Highway merging scenarios featuring mixed traffic conditions pose significant modeling and control challenges for connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) interacting with incoming on-ramp human-driven vehicles (HDVs). In this paper, we present an approach to learn an approximate information state model of CAV-HDV interactions for a CAV to maneuver safely during highway merging. In our approach, the CAV learns the behavior of an incoming HDV using approximate information states before generating a control strategy to facilitate merging. First, we validate the efficacy of this framework on real-world data by using it to predict the behavior of an HDV in mixed traffic situations extracted from the Next-Generation Simulation repository. Then, we generate simulation data for HDV-CAV interactions in a highway merging scenario using a standard inverse reinforcement learning approach. Without assuming a prior knowledge of the generating model, we show that our approximate information state model learns to predict the future trajectory of the HDV using only observations. Subsequently, we generate safe control policies for a CAV while merging with HDVs, demonstrating a spectrum of driving behaviors, from aggressive to conservative. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach by performing numerical simulations.
The development of automated vehicles has the potential to revolutionize transportation, but they are currently unable to ensure a safe and time-efficient driving style. Reliable models predicting human behavior are essential for overcoming this issue. While data-driven models are commonly used to this end, they can be vulnerable in safety-critical edge cases. This has led to an interest in models incorporating cognitive theory, but as such models are commonly developed for explanatory purposes, this approach's effectiveness in behavior prediction has remained largely untested so far. In this article, we investigate the usefulness of the \emph{Commotions} model -- a novel cognitively plausible model incorporating the latest theories of human perception, decision-making, and motor control -- for predicting human behavior in gap acceptance scenarios, which entail many important traffic interactions such as lane changes and intersections. We show that this model can compete with or even outperform well-established data-driven prediction models across several naturalistic datasets. These results demonstrate the promise of incorporating cognitive theory in behavior prediction models for automated vehicles.
Ad hoc teamwork (AHT) is the challenge of designing a robust learner agent that effectively collaborates with unknown teammates without prior coordination mechanisms. Early approaches address the AHT challenge by training the learner with a diverse set of handcrafted teammate policies, usually designed based on an expert's domain knowledge about the policies the learner may encounter. However, implementing teammate policies for training based on domain knowledge is not always feasible. In such cases, recent approaches attempted to improve the robustness of the learner by training it with teammate policies generated by optimising information-theoretic diversity metrics. The problem with optimising existing information-theoretic diversity metrics for teammate policy generation is the emergence of superficially different teammates. When used for AHT training, superficially different teammate behaviours may not improve a learner's robustness during collaboration with unknown teammates. In this paper, we present an automated teammate policy generation method optimising the Best-Response Diversity (BRDiv) metric, which measures diversity based on the compatibility of teammate policies in terms of returns. We evaluate our approach in environments with multiple valid coordination strategies, comparing against methods optimising information-theoretic diversity metrics and an ablation not optimising any diversity metric. Our experiments indicate that optimising BRDiv yields a diverse set of training teammate policies that improve the learner's performance relative to previous teammate generation approaches when collaborating with near-optimal previously unseen teammate policies.
Vision-and-language navigation (VLN) agents are trained to navigate in real-world environments by following natural language instructions. A major challenge in VLN is the limited availability of training data, which hinders the models' ability to generalize effectively. Previous approaches have attempted to address this issue by introducing additional supervision during training, often requiring costly human-annotated data that restricts scalability. In this paper, we introduce a masked path modeling (MPM) objective, which pretrains an agent using self-collected data for downstream navigation tasks. Our proposed method involves allowing the agent to actively explore navigation environments without a specific goal and collect the paths it traverses. Subsequently, we train the agent on this collected data to reconstruct the original path given a randomly masked subpath. This way, the agent can actively accumulate a diverse and substantial amount of data while learning conditional action generation. To evaluate the effectiveness of our technique, we conduct experiments on various VLN datasets and demonstrate the versatility of MPM across different levels of instruction complexity. Our results exhibit significant improvements in success rates, with enhancements of 1.32\%, 1.05\%, and 1.19\% on the val-unseen split of the Room-to-Room, Room-for-Room, and Room-across-Room datasets, respectively. Furthermore, we conduct an analysis that highlights the potential for additional improvements when the agent is allowed to explore unseen environments prior to testing.
In this study, a new concept of a wheelchair-towing robot for the facile electrification of manual wheelchairs is introduced. The development of this concept includes the design of towing robot hardware and an autonomous driving algorithm to ensure the safe transportation of patients to their intended destinations inside the hospital. We developed a novel docking mechanism to facilitate easy docking and separation between the towing robot and the manual wheelchair, which is connected to the front caster wheel of the manual wheelchair. The towing robot has a mecanum wheel drive, enabling the robot to move with a high degree of freedom in the standalone driving mode while adhering to kinematic constraints in the docking mode. Our novel towing robot features a camera sensor that can observe the ground ahead which allows the robot to autonomously follow color-coded wayfinding lanes installed in hospital corridors. This study introduces dedicated image processing techniques for capturing the lanes and control algorithms for effectively tracing a path to achieve autonomous path following. The autonomous towing performance of our proposed platform was validated by a real-world experiment in which a hospital environment with colored lanes was created.
The ability of living organisms to perform complex high speed manoeuvers in flight with a very small number of neurons and an incredibly low failure rate highlights the efficacy of these resource-constrained biological systems. Event-driven hardware has emerged, in recent years, as a promising avenue for implementing complex vision tasks in resource-constrained environments. Vision-based autonomous navigation and obstacle avoidance consists of several independent but related tasks such as optical flow estimation, depth estimation, Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM), object detection, and recognition. To ensure coherence between these tasks, it is imperative that they be trained on a single dataset. However, most existing datasets provide only a selected subset of the required data. This makes inter-network coherence difficult to achieve. Another limitation of existing datasets is the limited temporal resolution they provide. To address these limitations, we present FEDORA, a first-of-its-kind fully synthetic dataset for vision-based tasks, with ground truths for depth, pose, ego-motion, and optical flow. FEDORA is the first dataset to provide optical flow at three different frequencies - 10Hz, 25Hz, and 50Hz
Zero-shot human-AI coordination holds the promise of collaborating with humans without human data. Prevailing methods try to train the ego agent with a population of partners via self-play. However, these methods suffer from two problems: 1) The diversity of a population with finite partners is limited, thereby limiting the capacity of the trained ego agent to collaborate with a novel human; 2) Current methods only provide a common best response for every partner in the population, which may result in poor zero-shot coordination performance with a novel partner or humans. To address these issues, we first propose the policy ensemble method to increase the diversity of partners in the population, and then develop a context-aware method enabling the ego agent to analyze and identify the partner's potential policy primitives so that it can take different actions accordingly. In this way, the ego agent is able to learn more universal cooperative behaviors for collaborating with diverse partners. We conduct experiments on the Overcooked environment, and evaluate the zero-shot human-AI coordination performance of our method with both behavior-cloned human proxies and real humans. The results demonstrate that our method significantly increases the diversity of partners and enables ego agents to learn more diverse behaviors than baselines, thus achieving state-of-the-art performance in all scenarios. We also open-source a human-AI coordination study framework on the Overcooked for the convenience of future studies.
The ability to pick up on language signals in an ongoing interaction is crucial for future machine learning models to collaborate and interact with humans naturally. In this paper, we present an initial study that evaluates intra-episodic feedback given in a collaborative setting. We use a referential language game as a controllable example of a task-oriented collaborative joint activity. A teacher utters a referring expression generated by a well-known symbolic algorithm (the "Incremental Algorithm") as an initial instruction and then monitors the follower's actions to possibly intervene with intra-episodic feedback (which does not explicitly have to be requested). We frame this task as a reinforcement learning problem with sparse rewards and learn a follower policy for a heuristic teacher. Our results show that intra-episodic feedback allows the follower to generalize on aspects of scene complexity and performs better than providing only the initial statement.
Federated learning (FL) shines through in the internet of things (IoT) with its ability to realize collaborative learning and improve learning efficiency by sharing client model parameters trained on local data. Although FL has been successfully applied to various domains, including driver monitoring applications (DMAs) on the internet of vehicles (IoV), its usages still face some open issues, such as data and system heterogeneity, large-scale parallelism communication resources, malicious attacks, and data poisoning. This paper proposes a federated transfer-ordered-personalized learning (FedTOP) framework to address the above problems and test on two real-world datasets with and without system heterogeneity. The performance of the three extensions, transfer, ordered, and personalized, is compared by an ablation study and achieves 92.32% and 95.96% accuracy on the test clients of two datasets, respectively. Compared to the baseline, there is a 462% improvement in accuracy and a 37.46% reduction in communication resource consumption. The results demonstrate that the proposed FedTOP can be used as a highly accurate, streamlined, privacy-preserving, cybersecurity-oriented, and personalized framework for DMA.
To support future 6G mobile applications, the mobile edge computing (MEC) network needs to be jointly optimized for computing, pushing, and caching to reduce transmission load and computation cost. To achieve this, we propose a framework based on deep reinforcement learning that enables the dynamic orchestration of these three activities for the MEC network. The framework can implicitly predict user future requests using deep networks and push or cache the appropriate content to enhance performance. To address the curse of dimensionality resulting from considering three activities collectively, we adopt the soft actor-critic reinforcement learning in continuous space and design the action quantization and correction specifically to fit the discrete optimization problem. We conduct simulations in a single-user single-server MEC network setting and demonstrate that the proposed framework effectively decreases both transmission load and computing cost under various configurations of cache size and tolerable service delay.
Stickers with vivid and engaging expressions are becoming increasingly popular in online messaging apps, and some works are dedicated to automatically select sticker response by matching text labels of stickers with previous utterances. However, due to their large quantities, it is impractical to require text labels for the all stickers. Hence, in this paper, we propose to recommend an appropriate sticker to user based on multi-turn dialog context history without any external labels. Two main challenges are confronted in this task. One is to learn semantic meaning of stickers without corresponding text labels. Another challenge is to jointly model the candidate sticker with the multi-turn dialog context. To tackle these challenges, we propose a sticker response selector (SRS) model. Specifically, SRS first employs a convolutional based sticker image encoder and a self-attention based multi-turn dialog encoder to obtain the representation of stickers and utterances. Next, deep interaction network is proposed to conduct deep matching between the sticker with each utterance in the dialog history. SRS then learns the short-term and long-term dependency between all interaction results by a fusion network to output the the final matching score. To evaluate our proposed method, we collect a large-scale real-world dialog dataset with stickers from one of the most popular online chatting platform. Extensive experiments conducted on this dataset show that our model achieves the state-of-the-art performance for all commonly-used metrics. Experiments also verify the effectiveness of each component of SRS. To facilitate further research in sticker selection field, we release this dataset of 340K multi-turn dialog and sticker pairs.