Source author record

David Müller

David Müller appears in the imported research catalog. Authorship, coauthor and topic links are available while profile ownership is still unclaimed.

ResearcherUnclaimed source record

Catalog footprint

What is connected

9works
15topics
4close collaborators

Actions

Connect this record

Log in to claim

Research graph

See the researcher in context

Open full explorer

Inspect adjacent papers, topics, institutions and collaborators without losing the researcher page.

Building this map preview

BZPEER is loading the nearby papers, people, topics and institutions for this page.

Published work

9 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

CoCo-InEKF: State Estimation with Learned Contact Covariances in Dynamic, Contact-Rich Scenarios

Robust state estimation for highly dynamic motion of legged robots remains challenging, especially in dynamic, contact-rich scenarios. Traditional approaches often rely on binary contact states that fail to capture the nuances of partial contact or directional slippage. This paper presents CoCo-InEKF, a differentiable invariant extended Kalman filter that utilizes continuous contact velocity covariances instead of binary contact states. These learned covariances allow the method to dynamically modulate contact confidence, accounting for more nuanced conditions ranging from firm contact to directional slippage or no contact. To predict these covariances for a set of predefined contact candidate points, we employ a lightweight neural network trained end-to-end using a state-error loss. This approach eliminates the need for heuristic ground-truth contact labels. In addition, we propose an automated contact candidate selection procedure and demonstrate that our method is insensitive to their exact placement. Experiments on a bipedal robot demonstrate a superior accuracy-efficiency tradeoff for linear velocity estimation, as well as improved filter consistency compared to baseline methods. This enables the robust execution of challenging motions, including dancing and complex ground interactions -- both in simulation and in the real world.

preprint2026arXiv

ReActor: Reinforcement Learning for Physics-Aware Motion Retargeting

Retargeting human kinematic reference motion onto a robot's morphology remains a formidable challenge. Existing methods often produce physical inconsistencies, such as foot sliding, self-collisions, or dynamically infeasible motions, which hinder downstream imitation learning. We propose a bilevel optimization framework that jointly adapts reference motions to a robot's morphology while training a tracking policy using reinforcement learning. To make the optimization tractable, we derive an approximate gradient for the upper-level loss. Our framework requires only a sparse set of semantic rigid-body correspondences and eliminates the need for manual tuning by identifying optimal values for a parameterization expressive enough to preserve characteristic motion across different embodiments. Moreover, by integrating retargeting directly with physics simulation, we produce physically plausible motions that facilitate robust imitation learning. We validate our method in simulation and on hardware, demonstrating challenging motions for morphologies that differ significantly from a human, including retargeting onto a quadruped.

preprint2021arXiv

Dynamic pricing under nested logit demand

Recently, there is growing interest and need for dynamic pricing algorithms, especially, in the field of online marketplaces by offering smart pricing options for big online stores. We present an approach to adjust prices based on the observed online market data. The key idea is to characterize optimal prices as minimizers of a total expected revenue function, which turns out to be convex. We assume that consumers face information processing costs, hence, follow a discrete choice demand model, and suppliers are equipped with quantity adjustment costs. We prove the strong smoothness of the total expected revenue function by deriving the strong convexity modulus of its dual. Our gradient-based pricing schemes outbalance supply and demand at the convergence rates of $\mathcal{O}(\frac{1}{t})$ and $\mathcal{O}(\frac{1}{t^2})$, respectively. This suggests that the imperfect behavior of consumers and suppliers helps to stabilize the market.

preprint2020arXiv

Chaining of hard disks in nematic needles: particle-based simulation of colloidal interactions in liquid crystals

Colloidal particles suspended in liquid crystals can exhibit various effective anisotropic interactions that can be tuned and utilized in self-assembly processes. We simulate a two-dimensional system of hard disks suspended in a solution of dense hard needles as a model system for colloids suspended in a nematic lyotropic liquid crystal. The novel event-chain Monte Carlo technique enables us to directly measure colloidal interactions in a microscopic simulation with explicit liquid crystal particles in the dense nematic phase. We find a directional short-range attraction for disks along the director, which triggers chaining parallel to the director and seemingly contradicts the standard liquid crystal field theory result of a quadrupolar attraction with a preferred ${45^{\circ}}$ angle. Our results can be explained by a short-range density-dependent depletion interaction, which has been neglected so far. Directionality and strength of the depletion interaction are caused by the weak planar anchoring of hard rods. The depletion attraction robustly dominates over the quadrupolar elastic attraction if disks come close. Self-assembly of many disks proceeds via intermediate chaining, which demonstrates that in lyotropic liquid crystal colloids depletion interactions play an important role in structure formation processes.

preprint2020arXiv

Simulations of the Glasma in 3+1D

The Glasma is a gluonic state of matter which can be created in collisions of relativistic heavy ions and is a precursor to the quark-gluon plasma. The existence of this state is a prediction of the color glass condensate (CGC) effective theory. In many applications of the CGC framework, the boost invariant approximation is employed. It assumes that the longitudinal extent of the nuclei can be approximated as infinitesimally thin. Consequently, the Glasma produced from such a collision is boost invariant and can be effectively described in 2+1D. Therefore, observables of the boost invariant Glasma are by construction independent of rapidity. The main goal of this thesis is to develop a numerical method for the non-boost-invariant setting where nuclei are assumed to be thin, but of finite longitudinal extent. This is in conflict with a number of simplifications that are used in the boost invariant case. In particular, one has to describe the collisions in 3+1D in the laboratory or center-of-mass frame. The change of frame forces the explicit inclusion of the color charges of nuclei. The new method is tested using an extension of the McLerran-Venugopalan model which includes a parameter for longitudinal thickness. It reproduces the boost invariant setting as a limiting case. Studying the pressure components of the Glasma, one finds the pressure anisotropy remains large. The energy density of the Glasma depends on rapidity due to the explicit breaking of boost invariance. The width of the observed rapidity profiles is controlled by the collision energy and can be shown to roughly agree with experimental data. Finally, a new numerical scheme for real-time lattice gauge theory is developed which provides higher numerical stability than the previous method. This new scheme is shown to be gauge-covariant and conserves the Gauss constraint even for large time steps.

preprint2016arXiv

Minimax principles, Hardy-Dirac inequalities and operator cores for two and three dimensional Coulomb-Dirac operators

For $n\in\{2,3\}$ we prove minimax characterisations of eigenvalues in the gap of the $n$ dimensional Dirac operator with an potential, which may have a Coulomb singularity with a coupling constant up to the critical value $1/(4-n)$. This result implies a so-called Hardy-Dirac inequality, which can be used to define a distinguished self-adjoint extension of the Coulomb-Dirac operator defined on $\mathsf{C}_{0}^{\infty}(\mathbb{R}^n\setminus\{0\};\mathbb{C}^{2(n-1)})$, as long as the coupling constant does not exceed $1/(4-n)$. We also find an explicit description of an operator core of this operator.

preprint2016arXiv

Simulating collisions of thick nuclei in the color glass condensate framework

We present our work on the simulation of the early stages of heavy-ion collisions with finite longitudinal thickness in the laboratory frame in 3+1 dimensions. In particular we study the effects of nuclear thickness on the production of a glasma state in the McLerran-Venugopalan model within the color glass condensate framework. A finite thickness enables us to describe nuclei at lower energies, but forces us to abandon boost-invariance. As a consequence, random classical color sources within the nuclei have to be included in the simulation, which is achieved by using the colored particle-in-cell (CPIC) method. We show that the description in the laboratory frame agrees with boost-invariant approaches as a limiting case. Furthermore we investigate collisions beyond boost-invariance, in particular the pressure anisotropy in the glasma.

preprint2014arXiv

On the minimax principle for Coulomb-Dirac operators

Let q and v be symmetric sesquilinear forms such that v is a form perturbation of q. Then we can associate a unique self-adjoint operator B to q+ v. Assuming that B has a gap (a, b) in the essential spectrum, we prove a minimax principle for the eigenvalues of B in (a, b) using a suitable orthogonal decomposition of the domain of q. This allows us to justify two minimax characterisations of eigenvalues in the gap of three-dimensional Dirac operators with electrostatic potentials having strong Coulomb singularities.