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gradSim: Differentiable simulation for system identification and visuomotor control

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arxiv 2104.02646 v1 pith:IFJGEAZ5 submitted 2021-04-06 cs.CV cs.AIcs.LGcs.RO

classification cs.CVcs.AIcs.LGcs.RO
keywords differentiablecontroldynamicsenablesformationgradsimidentificationimage
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We consider the problem of estimating an object's physical properties such as mass, friction, and elasticity directly from video sequences. Such a system identification problem is fundamentally ill-posed due to the loss of information during image formation. Current solutions require precise 3D labels which are labor-intensive to gather, and infeasible to create for many systems such as deformable solids or cloth. We present gradSim, a framework that overcomes the dependence on 3D supervision by leveraging differentiable multiphysics simulation and differentiable rendering to jointly model the evolution of scene dynamics and image formation. This novel combination enables backpropagation from pixels in a video sequence through to the underlying physical attributes that generated them. Moreover, our unified computation graph -- spanning from the dynamics and through the rendering process -- enables learning in challenging visuomotor control tasks, without relying on state-based (3D) supervision, while obtaining performance competitive to or better than techniques that rely on precise 3D labels.

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Cited by 5 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Learning Physics-Guided Residual Dynamics for Deformable Object Simulation

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    Physics-guided residual dynamics, a spring-mass simulator plus a network that predicts velocity corrections, yields the most accurate deformable-object simulation in the paper's real-world tests.

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    WASP derivative reuse speeds up MuJoCo MPC by 1.26–2.08x versus finite differences on selected locomotion tasks, with comparable task costs.

  3. Vid2Sim: Generalizable, Video-based Reconstruction of Appearance, Geometry and Physics for Mesh-free Simulation

    cs.GR 2025-06 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Vid2Sim recovers 3D geometry, appearance, and elastic material parameters from multi-view videos using a feed-forward network plus a fast refinement, enabling mesh-free reduced-order simulation.

  4. Physics-Grounded Differentiable Simulation for Soft Growing Robots

    cs.RO 2025-01 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A differentiable simulator for soft growing robots with a new wrinkling-based bending stiffness model, fitted and validated against real robot trajectories.

  5. Generative Physical AI in Vision: A Survey

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    A structured review that categorizes physics-aware generative models in vision into explicit-simulation and implicit-learning families and proposes six integration paradigms.

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