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Chandrajit Bajaj

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Published work

16 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Learning Material-Aware Hamiltonian Risk Fields for Safe Navigation

Risk-aware navigation should be selective: a policy should expose evasive degrees of freedom only when the local scene admits a lower-risk feasible maneuver, and suppress them when no safer alternative exists. We show that adding one context-energy term to a port-Hamiltonian navigation policy produces a learned force channel with exactly this falsifiable signature. When the local risk field contains a feasible lower-risk direction, the induced context force activates toward it; when the apparent escape is blocked or not yet available, a route-aware gate suppresses lateral force rather than hallucinating an unsafe maneuver. A CVaR tail-risk objective focuses gradient updates on rare but consequential risk transitions. We validate the selectivity signature across four settings. In the primary delayed-required-escape benchmark, route-aware CVaR reduces premature force activation from 0.950 to 0.180 versus DWA while raising success from 0.480 to 0.810 with zero replans. On real off-road terrain (RELLIS-3D), route-aware enrichment achieves correct activation rate 0.837 and false activation rate 0.114, compared to 0.378/0.752 for scalar risk gradients. On static semantic maps (DFC2018), enrichment reduces catastrophic failure from 0.60 to 0.10 and oscillation by 90.7% while preserving path efficiency. In highway traffic, collisions drop from 100% to 0% when a lane escape is feasible; when no escape exists, the policy suppresses the lateral maneuver. The selectivity property follows from the gradient structure of the context energy rather than from training-time tuning.

preprint2026arXiv

Queryable LoRA: Instruction-Regularized Routing Over Shared Low-Rank Update Atoms

We present a data-adaptive method for parameter-efficient fine-tuning of large neural networks. Standard low-rank adaptation methods improve efficiency by restricting each layer update to a fixed low-rank form, but this static parameterization can be too rigid when the appropriate correction depends on the input and on the evolving depth-wise computation of the network. Our approach replaces a purely layer-local adapter with a shared queryable memory of low-rank update atoms. For each block of layers, the model forms a query from the current low-rank state and a running summary of previous blocks, uses this query to retrieve a content-dependent combination of shared update components via attention, and applies the resulting routed operator within the low-rank bottleneck. In this way, the method retains the efficiency and scalability of low-rank adaptation while allowing the effective update to vary across inputs and to share reusable structure across layers. The resulting architecture provides a principled middle ground between static LoRA-style updates and fully generated parameter updates: it remains compact and parameter-efficient while supporting dynamic, context-sensitive adaptation. Further, we incorporate instruction-regularization by augmenting routing logits with a language-induced prior over update atoms, thereby biasing the selection of low-rank transformations toward semantically relevant directions without generating unconstrained parameter updates. Experiments on noisy non-linear regression tasks and LLM fine-tuning suggest that this queryable update-memory formulation can improve final test performance and training stability compared to standard low-rank adaptation, while using a comparable number of trainable parameters.

preprint2026arXiv

When Descent Is Too Stable: Event-Triggered Hamiltonian Learning to Optimize

Fixed-budget nonconvex optimization can fail not because local descent is unstable, but because it is too stable: after reaching a nearby stationary point, an optimizer may spend the remaining evaluations refining an uninformative local minimum. We formulate this failure mode as a control problem over optimizer dynamics, where the learner must decide when to descend, when to exploit a promising basin, and when stagnation should trigger movement elsewhere. We introduce SHAPE, a structured adaptive port-Hamiltonian task-family optimizer for event-triggered minima hunting under local information. Starting from gradient-descent dynamics, SHAPE lifts optimization to an augmented phase space $(q, p)$, where the primal state $q$ represents the candidate solution, the cotangent variable $p$ carries directional sensitivity, and a controller $u$ provides processed information from current gradient oracle. Within each stage, a learned Hamiltonian vector field induces structured local descent; across stages, a fixed event clock in the implementation updates ports and memory when local equilibria are detected, with stage-dependent horizons treated in the analysis as a direct generalization. This design preserves a passivity-compatible structure while allowing the same trained policy to use clean, stochastic, or estimated gradient inputs. Experiments on fixed-budget nonconvex optimization tasks show that SHAPE improves best-so-far performance compared with fixed-policy optimizers. These results suggest that adaptive Hamiltonian energy shaping provides a principled mechanism for balancing descent, exploration, and budget allocation in difficult optimization landscapes.

preprint2025arXiv

GRL-SNAM: Geometric Reinforcement Learning with Path Differential Hamiltonians for Simultaneous Navigation and Mapping in Unknown Environments

We present GRL-SNAM, a geometric reinforcement learning framework for Simultaneous Navigation and Mapping(SNAM) in unknown environments. A SNAM problem is challenging as it needs to design hierarchical or joint policies of multiple agents that control the movement of a real-life robot towards the goal in mapless environment, i.e. an environment where the map of the environment is not available apriori, and needs to be acquired through sensors. The sensors are invoked from the path learner, i.e. navigator, through active query responses to sensory agents, and along the motion path. GRL-SNAM differs from preemptive navigation algorithms and other reinforcement learning methods by relying exclusively on local sensory observations without constructing a global map. Our approach formulates path navigation and mapping as a dynamic shortest path search and discovery process using controlled Hamiltonian optimization: sensory inputs are translated into local energy landscapes that encode reachability, obstacle barriers, and deformation constraints, while policies for sensing, planning, and reconfiguration evolve stagewise via updating Hamiltonians. A reduced Hamiltonian serves as an adaptive score function, updating kinetic/potential terms, embedding barrier constraints, and continuously refining trajectories as new local information arrives. We evaluate GRL-SNAM on two different 2D navigation tasks. Comparing against local reactive baselines and global policy learning references under identical stagewise sensing constraints, it preserves clearance, generalizes to unseen layouts, and demonstrates that Geometric RL learning via updating Hamiltonians enables high-quality navigation through minimal exploration via local energy refinement rather than extensive global mapping. The code is publicly available on \href{https://github.com/CVC-Lab/GRL-SNAM}{Github}.

preprint2022arXiv

E-CIR: Event-Enhanced Continuous Intensity Recovery

A camera begins to sense light the moment we press the shutter button. During the exposure interval, relative motion between the scene and the camera causes motion blur, a common undesirable visual artifact. This paper presents E-CIR, which converts a blurry image into a sharp video represented as a parametric function from time to intensity. E-CIR leverages events as an auxiliary input. We discuss how to exploit the temporal event structure to construct the parametric bases. We demonstrate how to train a deep learning model to predict the function coefficients. To improve the appearance consistency, we further introduce a refinement module to propagate visual features among consecutive frames. Compared to state-of-the-art event-enhanced deblurring approaches, E-CIR generates smoother and more realistic results. The implementation of E-CIR is available at https://github.com/chensong1995/E-CIR.

preprint2016arXiv

Construction of scalar and vector finite element families on polygonal and polyhedral meshes

We combine theoretical results from polytope domain meshing, generalized barycentric coordinates, and finite element exterior calculus to construct scalar- and vector-valued basis functions for conforming finite element methods on generic convex polytope meshes in dimensions 2 and 3. Our construction recovers well-known bases for the lowest order Nédélec, Raviart-Thomas, and Brezzi-Douglas-Marini elements on simplicial meshes and generalizes the notion of Whitney forms to non-simplicial convex polygons and polyhedra. We show that our basis functions lie in the correct function space with regards to global continuity and that they reproduce the requisite polynomial differential forms described by finite element exterior calculus. We present a method to count the number of basis functions required to ensure these two key properties.

preprint2016arXiv

Higher Order Mutual Information Approximation for Feature Selection

Feature selection is a process of choosing a subset of relevant features so that the quality of prediction models can be improved. An extensive body of work exists on information-theoretic feature selection, based on maximizing Mutual Information (MI) between subsets of features and class labels. The prior methods use a lower order approximation, by treating the joint entropy as a summation of several single variable entropies. This leads to locally optimal selections and misses multi-way feature combinations. We present a higher order MI based approximation technique called Higher Order Feature Selection (HOFS). Instead of producing a single list of features, our method produces a ranked collection of feature subsets that maximizes MI, giving better comprehension (feature ranking) as to which features work best together when selected, due to their underlying interdependent structure. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed method performs better than existing feature selection approaches while keeping similar running times and computational complexity.

preprint2016arXiv

Quantifying and Visualizing Uncertainties in Molecular Models

Computational molecular modeling and visualization has seen significant progress in recent years with sev- eral molecular modeling and visualization software systems in use today. Nevertheless the molecular biology community lacks techniques and tools for the rigorous analysis, quantification and visualization of the associated errors in molecular structure and its associated properties. This paper attempts at filling this vacuum with the introduction of a systematic statistical framework where each source of structural uncertainty is modeled as a ran- dom variable (RV) with a known distribution, and properties of the molecules are defined as dependent RVs. The framework consists of a theoretical basis, and an empirical implementation where the uncertainty quantification (UQ) analysis is achieved by using Chernoff-like bounds. The framework enables additionally the propagation of input structural data uncertainties, which in the molecular protein world are described as B-factors, saved with almost all X-ray models deposited in the Protein Data Bank (PDB). Our statistical framework is also able and has been applied to quantify and visualize the uncertainties in molecular properties, namely solvation interfaces and solvation free energy estimates. For each of these quantities of interest (QOI) of the molecular models we provide several novel and intuitive visualizations of the input, intermediate, and final propagated uncertainties. These methods should enable the end user achieve a more quantitative and visual evaluation of various molecular PDB models for structural and property correctness, or the lack thereof.

preprint2015arXiv

Characterization and Construction of a Family of Highly Symmetric Spherical Polyhedra with Application in Modeling Self-Assembling Structures

The regular polyhedra have the highest order of 3D symmetries and are exceptionally at- tractive templates for (self)-assembly using minimal types of building blocks, from nano-cages and virus capsids to large scale constructions like glass domes. However, they only represent a small number of possible spherical layouts which can serve as templates for symmetric assembly. In this paper, we formalize the necessary and sufficient conditions for symmetric assembly using exactly one type of building block. All such assemblies correspond to spherical polyhedra which are edge-transitive and face-transitive, but not necessarily vertex-transitive. This describes a new class of polyhedra outside of the well-studied Platonic, Archimedean, Catalan and and Johnson solids. We show that this new family, dubbed almost-regular polyhedra, can be pa- rameterized using only two variables and provide an efficient algorithm to generate an infinite series of such polyhedra. Additionally, considering the almost-regular polyhedra as templates for the assembly of 3D spherical shell structures, we developed an efficient polynomial time shell assembly approximation algorithm for an otherwise NP-hard geometric optimization problem.

preprint2015arXiv

On the construction of general cubature formula by flat extensions

We describe a new method to compute general cubature formulae. The problem is initially transformed into the computation of truncated Hankel operators with flat extensions. We then analyse the algebraic properties associated to flat extensions and show how to recover the cubature points and weights from the truncated Hankel operator. We next present an algorithm to test the flat extension property and to additionally compute the decomposition. To generate cubature formulae with a minimal number of points, we propose a new relaxation hierarchy of convex optimization problems minimizing the nuclear norm of the Hankel operators. For a suitably high order of convex relaxation, the minimizer of the optimization problem corresponds to a cubature formula. Furthermore cubature formulae with a minimal number of points are associated to faces of the convex sets. We illustrate our method on some examples, and for each we obtain a new minimal cubature formula.

preprint2014arXiv

On Low Discrepancy Samplings in Product Spaces of Motion Groups

Deterministically generating near-uniform point samplings of the motion groups like SO(3), SE(3) and their n-wise products SO(3)^n, SE(3)^n is fundamental to numerous applications in computational and data sciences. The natural measure of sampling quality is discrepancy. In this work, our main goal is construct low discrepancy deterministic samplings in product spaces of the motion groups. To this end, we develop a novel strategy (using a two-step discrepancy construction) that leads to an almost exponential improvement in size (from the trivial direct product). To the best of our knowledge, this is the first nontrivial construction for SO(3)^n, SE(3)^n and the hypertorus T^n. We also construct new low discrepancy samplings of S^2 and SO(3). The central component in our construction for SO(3) is an explicit construction of N points in S^2 with discrepancy \tildeØ(1/\sqrt{N}) with respect to convex sets, matching the bound achieved for the special case of spherical caps in \cite{ABD_12}. We also generalize the discrepancy of Cartesian product sets \cite{Chazelle04thediscrepancy} to the discrepancy of local Cartesian product sets. The tools we develop should be useful in generating low discrepancy samplings of other complicated geometric spaces.

preprint2012arXiv

Interpolation Error Estimates for Mean Value Coordinates over Convex Polygons

In a similar fashion to estimates shown for Harmonic, Wachspress, and Sibson coordinates in [Gillette et al., AiCM, doi:10.1007/s10444-011-9218-z], we prove interpolation error estimates for the mean value coordinates on convex polygons suitable for standard finite element analysis. Our analysis is based on providing a uniform bound on the gradient of the mean value functions for all convex polygons of diameter one satisfying certain simple geometric restrictions. This work makes rigorous an observed practical advantage of the mean value coordinates: unlike Wachspress coordinates, the gradients of the mean value coordinates do not become large as interior angles of the polygon approach pi.

preprint2012arXiv

Quadratic Serendipity Finite Elements on Polygons Using Generalized Barycentric Coordinates

We introduce a finite element construction for use on the class of convex, planar polygons and show it obtains a quadratic error convergence estimate. On a convex n-gon satisfying simple geometric criteria, our construction produces 2n basis functions, associated in a Lagrange-like fashion to each vertex and each edge midpoint, by transforming and combining a set of n(n+1)/2 basis functions known to obtain quadratic convergence. The technique broadens the scope of the so-called `serendipity' elements, previously studied only for quadrilateral and regular hexahedral meshes, by employing the theory of generalized barycentric coordinates. Uniform `a priori' error estimates are established over the class of convex quadrilaterals with bounded aspect ratio as well as over the class of generic convex planar polygons satisfying additional shape regularity conditions to exclude large interior angles and short edges. Numerical evidence is provided on a trapezoidal quadrilateral mesh, previously not amenable to serendipity constructions, and applications to adaptive meshing are discussed.

preprint2011arXiv

Dual Formulations of Mixed Finite Element Methods with Applications

Mixed finite element methods solve a PDE using two or more variables. The theory of Discrete Exterior Calculus explains why the degrees of freedom associated to the different variables should be stored on both primal and dual domain meshes with a discrete Hodge star used to transfer information between the meshes. We show through analysis and examples that the choice of discrete Hodge star is essential to the numerical stability of the method. Additionally, we define interpolation functions and discrete Hodge stars on dual meshes which can be used to create previously unconsidered mixed methods. Examples from magnetostatics and Darcy flow are examined in detail.

preprint2011arXiv

Error Estimates for Generalized Barycentric Interpolation

We prove the optimal convergence estimate for first order interpolants used in finite element methods based on three major approaches for generalizing barycentric interpolation functions to convex planar polygonal domains. The Wachspress approach explicitly constructs rational functions, the Sibson approach uses Voronoi diagrams on the vertices of the polygon to define the functions, and the Harmonic approach defines the functions as the solution of a PDE. We show that given certain conditions on the geometry of the polygon, each of these constructions can obtain the optimal convergence estimate. In particular, we show that the well-known maximum interior angle condition required for interpolants over triangles is still required for Wachspress functions but not for Sibson functions.

preprint2011arXiv

On a Nanoscopically-Informed Shell Theory of Single-Wall Carbon Nanotubes

This paper proposes a bottom-up sequence of modeling steps leading to a nanoscopically informed continuum, and as such macroscopic, theory of single-walled carbon nanotubes (SWCNTs). We provide a description of the geometry of the two most representative types of SWCNTs, armchair (A-) and zigzag (Z-), of their modules and of their elementary bond units. We believe ours to be the simplest shell theory that accounts accurately for the linearly elastic response of both A- and Z- CNTs. In fact, our theory can be shown to fit SWCNTs of whatever chirality; its main novel feature is perhaps the proposition of chirality-dependent concepts of effective thickness and effective radius.