Papers › Scalable Differentiable Physics for Learning and Control

Scalable Differentiable Physics for Learning and Control

4 Jul 2020ICML 2020 1arXiv:2007.02168archive 2025-07-28

Yi-Ling Qiao, Junbang Liang, Vladlen Koltun, Ming C. Lin

Differentiable physics is a powerful approach to learning and control problems that involve physical objects and environments. While notable progress has been made, the capabilities of differentiable physics solvers remain limited. We develop a scalable framework for differentiable physics that can support a large number of objects and their interactions. To accommodate objects with arbitrary geometry and topology, we adopt meshes as our representation and leverage the sparsity of contacts for scalable differentiable collision handling. Collisions are resolved in localized regions to minimize the number of optimization variables even when the number of simulated objects is high. We further accelerate implicit differentiation of optimization with nonlinear constraints. Experiments demonstrate that the presented framework requires up to two orders of magnitude less memory and computation in comparison to recent particle-based methods. We further validate the approach on inverse problems and control scenarios, where it outperforms derivative-free and model-free baselines by at least an order of magnitude.

PaperPDFConference PDFCode

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

Code

YilingQiao/diffsim mentioned on GitHub report
yilingqiao/diff_fem mentioned on GitHubApache-2.0 report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections