We introduce MuJoCo MPC (MJPC), an open-source, interactive application and software framework for real-time predictive control, based on MuJoCo physics. MJPC allows the user to easily author and solve complex robotics tasks, and currently supports three shooting-based planners: derivative-based iLQG and Gradient Descent, and a simple derivative-free method we call Predictive Sampling. Predictive Sampling was designed as an elementary baseline, mostly for its pedagogical value, but turned out to be surprisingly competitive with the more established algorithms. This work does not present algorithmic advances, and instead, prioritises performant algorithms, simple code, and accessibility of model-based methods via intuitive and interactive software. MJPC is available at: github.com/deepmind/mujoco_mpc, a video summary can be viewed at: dpmd.ai/mjpc.

Autoregressive models (ARMs) currently hold state-of-the-art performance in likelihood-based modeling of image and audio data. Generally, neural network based ARMs are designed to allow fast inference, but sampling from these models is impractically slow. In this paper, we introduce the predictive sampling algorithm: a procedure that exploits the fast inference property of ARMs in order to speed up sampling, while keeping the model intact. We propose two variations of predictive sampling, namely sampling with ARM fixed-point iteration and learned forecasting modules. Their effectiveness is demonstrated in two settings: i) explicit likelihood modeling on binary MNIST, SVHN and CIFAR10, and ii) discrete latent modeling in an autoencoder trained on SVHN, CIFAR10 and Imagenet32. Empirically, we show considerable improvements over baselines in number of ARM inference calls and sampling speed.