability, which are essential for more complex robot behaviors. Paired with a simple forward-velocity reward, our method produces coordinated gaits such as hopping and running which otherwise require reward engineering to learn.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Dimensionality Reduction of Dynamics on Lie Manifolds via Structure-Aware Canonical Correlation Analysis

Incorporating prior knowledge into a data-driven modeling problem can drastically improve performance, reliability, and generalization outside of the training sample. The stronger the structural properties, the more effective these improvements become. Manifolds are a powerful nonlinear generalization of Euclidean space for modeling finite dimensions. Structural impositions in constrained systems increase when applying group structure, converting them into Lie manifolds. The range of their applications is very wide and includes the important case of robotic tasks. Canonical Correlation Analysis (CCA) can construct a hierarchical sequence of maximal correlations of up to two paired data sets in these Euclidean spaces. We present a method to generalize this concept to Lie Manifolds and demonstrate its efficacy through the substantial improvements it achieves in making structure-consistent predictions about changes in the state of a robotic hand.

cs.RO↗