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Shankar Sastry

Shankar Sastry contributes to research discovery and scholarly infrastructure.

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Published work

5 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

TT4D: A Pipeline and Dataset for Table Tennis 4D Reconstruction From Monocular Videos

We present TT4D, a large-scale, high-fidelity table tennis dataset. It provides $140+$ hours of reconstructed singles and doubles gameplay from monocular broadcast videos, featuring multimodal annotations like high-quality camera calibrations, precise 3D ball positions, ball spin, time segmentation, and 3D human meshes over time. This rich data provides a new foundation for virtual replay, in-depth player analysis, and robot learning. The dataset's combination of scale and precision is achieved through a novel reconstruction pipeline. Prior methods first partition a game sequence into individual shot segments based on the 2D ball track, and only then attempt reconstruction. However, 2D-based time segmentation collapses under occlusion and varied camera viewpoints, preventing reliable reconstruction. We invert this paradigm by first lifting the entire unsegmented 2D ball track to 3D through a learned lifting network. This 3D trajectory then allows us to reliably perform time segmentation. The learned lifting network also infers the ball's spin, handles unreliable ball detections, and successfully reconstructs the ball trajectory in cases of high occlusion. This lift-first design is necessary, as our pipeline is the only method capable of reconstructing table tennis gameplay from general-view broadcast monocular videos. We demonstrate the dataset's fidelity through two downstream tasks: estimating the racket's pose \& velocity at impact, and training a generative model of competitive rallies.

preprint2023arXiv

Competing Bandits in Time Varying Matching Markets

We study the problem of online learning in two-sided non-stationary matching markets, where the objective is to converge to a stable match. In particular, we consider the setting where one side of the market, the arms, has fixed known set of preferences over the other side, the players. While this problem has been studied when the players have fixed but unknown preferences, in this work we study the problem of how to learn when the preferences of the players are time varying and unknown. Our contribution is a methodology that can handle any type of preference structure and variation scenario. We show that, with the proposed algorithm, each player receives a uniform sub-linear regret of {$\widetilde{\mathcal{O}}(L^{1/2}_TT^{1/2})$} up to the number of changes in the underlying preferences of the agents, $L_T$. Therefore, we show that the optimal rates for single-agent learning can be achieved in spite of the competition up to a difference of a constant factor. We also discuss extensions of this algorithm to the case where the number of changes need not be known a priori.

preprint2022arXiv

Decentralized, Communication- and Coordination-free Learning in Structured Matching Markets

We study the problem of online learning in competitive settings in the context of two-sided matching markets. In particular, one side of the market, the agents, must learn about their preferences over the other side, the firms, through repeated interaction while competing with other agents for successful matches. We propose a class of decentralized, communication- and coordination-free algorithms that agents can use to reach to their stable match in structured matching markets. In contrast to prior works, the proposed algorithms make decisions based solely on an agent's own history of play and requires no foreknowledge of the firms' preferences. Our algorithms are constructed by splitting up the statistical problem of learning one's preferences, from noisy observations, from the problem of competing for firms. We show that under realistic structural assumptions on the underlying preferences of the agents and firms, the proposed algorithms incur a regret which grows at most logarithmically in the time horizon. Our results show that, in the case of matching markets, competition need not drastically affect the performance of decentralized, communication and coordination free online learning algorithms.

preprint2022arXiv

Inducing Social Optimality in Games via Adaptive Incentive Design

How can a social planner adaptively incentivize selfish agents who are learning in a strategic environment to induce a socially optimal outcome in the long run? We propose a two-timescale learning dynamics to answer this question in both atomic and non-atomic games. In our learning dynamics, players adopt a class of learning rules to update their strategies at a faster timescale, while a social planner updates the incentive mechanism at a slower timescale. In particular, the update of the incentive mechanism is based on each player's externality, which is evaluated as the difference between the player's marginal cost and the society's marginal cost in each time step. We show that any fixed point of our learning dynamics corresponds to the optimal incentive mechanism such that the corresponding Nash equilibrium also achieves social optimality. We also provide sufficient conditions for the learning dynamics to converge to a fixed point so that the adaptive incentive mechanism eventually induces a socially optimal outcome. Finally, we demonstrate that the sufficient conditions for convergence are satisfied in a variety of games, including (i) atomic networked quadratic aggregative games, (ii) atomic Cournot competition, and (iii) non-atomic network routing games.

preprint2022arXiv

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping: Through the Lens of Nonlinear Optimization

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithms perform visual-inertial estimation via filtering or batch optimization methods. Empirical evidence suggests that filtering algorithms are computationally faster, while optimization methods are more accurate. This work presents an optimization-based framework that unifies these approaches, and allows users to flexibly implement different design choices, e.g., the number and types of variables maintained in the algorithm at each time. We prove that filtering methods correspond to specific design choices in our generalized framework. We then reformulate the Multi-State Constrained Kalman Filter (MSCKF), implement the reformulation on challenging image sequence datasets in simulation, and contrast its performance with that of sliding window based filters. Using these results, we explain the relative performance characteristics of these two classes of algorithms in the context of our algorithm. Finally, we illustrate that under different design choices, the empirical performance of our algorithm interpolates between those of state-of-the-art approaches.