The ability to accurately predict human behavior is central to the safety and efficiency of robot autonomy in interactive settings. Unfortunately, robots often lack access to key information on which these predictions may hinge, such as people's goals, attention, and willingness to cooperate. Dual control theory addresses this challenge by treating unknown parameters of a predictive model as stochastic hidden states and inferring their values at runtime using information gathered during system operation. While able to optimally and automatically trade off exploration and exploitation, dual control is computationally intractable for general interactive motion planning, mainly due to the fundamental coupling between robot trajectory optimization and human intent inference. In this paper, we present a novel algorithmic approach to enable active uncertainty reduction for interactive motion planning based on the implicit dual control paradigm. Our approach relies on sampling-based approximation of stochastic dynamic programming, leading to a model predictive control problem that can be readily solved by real-time gradient-based optimization methods. The resulting policy is shown to preserve the dual control effect for a broad class of predictive human models with both continuous and categorical uncertainty. The efficacy of our approach is demonstrated with simulated driving examples.
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IFIP TC13 Conference on Human-Computer Interaction是人機交互領域的研究者和實踐者展示其工作的重要平臺。多年來，這些會議吸引了來自幾個國家和文化的研究人員。官網鏈接： ·
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Predicting the future states of surrounding traffic participants and planning a safe, smooth, and socially compliant trajectory accordingly is crucial for autonomous vehicles. There are two major issues with the current autonomous driving system: the prediction module is often decoupled from the planning module and the cost function for planning is hard to specify and tune. To tackle these issues, we propose an end-to-end differentiable framework that integrates prediction and planning modules and is able to learn the cost function from data. Specifically, we employ a differentiable nonlinear optimizer as the motion planner, which takes the predicted trajectories of surrounding agents given by the neural network as input and optimizes the trajectory for the autonomous vehicle, thus enabling all operations in the framework to be differentiable including the cost function weights. The proposed framework is trained on a large-scale real-world driving dataset to imitate human driving trajectories in the entire driving scene and validated in both open-loop and closed-loop manners. The open-loop testing results reveal that the proposed method outperforms the baseline methods across a variety of metrics and delivers planning-centric prediction results, allowing the planning module to output close-to-human trajectories. In closed-loop testing, the proposed method shows the ability to handle complex urban driving scenarios and robustness against the distributional shift that imitation learning methods suffer from. Importantly, we find that joint training of planning and prediction modules achieves better performance than planning with a separate trained prediction module in both open-loop and closed-loop tests. Moreover, the ablation study indicates that the learnable components in the framework are essential to ensure planning stability and performance.
The flow-driven spectral chaos (FSC) is a recently developed method for tracking and quantifying uncertainties in the long-time response of stochastic dynamical systems using the spectral approach. The method uses a novel concept called 'enriched stochastic flow maps' as a means to construct an evolving finite-dimensional random function space that is both accurate and computationally efficient in time. In this paper, we present a multi-element version of the FSC method (the ME-FSC method for short) to tackle (mainly) those dynamical systems that are inherently discontinuous over the probability space. In ME-FSC, the random domain is partitioned into several elements, and then the problem is solved separately on each random element using the FSC method. Subsequently, results are aggregated to compute the probability moments of interest using the law of total probability. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the ME-FSC method in dealing with discontinuities and long-time integration of stochastic dynamical systems, four representative numerical examples are presented in this paper, including the Van-der-Pol oscillator problem and the Kraichnan-Orszag three-mode problem. Results show that the ME-FSC method is capable of solving problems that have strong nonlinear dependencies over the probability space, both reliably and at low computational cost.
The proliferation of automated data collection schemes and the advances in sensorics are increasing the amount of data we are able to monitor in real-time. However, given the high annotation costs and the time required by quality inspections, data is often available in an unlabeled form. This is fostering the use of active learning for the development of soft sensors and predictive models. In production, instead of performing random inspections to obtain product information, labels are collected by evaluating the information content of the unlabeled data. Several query strategy frameworks for regression have been proposed in the literature but most of the focus has been dedicated to the static pool-based scenario. In this work, we propose a new strategy for the stream-based scenario, where instances are sequentially offered to the learner, which must instantaneously decide whether to perform the quality check to obtain the label or discard the instance. The approach is inspired by the optimal experimental design theory and the iterative aspect of the decision-making process is tackled by setting a threshold on the informativeness of the unlabeled data points. The proposed approach is evaluated using numerical simulations and the Tennessee Eastman Process simulator. The results confirm that selecting the examples suggested by the proposed algorithm allows for a faster reduction in the prediction error.
Teleoperation is a widely adopted strategy to control robotic manipulators executing complex tasks that require highly dexterous movements and critical high-level intelligence. Classical teleoperation schemes are based on either joystick control, or on more intuitive interfaces which map directly the user arm motions into one robot arm's motions. These approaches have limits when the execution of a given task requires reconfigurable multiple robotic arm systems. Indeed, the simultaneous teleoperation of two or more robot arms could extend the workspace of the manipulation cell, or increase its total payload, or afford other advantages. In different phases of a reconfigurable multi-arm system, each robot could act as an independent arm, or as one of a pair of cooperating arms, or as one of the fingers of a virtual, large robot hand. This manuscript proposes a novel telemanipulation framework that enables both the individual and combined control of any number of robotic arms. Thanks to the designed control architecture, the human operator can intuitively choose the proposed control modalities and the manipulators that make the task convenient to execute through the user interface. Moreover, through the tele-impedance paradigm, the system can address complex tasks that require physical interaction by letting the robot mimic the arm impedance and position references of the human operator. The proposed framework is validated with 8 subjects controlling 4 Franka Emika Panda robots with 7-DoFs to execute a telemanipulation task. Qualitative results of the experiments show us the promising applicability of our framework.
In this work, we consider the task of improving the accuracy of dynamic models for model predictive control (MPC) in an online setting. Even though prediction models can be learned and applied to model-based controllers, these models are often learned offline. In this offline setting, training data is first collected and a prediction model is learned through an elaborated training procedure. After the model is trained to a desired accuracy, it is then deployed in a model predictive controller. However, since the model is learned offline, it does not adapt to disturbances or model errors observed during deployment. To improve the adaptiveness of the model and the controller, we propose an online dynamics learning framework that continually improves the accuracy of the dynamic model during deployment. We adopt knowledge-based neural ordinary differential equations (KNODE) as the dynamic models, and use techniques inspired by transfer learning to continually improve the model accuracy. We demonstrate the efficacy of our framework with a quadrotor robot, and verify the framework in both simulations and physical experiments. Results show that the proposed approach is able to account for disturbances that are possibly time-varying, while maintaining good trajectory tracking performance.
The superior performance of some of today's state-of-the-art deep learning models is to some extent owed to extensive (self-)supervised contrastive pretraining on large-scale datasets. In contrastive learning, the network is presented with pairs of positive (similar) and negative (dissimilar) datapoints and is trained to find an embedding vector for each datapoint, i.e., a representation, which can be further fine-tuned for various downstream tasks. In order to safely deploy these models in critical decision-making systems, it is crucial to equip them with a measure of their uncertainty or reliability. However, due to the pairwise nature of training a contrastive model, and the lack of absolute labels on the output (an abstract embedding vector), adapting conventional uncertainty estimation techniques to such models is non-trivial. In this work, we study whether the uncertainty of such a representation can be quantified for a single datapoint in a meaningful way. In other words, we explore if the downstream performance on a given datapoint is predictable, directly from its pre-trained embedding. We show that this goal can be achieved by directly estimating the distribution of the training data in the embedding space and accounting for the local consistency of the representations. Our experiments show that this notion of uncertainty for an embedding vector often strongly correlates with its downstream accuracy.
In recent years, change point detection for high dimensional data has become increasingly important in many scientific fields. Most literature develop a variety of separate methods designed for specified models (e.g. mean shift model, vector auto-regressive model, graphical model). In this paper, we provide a unified framework for structural break detection which is suitable for a large class of models. Moreover, the proposed algorithm automatically achieves consistent parameter estimates during the change point detection process, without the need for refitting the model. Specifically, we introduce a three-step procedure. The first step utilizes the block segmentation strategy combined with a fused lasso based estimation criterion, leads to significant computational gains without compromising the statistical accuracy in identifying the number and location of the structural breaks. This procedure is further coupled with hard-thresholding and exhaustive search steps to consistently estimate the number and location of the break points. The strong guarantees are proved on both the number of estimated change points and the rates of convergence of their locations. The consistent estimates of model parameters are also provided. The numerical studies provide further support of the theory and validate its competitive performance for a wide range of models. The developed algorithm is implemented in the R package LinearDetect.
Human decision-making is plagued by many systematic errors. Many of these errors can be avoided by providing decision aids that guide decision-makers to attend to the important information and integrate it according to a rational decision strategy. Designing such decision aids used to be a tedious manual process. Advances in cognitive science might make it possible to automate this process in the future. We recently introduced machine learning methods for discovering optimal strategies for human decision-making automatically and an automatic method for explaining those strategies to people. Decision aids constructed by this method were able to improve human decision-making. However, following the descriptions generated by this method is very tedious. We hypothesized that this problem can be overcome by conveying the automatically discovered decision strategy as a series of natural language instructions for how to reach a decision. Experiment 1 showed that people do indeed understand such procedural instructions more easily than the decision aids generated by our previous method. Encouraged by this finding, we developed an algorithm for translating the output of our previous method into procedural instructions. We applied the improved method to automatically generate decision aids for a naturalistic planning task (i.e., planning a road trip) and a naturalistic decision task (i.e., choosing a mortgage). Experiment 2 showed that these automatically generated decision-aids significantly improved people's performance in planning a road trip and choosing a mortgage. These findings suggest that AI-powered boosting might have potential for improving human decision-making in the real world.
Due to their increasing spread, confidence in neural network predictions became more and more important. However, basic neural networks do not deliver certainty estimates or suffer from over or under confidence. Many researchers have been working on understanding and quantifying uncertainty in a neural network's prediction. As a result, different types and sources of uncertainty have been identified and a variety of approaches to measure and quantify uncertainty in neural networks have been proposed. This work gives a comprehensive overview of uncertainty estimation in neural networks, reviews recent advances in the field, highlights current challenges, and identifies potential research opportunities. It is intended to give anyone interested in uncertainty estimation in neural networks a broad overview and introduction, without presupposing prior knowledge in this field. A comprehensive introduction to the most crucial sources of uncertainty is given and their separation into reducible model uncertainty and not reducible data uncertainty is presented. The modeling of these uncertainties based on deterministic neural networks, Bayesian neural networks, ensemble of neural networks, and test-time data augmentation approaches is introduced and different branches of these fields as well as the latest developments are discussed. For a practical application, we discuss different measures of uncertainty, approaches for the calibration of neural networks and give an overview of existing baselines and implementations. Different examples from the wide spectrum of challenges in different fields give an idea of the needs and challenges regarding uncertainties in practical applications. Additionally, the practical limitations of current methods for mission- and safety-critical real world applications are discussed and an outlook on the next steps towards a broader usage of such methods is given.
The notion of uncertainty is of major importance in machine learning and constitutes a key element of machine learning methodology. In line with the statistical tradition, uncertainty has long been perceived as almost synonymous with standard probability and probabilistic predictions. Yet, due to the steadily increasing relevance of machine learning for practical applications and related issues such as safety requirements, new problems and challenges have recently been identified by machine learning scholars, and these problems may call for new methodological developments. In particular, this includes the importance of distinguishing between (at least) two different types of uncertainty, often refereed to as aleatoric and epistemic. In this paper, we provide an introduction to the topic of uncertainty in machine learning as well as an overview of hitherto attempts at handling uncertainty in general and formalizing this distinction in particular.
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