OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Robust Constrained Reinforcement Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Constrained reinforcement learning is to maximize the expected reward subject to constraints on utilities/costs. However, the training environment may not be the same as the test one, due to, e.g., modeling error, adversarial attack, non-stationarity, resulting in severe performance degradation and more importantly constraint violation. We propose a framework of robust constrained reinforcement learning under model uncertainty, where the MDP is not fixed but lies in some uncertainty set, the goal is to guarantee that constraints on utilities/costs are satisfied for all MDPs in the uncertainty set, and to maximize the worst-case reward performance over the uncertainty set. We design a robust primal-dual approach, and further theoretically develop guarantee on its convergence, complexity and robust feasibility. We then investigate a concrete example of $δ$-contamination uncertainty set, design an online and model-free algorithm and theoretically characterize its sample complexity.
Time Series Prediction for Food sustainability
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

With exponential growth in the human population, it is vital to conserve natural resources without compromising on producing enough food to feed everyone. Doing so can improve people's livelihoods, health, and ecosystems for the present and future generations. Sustainable development, a paradigm of the United Nations, is rooted in food, crop, livestock, forest, population, and even the emission of gases. By understanding the overall usage of natural resources in different countries in the past, it is possible to forecast the demand in each country. The proposed solution consists of implementing a machine learning system using a statistical regression model that can predict the top k products that would endure a shortage in each country in a specific period in the future. The prediction performance in terms of absolute error and root mean square error show promising results due to its low errors. This solution could help organizations and manufacturers understand the productivity and sustainability needed to satisfy the global demand.
Predictive Closed-Loop Remote Control over Wireless Two-Way Split Koopman Autoencoder
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

Real-time remote control over wireless is an important-yet-challenging application in 5G and beyond due to its mission-critical nature under limited communication resources. Current solutions hinge on not only utilizing ultra-reliable and low-latency communication (URLLC) links but also predicting future states, which may consume enormous communication resources and struggle with a short prediction time horizon. To fill this void, in this article we propose a novel two-way Koopman autoencoder (AE) approach wherein: 1) a sensing Koopman AE learns to understand the temporal state dynamics and predicts missing packets from a sensor to its remote controller; and 2) a controlling Koopman AE learns to understand the temporal action dynamics and predicts missing packets from the controller to an actuator co-located with the sensor. Specifically, each Koopman AE aims to learn the Koopman operator in the hidden layers while the encoder of the AE aims to project the non-linear dynamics onto a lifted subspace, which is reverted into the original non-linear dynamics by the decoder of the AE. The Koopman operator describes the linearized temporal dynamics, enabling long-term future prediction and coping with missing packets and closed-form optimal control in the lifted subspace. Simulation results corroborate that the proposed approach achieves a 38x lower mean squared control error at 0 dBm signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) than the non-predictive baseline.
NanoFlowNet: Real-time Dense Optical Flow on a Nano Quadcopter
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Nano quadcopters are small, agile, and cheap platforms that are well suited for deployment in narrow, cluttered environments. Due to their limited payload, these vehicles are highly constrained in processing power, rendering conventional vision-based methods for safe and autonomous navigation incompatible. Recent machine learning developments promise high-performance perception at low latency, while dedicated edge computing hardware has the potential to augment the processing capabilities of these limited devices. In this work, we present NanoFlowNet, a lightweight convolutional neural network for real-time dense optical flow estimation on edge computing hardware. We draw inspiration from recent advances in semantic segmentation for the design of this network. Additionally, we guide the learning of optical flow using motion boundary ground truth data, which improves performance with no impact on latency. Validation results on the MPI-Sintel dataset show the high performance of the proposed network given its constrained architecture. Additionally, we successfully demonstrate the capabilities of NanoFlowNet by deploying it on the ultra-low power GAP8 microprocessor and by applying it to vision-based obstacle avoidance on board a Bitcraze Crazyflie, a 34 g nano quadcopter.
Design and Analysis of Polar Codes Based on Piecewise Gaussian Approximation
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2022
Year: 2022

In this article, we propose the construction of polar codes based on piecewise Gaussian approximation (PGA) techniques. The PGA is first optimized and then compared to the Gaussian approximation (GA) construction method, showing performance gains for medium blocks and high precision for long blocks, in scenarios with successive cancellation (SC) decoding and additive white gaussian noise (AWGN) channel. Based on the PGA, we develop two approximations based on multi-segmented polynomials that are easy to implement. We present the Approximate PGA (APGA) that is optimized for medium blocks and provides a performance improvement without increasing complexity. Furthermore, we develop the simplified PGA (SPGA) as an alternative to the GA, which is optimized for long blocks and achieves high construction accuracy. Simulation results show that the APGA and SPGA construction methods outperform existing GA and competing approaches for medium and long block codes with notable performance improvement.
Stochastic strategies for patrolling a terrain with a synchronized multi-robot system
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

A group of cooperative aerial robots can be deployed to efficiently patrol a terrain, in which each robot flies around an assigned area and shares information with the neighbors periodically in order to protect or supervise it. To ensure robustness, previous works on these synchronized systems propose sending a robot to the neighboring area in case it detects a failure. In order to deal with unpredictability and to improve on the efficiency in the deterministic patrolling scheme, this paper proposes random strategies to cover the areas distributed among the agents. First, a theoretical study of the stochastic process is addressed in this paper for two metrics: the \emph{idle time}, the expected time between two consecutive observations of any point of the terrain and the \emph{isolation time}, the expected time that a robot is without communication with any other robot. After that, the random strategies are experimentally compared with the deterministic strategy adding another metric: the \emph{broadcast time}, the expected time elapsed from the moment a robot emits a message until it is received by all the other robots of the team. The simulations show that theoretical results are in good agreement with the simulations and the random strategies outperform the behavior obtained with the deterministic protocol proposed in the literature.
Towards self-attention based visual navigation in the real world
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

Vision guided navigation requires processing complex visual information to inform task-orientated decisions. Applications include autonomous robots, self-driving cars, and assistive vision for humans. A key element is the extraction and selection of relevant features in pixel space upon which to base action choices, for which Machine Learning techniques are well suited. However, Deep Reinforcement Learning agents trained in simulation often exhibit unsatisfactory results when deployed in the real-world due to perceptual differences known as the $\textit{reality gap}$. An approach that is yet to be explored to bridge this gap is self-attention. In this paper we (1) perform a systematic exploration of the hyperparameter space for self-attention based navigation of 3D environments and qualitatively appraise behaviour observed from different hyperparameter sets, including their ability to generalise; (2) present strategies to improve the agents' generalisation abilities and navigation behaviour; and (3) show how models trained in simulation are capable of processing real world images meaningfully in real time. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of a self-attention based agent successfully trained in navigating a 3D action space, using less than 4000 parameters.
Valid Utility Games with Information Sharing Constraints
Venue: arXiv cs.GT 2022
Year: 2022

The use of game theoretic methods for control in multiagent systems has been an important topic in recent research. Valid utility games in particular have been used to model real-world problems; such games have the convenient property that the value of any decision set which is a Nash equilibrium of the game is guaranteed to be within 1/2 of the value of the optimal decision set. However, an implicit assumption in this guarantee is that each agent is aware of the decisions of all other agents. In this work, we first describe how this guarantee degrades as agents are only aware of a subset of the decisions of other agents. We then show that this loss can be mitigated by restriction to a relevant subclass of games.
Layerwise Bregman Representation Learning with Applications to Knowledge Distillation
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

In this work, we propose a novel approach for layerwise representation learning of a trained neural network. In particular, we form a Bregman divergence based on the layer's transfer function and construct an extension of the original Bregman PCA formulation by incorporating a mean vector and normalizing the principal directions with respect to the geometry of the local convex function around the mean. This generalization allows exporting the learned representation as a fixed layer with a non-linearity. As an application to knowledge distillation, we cast the learning problem for the student network as predicting the compression coefficients of the teacher's representations, which are passed as the input to the imported layer. Our empirical findings indicate that our approach is substantially more effective for transferring information between networks than typical teacher-student training using the teacher's penultimate layer representations and soft labels.
DEQGAN: Learning the Loss Function for PINNs with Generative Adversarial Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Solutions to differential equations are of significant scientific and engineering relevance. Physics-Informed Neural Networks (PINNs) have emerged as a promising method for solving differential equations, but they lack a theoretical justification for the use of any particular loss function. This work presents Differential Equation GAN (DEQGAN), a novel method for solving differential equations using generative adversarial networks to "learn the loss function" for optimizing the neural network. Presenting results on a suite of twelve ordinary and partial differential equations, including the nonlinear Burgers', Allen-Cahn, Hamilton, and modified Einstein's gravity equations, we show that DEQGAN can obtain multiple orders of magnitude lower mean squared errors than PINNs that use $L_2$, $L_1$, and Huber loss functions. We also show that DEQGAN achieves solution accuracies that are competitive with popular numerical methods. Finally, we present two methods to improve the robustness of DEQGAN to different hyperparameter settings.
Knowledge Graph Completion with Pre-trained Multimodal Transformer and Twins Negative Sampling
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

Knowledge graphs (KGs) that modelings the world knowledge as structural triples are inevitably incomplete. Such problems still exist for multimodal knowledge graphs (MMKGs). Thus, knowledge graph completion (KGC) is of great importance to predict the missing triples in the existing KGs. As for the existing KGC methods, embedding-based methods rely on manual design to leverage multimodal information while finetune-based approaches are not superior to embedding-based methods in link prediction. To address these problems, we propose a VisualBERT-enhanced Knowledge Graph Completion model (VBKGC for short). VBKGC could capture deeply fused multimodal information for entities and integrate them into the KGC model. Besides, we achieve the co-design of the KGC model and negative sampling by designing a new negative sampling strategy called twins negative sampling. Twins negative sampling is suitable for multimodal scenarios and could align different embeddings for entities. We conduct extensive experiments to show the outstanding performance of VBKGC on the link prediction task and make further exploration of VBKGC.
Align, Reason and Learn: Enhancing Medical Vision-and-Language Pre-training with Knowledge
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2022
Year: 2022

Medical vision-and-language pre-training (Med-VLP) has received considerable attention owing to its applicability to extracting generic vision-and-language representations from medical images and texts. Most existing methods mainly contain three elements: uni-modal encoders (i.e., a vision encoder and a language encoder), a multi-modal fusion module, and pretext tasks, with few studies considering the importance of medical domain expert knowledge and explicitly exploiting such knowledge to facilitate Med-VLP. Although there exist knowledge-enhanced vision-and-language pre-training (VLP) methods in the general domain, most require off-the-shelf toolkits (e.g., object detectors and scene graph parsers), which are unavailable in the medical domain. In this paper, we propose a systematic and effective approach to enhance Med-VLP by structured medical knowledge from three perspectives. First, considering knowledge can be regarded as the intermediate medium between vision and language, we align the representations of the vision encoder and the language encoder through knowledge. Second, we inject knowledge into the multi-modal fusion model to enable the model to perform reasoning using knowledge as the supplementation of the input image and text. Third, we guide the model to put emphasis on the most critical information in images and texts by designing knowledge-induced pretext tasks. To perform a comprehensive evaluation and facilitate further research, we construct a medical vision-and-language benchmark including three tasks. Experimental results illustrate the effectiveness of our approach, where state-of-the-art performance is achieved on all downstream tasks. Further analyses explore the effects of different components of our approach and various settings of pre-training.
4DenoiseNet: Adverse Weather Denoising from Adjacent Point Clouds
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2022
Year: 2022

Reliable point cloud data is essential for perception tasks \textit{e.g.} in robotics and autonomous driving applications. Adverse weather causes a specific type of noise to light detection and ranging (LiDAR) sensor data, which degrades the quality of the point clouds significantly. To address this issue, this letter presents a novel point cloud adverse weather denoising deep learning algorithm (4DenoiseNet). Our algorithm takes advantage of the time dimension unlike deep learning adverse weather denoising methods in the literature. It performs about 10\% better in terms of intersection over union metric compared to the previous work and is more computationally efficient. These results are achieved on our novel SnowyKITTI dataset, which has over 40000 adverse weather annotated point clouds. Moreover, strong qualitative results on the Canadian Adverse Driving Conditions dataset indicate good generalizability to domain shifts and to different sensor intrinsics.
Landmark Management in the Application of Radar SLAM
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

This paper focuses on efficient landmark management in radar based simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). Landmark management is necessary in order to maintain a consistent map of the estimated landmarks relative to the estimate of the platform's pose. This task is particularly important when faced with multiple detections from the same landmark and/or dynamic environments where the location of a landmark can change. A further challenge with radar data is the presence of false detections. Accordingly, we propose a simple yet efficient rule based solution for radar SLAM landmark management. Assuming a low-dynamic environment, there are several steps in our solution: new landmarks need to be detected and included, false landmarks need to be identified and removed, and the consistency of the landmarks registered in the map needs to be maintained. To illustrate our solution, we run an extended Kalman filter SLAM algorithm in an environment containing both stationary and temporally stationary landmarks. Our simulation results demonstrate that the proposed solution is capable of reliably managing landmarks even when faced with false detections and multiple detections from the same landmark.
MDE for Machine Learning-Enabled Software Systems: A Case Study and Comparison of MontiAnna & ML-Quadrat
Venue: arXiv cs.SE 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper, we propose to adopt the MDE paradigm for the development of Machine Learning (ML)-enabled software systems with a focus on the Internet of Things (IoT) domain. We illustrate how two state-of-the-art open-source modeling tools, namely MontiAnna and ML-Quadrat can be used for this purpose as demonstrated through a case study. The case study illustrates using ML, in particular deep Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs), for automated image recognition of handwritten digits using the MNIST reference dataset, and integrating the machine learning components into an IoT system. Subsequently, we conduct a functional comparison of the two frameworks, setting out an analysis base to include a broad range of design considerations, such as the problem domain, methods for the ML integration into larger systems, and supported ML methods, as well as topics of recent intense interest to the ML community, such as AutoML and MLOps. Accordingly, this paper is focused on elucidating the potential of the MDE approach in the ML domain. This supports the ML engineer in developing the (ML/software) model rather than implementing the code, and additionally enforces reusability and modularity of the design through enabling the out-of-the-box integration of ML functionality as a component of the IoT or cyber-physical systems.
Differentially Private Estimation of Hawkes Process
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

Point process models are of great importance in real world applications. In certain critical applications, estimation of point process models involves large amounts of sensitive personal data from users. Privacy concerns naturally arise which have not been addressed in the existing literature. To bridge this glaring gap, we propose the first general differentially private estimation procedure for point process models. Specifically, we take the Hawkes process as an example, and introduce a rigorous definition of differential privacy for event stream data based on a discretized representation of the Hawkes process. We then propose two differentially private optimization algorithms, which can efficiently estimate Hawkes process models with the desired privacy and utility guarantees under two different settings. Experiments are provided to back up our theoretical analysis.
Multicalibrated Regression for Downstream Fairness
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2022
Year: 2022

We show how to take a regression function $\hat{f}$ that is appropriately ``multicalibrated'' and efficiently post-process it into an approximately error minimizing classifier satisfying a large variety of fairness constraints. The post-processing requires no labeled data, and only a modest amount of unlabeled data and computation. The computational and sample complexity requirements of computing $\hat f$ are comparable to the requirements for solving a single fair learning task optimally, but it can in fact be used to solve many different downstream fairness-constrained learning problems efficiently. Our post-processing method easily handles intersecting groups, generalizing prior work on post-processing regression functions to satisfy fairness constraints that only applied to disjoint groups. Our work extends recent work showing that multicalibrated regression functions are ``omnipredictors'' (i.e. can be post-processed to optimally solve unconstrained ERM problems) to constrained optimization.
Causal Coupled Mechanisms: A Control Method with Cooperation and Competition for Complex System
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2022
Year: 2022

Complex systems are ubiquitous in the real world and tend to have complicated and poorly understood dynamics. For their control issues, the challenge is to guarantee accuracy, robustness, and generalization in such bloated and troubled environments. Fortunately, a complex system can be divided into multiple modular structures that human cognition appears to exploit. Inspired by this cognition, a novel control method, Causal Coupled Mechanisms (CCMs), is proposed that explores the cooperation in division and competition in combination. Our method employs the theory of hierarchical reinforcement learning (HRL), in which 1) the high-level policy with competitive awareness divides the whole complex system into multiple functional mechanisms, and 2) the low-level policy finishes the control task of each mechanism. Specifically for cooperation, a cascade control module helps the series operation of CCMs, and a forward coupled reasoning module is used to recover the coupling information lost in the division process. On both synthetic systems and a real-world biological regulatory system, the CCM method achieves robust and state-of-the-art control results even with unpredictable random noise. Moreover, generalization results show that reusing prepared specialized CCMs helps to perform well in environments with different confounders and dynamics.
On the programming effort required to generate Behavior Trees and Finite State Machines for robotic applications
Venue: arXiv cs.RO 2022
Year: 2022

In this paper we provide a practical demonstration of how the modularity in a Behavior Tree (BT) decreases the effort in programming a robot task when compared to a Finite State Machine (FSM). In recent years the way to represent a task plan to control an autonomous agent has been shifting from the standard FSM towards BTs. Many works in the literature have highlighted and proven the benefits of such design compared to standard approaches, especially in terms of modularity, reactivity and human readability. However, these works have often failed in providing a tangible comparison in the implementation of those policies and the programming effort required to modify them. This is a relevant aspect in many robotic applications, where the design choice is dictated both by the robustness of the policy and by the time required to program it. In this work, we compare backward chained BTs with a fault-tolerant design of FSMs by evaluating the cost to modify them. We validate the analysis with a set of experiments in a simulation environment where a mobile manipulator solves an item fetching task.