GenAI4ELab/papercli-papers huggingface dataset:
Human Joint Kinematics Diffusion-Refinement for Stochastic Motion Prediction
Authors: Dong Wei; Huaijiang Sun; Bin Li; Jianfeng Lu; Weiqing Li; Xiaoning Sun; Shengxiang Hu
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: Stochastic human motion prediction aims to forecast multiple plausible future motions given a single pose sequence from the past. Most previous works focus on designing elaborate losses to improve the accuracy, while the diversity is typically characterized by randomly sampling a set of latent variables from the latent prior, which is then decoded into possible motions. This joint training of sampling and decoding, however, suffers from posterior collapse as the learned latent variables tend to be ignored by a strong decoder, leading to limited diversity. Alternatively, inspired by the diffusion process in nonequilibrium thermodynamics, we propose MotionDiff, a diffusion probabilistic model to treat the kinematics of human joints as heated particles, which will diffuse from original states to a noise distribution. This process not only offers a natural way to obtain the "whitened'' latents without any trainable parameters, but also introduces a new noise in each diffusion step, both of which facilitate more diverse motions. Human motion prediction is then regarded as the reverse diffusion process that converts the noise distribution into realistic future motions conditioned on the observed sequence. Specifically, MotionDiff consists of two parts: a spatial-temporal transformer-based diffusion network to generate diverse yet plausible motions, and a flexible refinement network to further enable geometric losses and align with the ground truth. Experimental results on two datasets demonstrate that our model yields the competitive performance in terms of both diversity and accuracy.
Collective Intelligence in Human-AI Teams: A Bayesian Theory of Mind Approach
Authors: Samuel Westby; Christoph Riedl
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: We develop a network of Bayesian agents that collectively model the mental states of teammates from the observed communication. Using a generative computational approach to cognition, we make two contributions. First, we show that our agent could generate interventions that improve the collective intelligence of a human-AI team beyond what humans alone would achieve. Second, we develop a real-time measure of human's theory of mind ability and test theories about human cognition. We use data collected from an online experiment in which 145 individuals in 29 human-only teams of five communicate through a chat-based system to solve a cognitive task. We find that humans (a) struggle to fully integrate information from teammates into their decisions, especially when communication load is high, and (b) have cognitive biases which lead them to underweight certain useful, but ambiguous, information. Our theory of mind ability measure predicts both individual- and team-level performance. Observing teams' first 25% of messages explains about 8% of the variation in final team performance, a 170% improvement compared to the current state of the art.
Learning to Select Pivotal Samples for Meta Re-weighting
Authors: Yinjun Wu; Adam Stein; Jacob Gardner; Mayur Naik
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: Sample re-weighting strategies provide a promising mechanism to deal with imperfect training data in machine learning, such as noisily labeled or class-imbalanced data. One such strategy involves formulating a bi-level optimization problem called the meta re-weighting problem, whose goal is to optimize performance on a small set of perfect pivotal samples, called meta samples. Many approaches have been proposed to efficiently solve this problem. However, all of them assume that a perfect meta sample set is already provided while we observe that the selections of meta sample set is performance-critical. In this paper, we study how to learn to identify such a meta sample set from a large, imperfect training set, that is subsequently cleaned and used to optimize performance in the meta re-weighting setting. We propose a learning framework which reduces the meta samples selection problem to a weighted K-means clustering problem through rigorously theoretical analysis. We propose two clustering methods within our learning framework, Representation-based clustering method (RBC) and Gradient-based clustering method (GBC), for balancing performance and computational efficiency. Empirical studies demonstrate the performance advantage of our methods over various baseline methods
Better Peer Grading through Bayesian Inference
Authors: Hedayat Zarkoob; Greg d'Eon; Lena Podina; Kevin Leyton-Brown
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: Peer grading systems aggregate noisy reports from multiple students to approximate a "true" grade as closely as possible. Most current systems either take the mean or median of reported grades; others aim to estimate students’ grading accuracy under a probabilistic model. This paper extends the state of the art in the latter approach in three key ways: 
(1) recognizing that students can behave strategically (e.g., reporting grades close to the class average without doing the work); (2) appropriately handling censored data that arises from discrete-valued grading rubrics; and (3) using mixed integer programming to improve the interpretability of the grades assigned to students. We demonstrate how to make Bayesian inference practical in this model and evaluate our approach on both synthetic and real-world data obtained by using our implemented system in four large classes. These extensive experiments show that grade aggregation using our model accurately estimates true grades, students' likelihood of submitting uninformative grades, and the variation in their inherent grading error; we also characterize our models' robustness.
Maximum Entropy Population-Based Training for Zero-Shot Human-AI Coordination
Authors: Rui Zhao; Jinming Song; Yufeng Yuan; Haifeng Hu; Yang Gao; Yi Wu; Zhongqian Sun; Wei Yang
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: We study the problem of training a Reinforcement Learning (RL) agent that is collaborative with humans without using human data. Although such agents can be obtained through self-play training, they can suffer significantly from the distributional shift when paired with unencountered partners, such as humans. In this paper, we propose Maximum Entropy Population-based training (MEP) to mitigate such distributional shift. In MEP, agents in the population are trained with our derived Population Entropy bonus to promote the pairwise diversity between agents and the individual diversity of agents themselves. After obtaining this diversified population, a common best agent is trained by paring with agents in this population via prioritized sampling, where the prioritization is dynamically adjusted based on the training progress. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method MEP, with comparison to Self-Play PPO (SP), Population-Based Training (PBT), Trajectory Diversity (TrajeDi), and Fictitious Co-Play (FCP) in both matrix game and Overcooked game environments, with partners being human proxy models and real humans. A supplementary video showing experimental results is available at https://youtu.be/Xh-FKD0AAKE.
A Set of Control Points Conditioned Pedestrian Trajectory Prediction
Authors: Inhwan Bae; Hae-Gon Jeon
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: Predicting the trajectories of pedestrians in crowded conditions is an important task for applications like autonomous navigation systems. Previous studies have tackled this problem using two strategies. They (1) infer all future steps recursively, or (2) predict the potential destinations of pedestrians at once and interpolate the intermediate steps to arrive there. However, these strategies often suffer from the accumulated errors of the recursive inference, or restrictive assumptions about social relations in the intermediate path. In this paper, we present a graph convolutional network-based trajectory prediction. Firstly, we propose a control point prediction that divides the future path into three sections and infers the intermediate destinations of pedestrians to reduce the accumulated error. To do this, we construct multi-relational weighted graphs to account for their physical and complex social relations. We then introduce a trajectory refinement step based on a spatio-temporal and multi-relational graph. By considering the social interactions between neighbors, better prediction results are achievable. In experiments, the proposed network achieves state-of-the-art performance on various real-world trajectory prediction benchmarks.
Meta-Auxiliary Learning for Adaptive Human Pose Prediction
Authors: Qiongjie Cui; Huaijiang Sun; Jianfeng Lu; Bin Li; Weiqing Li
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: Predicting high-fidelity future human poses, from a historically observed sequence, is crucial for intelligent robots to interact with humans. Deep end-to-end learning approaches, which typically train a generic pre-trained model on external datasets and then directly apply it to all test samples, emerge as the dominant solution to solve this issue. Despite encouraging progress, they remain non-optimal, as the unique properties (e.g., motion style, rhythm) of a specific sequence cannot be adapted. More generally, once encountering out-of-distributions, the predicted poses tend to be unreliable. Motivated by this observation, we propose a novel test-time adaptation framework that leverages two self-supervised auxiliary tasks to help the primary forecasting network adapt to the test sequence. In the testing phase, our model can adjust the model parameters by several gradient updates to improve the generation quality. However, due to catastrophic forgetting, both auxiliary tasks typically have a low ability to automatically present the desired positive incentives for the final prediction performance. For this reason, we also propose a meta-auxiliary learning scheme for better adaptation. Extensive experiments show that the proposed approach achieves higher accuracy and more realistic visualization.
Moving-Landmark Assisted Distributed Learning Based Decentralized Cooperative Localization (DL-DCL) with Fault Tolerance
Authors: Shubhankar Gupta; Suresh Sundaram
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: This paper considers the problem of cooperative localization of multiple robots under uncertainty, communicating over a partially connected, dynamic communication network and assisted by an agile landmark. Each robot owns an IMU and a relative pose sensing suite, which can get faulty due to system or environmental uncertainty, and therefore exhibit large bias in their estimation output. For the robots to localize accurately under sensor failure and system or environmental uncertainty, a novel Distributed Learning based Decentralized Cooperative Localization (DL-DCL) algorithm is proposed that involves real-time learning of an information fusion strategy by each robot for combining pose estimates from its own sensors as well as from those of its neighboring robots, and utilizing the moving landmark's pose information as a feedback to the learning process. Convergence analysis shows that the learning process converges exponentially under certain reasonable assumptions. Simulations involving sensor failures inducing around 40-60 times increase in the nominal bias show DL-DCL's estimation performance to be approximately 40% better than the well-known covariance-based estimate fusion methods. For the evaluation of DL-DCL's implementability and fault-tolerance capability in practice, a high-fidelity simulation is carried out in Gazebo with ROS2.
Periodic Multi-Agent Path Planning
Authors: Kazumi Kasaura; Ryo Yonetani; Mai Nishimura
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: Multi-agent path planning (MAPP) is the problem of planning collision-free trajectories from start to goal locations for a team of agents. This work explores a relatively unexplored setting of MAPP where streams of agents have to go through the starts and goals with high throughput. We tackle this problem by formulating a new variant of MAPP called periodic MAPP in which the timing of agent appearances is periodic. The objective with periodic MAPP is to find a periodic plan, a set of collision-free trajectories that the agent streams can use repeatedly over periods, with periods that are as small as possible. To meet this objective, we propose a solution method that is based on constraint relaxation and optimization. We show that the periodic plans once found can be used for a more practical case in which agents in a stream can appear at random times. We confirm the effectiveness of our method compared with baseline methods in terms of throughput in several scenarios that abstract autonomous intersection management tasks.
Improving Robotic Tactile Localization Super-resolution via Spatiotemporal Continuity Learning and Overlapping Air Chambers
Authors: Xuyang Li; Yipu Zhang; Xuemei Xie; Jiawei Li; Guangming Shi
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: Human hand has amazing super-resolution ability in sensing the force and position of contact and this ability can be strengthened by practice. Inspired by this, we propose a method for robotic tactile super-resolution enhancement by learning spatiotemporal continuity of contact position and a tactile sensor composed of overlapping air chambers. Each overlapping air chamber is constructed of soft material and seals the barometer inside to mimic adapting receptors of human skin. Each barometer obtains the global receptive field of the contact surface with the pressure propagation in the hyperelastic seal overlapping air chambers. 
Neural networks with causal convolution are employed to resolve the pressure data sampled by barometers and to predict the contact position. The temporal consistency of spatial position contributes to the accuracy and stability of positioning. We obtain an average super-resolution (SR) factor of over 2500 with only four physical sensing nodes on the rubber surface (0.1 mm in the best case on 38 × 26 mm²), which outperforms the state-of-the-art. The effect of time series length on the location prediction accuracy of causal convolution is quantitatively analyzed in this article. 
We show that robots can accomplish challenging tasks such as haptic trajectory following, adaptive grasping, and human-robot interaction with the tactile sensor. This research provides new insight into tactile super-resolution sensing and could be beneficial to various applications in the robotics field.
Co-imitation: Learning Design and Behaviour by Imitation
Authors: Chang Rajani; Karol Arndt; David Blanco-Mulero; Kevin Sebastian Luck; Ville Kyrki
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: The co-adaptation of robots has been a long-standing research endeavour with the goal of adapting both body and behaviour of a robot for a given task, inspired by the natural evolution of animals. Co-adaptation has the potential to eliminate costly manual hardware engineering as well as improve the performance of systems.
The standard approach to co-adaptation is to use a reward function for optimizing behaviour and morphology. However, defining and constructing such reward functions is notoriously difficult and often a significant engineering effort.
This paper introduces a new viewpoint on the co-adaptation problem, which we call co-imitation: finding a morphology and a policy that allow an imitator to closely match the behaviour of a demonstrator. To this end we propose a co-imitation methodology for adapting behaviour and morphology by matching state-distributions of the demonstrator. Specifically, we focus on the challenging scenario with mismatched state- and action-spaces between both agents. We find that co-imitation increases behaviour similarity across a variety of tasks and settings, and demonstrate co-imitation by transferring human walking, jogging and kicking skills onto a simulated humanoid.
RobustLoc: Robust Camera Pose Regression in Challenging Driving Environments
Authors: Sijie Wang; Qiyu Kang; Rui She; Wee Peng Tay; Andreas Hartmannsgruber; Diego Navarro Navarro
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: Camera relocalization has various applications in autonomous driving. Previous camera pose regression models consider only ideal scenarios where there is little environmental perturbation. To deal with challenging driving environments that may have changing seasons, weather, illumination, and the presence of unstable objects, we propose RobustLoc, which derives its robustness against perturbations from neural differential equations. Our model uses a convolutional neural network to extract feature maps from multi-view images, a robust neural differential equation diffusion block module to diffuse information interactively, and a branched pose decoder with multi-layer training to estimate the vehicle poses. Experiments demonstrate that RobustLoc surpasses current state-of-the-art camera pose regression models and achieves robust performance in various environments. Our code is released at: https://github.com/sijieaaa/RobustLoc
Abstract Argumentation Framework with Conditional Preferences
Authors: Gianvincenzo Alfano; Sergio Greco; Francesco Parisi; Irina Trubitsyna
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: Dung's abstract Argumentation Framework (AF) has emerged as a central formalism in the area of knowledge representation and reasoning.
Preferences in AF allow to represent the comparative strength of arguments in a simple yet expressive way. 
Preference-based AF (PAF) has been proposed to extend AF with preferences of the form a > b, whose intuitive meaning is that argument a is better than b. 
In this paper we generalize PAF by introducing conditional preferences of the form a > b \leftarrow body that informally state that a is better than b whenever the condition expressed by body is true.
The resulting framework, namely Conditional Preference-based AF (CPAF), extends the PAF semantics under three well-known preference criteria, i.e. democratic, elitist, and KTV.  
After introducing CPAF, we study the complexity of the verification problem (deciding whether a set of arguments is a ``best'' extension) as well as of the credulous and skeptical acceptance problems (deciding whether a given argument belongs to any or all ``best'' extensions, respectively) under multiple-status semantics (that is, complete, preferred, stable, and semi-stable semantics) for the above-mentioned preference criteria.
Reactive Synthesis of Dominant Strategies
Authors: Benjamin Aminof; Giuseppe De Giacomo; Sasha Rubin
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: We study the synthesis under environment specifications problem for LTL/LTLf which, in particular, generalizes FOND (strong) planning with these temporal goals. We consider the case where the agent cannot enforce its goal --- for which the argument for using best-effort strategies has been made  --- and study the intermediate ground, between enforcing and best-effort strategies, of dominant strategies. Intuitively, such strategies achieve the goal against any environment for which it is achievable.  

We show that dominant strategies may exist when enforcing ones do not, while still sharing with the latter many desirable properties such as being interchangeable with each other, and being monotone with respect to tightening of environment specifications. We give necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of dominant strategies, and show that deciding if they exist is 2EXPTIME-complete --- the same as for enforcing strategies. Finally, we give a uniform, optimal, game-theoretic algorithm for simultaneously solving the three synthesis problems of enforcing, dominant, and best-effort strategies.
Complexity of Safety and coSafety Fragments of Linear Temporal Logic
Authors: Alessandro Artale; Luca Geatti; Nicola Gigante; Andrea Mazzullo; Angelo Montanari
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) is the de-facto standard temporal logic for system specification, whose foundational properties have been studied for over five decades. Safety and cosafety properties of LTL define notable fragments of LTL, where a prefix of a trace suffices to establish whether a formula is true or not over that trace. In this paper, we study the complexity of the problems of satisfiability, validity, and realizability over infinite and finite traces for the safety and cosafety fragments of LTL. As for satisfiability and validity over infinite traces, we prove that the majority of the fragments have the same complexity as full LTL, that is, they are PSPACE-complete. The picture is radically different for realizability: we find fragments with the same expressive power whose complexity varies from 2EXPTIME-complete (as full LTL) to EXPTIME-complete. Notably, for all cosafety fragments, the complexity of the three problems does not change passing from infinite to finite traces, while for all safety fragments the complexity of satisfiability (resp., realizability) over finite traces drops to NP-complete (resp., Πᴾ₂- complete).
Automatically Verifying Expressive Epistemic Properties of Programs
Authors: Francesco Belardinelli; Ioana Boureanu; Vadim Malvone; Fortunat Rajaona
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: We propose a new approach to the verification of epistemic properties of programmes. First, we introduce the new ``program-epistemic'' logic L_PK, which is strictly richer and more general than similar formalisms appearing in the literature. To solve the verification problem in an efficient way, we introduce a translation from our language L_PK into first-order logic. Then, we show and prove correct a reduction from the model checking problem for program-epistemic formulas to the satisfiability of their first-order translation. Both our logic and our translation can handle richer specification w.r.t. the state of the art, allowing us to express the knowledge of agents about facts pertaining to programs (i.e., agents' knowledge before a program is executed as well as after is has been executed). Furthermore, we implement our translation in Haskell in a general way (i.e., independently of the programs in the logical statements), and we use existing SMT-solvers to check satisfaction of L_PK formulas on a benchmark example in the AI/agency field.
The Effect of Preferences in Abstract Argumentation under a Claim-Centric View
Authors: Michael Bernreiter; Wolfgang Dvorak; Anna Rapberger; Stefan Woltran
Venue: AAAI 2023 (main)

Abstract: In this paper, we study the effect of preferences in abstract argumentation under a claim-centric perspective. Recent work has revealed that semantical and computational properties can change when reasoning is performed on 
  claim-level rather than on the argument-level, while under certain 
  natural restrictions (arguments with the same claims have the 
  same outgoing attacks) these properties are conserved. We now investigate
  these effects when, in addition, preferences have to be taken into account and consider four prominent reductions to handle preferences between arguments.
  As we shall see, these reductions give rise to 
  different classes of claim-augmented argumentation frameworks, and behave 
  differently in terms of semantic properties and computational complexity.
  This strengthens the view that the actual choice for handling preferences 
  has to be taken with care.