Connected and autonomous driving is developing rapidly in recent years. However, current autonomous driving systems, which are primarily based on data-driven approaches, exhibit deficiencies in interpretability, generalization, and continuing learning capabilities. In addition, the single-vehicle autonomous driving systems lack of the ability of collaboration and negotiation with other vehicles, which is crucial for the safety and efficiency of autonomous driving systems. In order to address these issues, we leverage large language models (LLMs) to develop a novel framework, AgentsCoDriver, to enable multiple vehicles to conduct collaborative driving. AgentsCoDriver consists of five modules: observation module, reasoning engine, cognitive memory module, reinforcement reflection module, and communication module. It can accumulate knowledge, lessons, and experiences over time by continuously interacting with the environment, thereby making itself capable of lifelong learning. In addition, by leveraging the communication module, different agents can exchange information and realize negotiation and collaboration in complex traffic environments. Extensive experiments are conducted and show the superiority of AgentsCoDriver.
Decision Transformer-based decision-making agents have shown the ability to generalize across multiple tasks. However, their performance relies on massive data and computation. We argue that this inefficiency stems from the forgetting phenomenon, in which a model memorizes its behaviors in parameters throughout training. As a result, training on a new task may deteriorate the model's performance on previous tasks. In contrast to LLMs' implicit memory mechanism, the human brain utilizes distributed memory storage, which helps manage and organize multiple skills efficiently, mitigating the forgetting phenomenon. Inspired by this, we propose a working memory module to store, blend, and retrieve information for different downstream tasks. Evaluation results show that the proposed method improves training efficiency and generalization in Atari games and Meta-World object manipulation tasks. Moreover, we demonstrate that memory fine-tuning further enhances the adaptability of the proposed architecture.
Generative adversarial networks (GANs) have emerged as a powerful tool for generating high-fidelity data. However, the main bottleneck of existing approaches is the lack of supervision on the generator training, which often results in undamped oscillation and unsatisfactory performance. To address this issue, we propose an algorithm called Monte Carlo GAN (MCGAN). This approach, utilizing an innovative generative loss function, termly the regression loss, reformulates the generator training as a regression task and enables the generator training by minimizing the mean squared error between the discriminator's output of real data and the expected discriminator of fake data. We demonstrate the desirable analytic properties of the regression loss, including discriminability and optimality, and show that our method requires a weaker condition on the discriminator for effective generator training. These properties justify the strength of this approach to improve the training stability while retaining the optimality of GAN by leveraging strong supervision of the regression loss. Numerical results on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 datasets demonstrate that the proposed MCGAN significantly and consistently improves the existing state-of-the-art GAN models in terms of quality, accuracy, training stability, and learned latent space. Furthermore, the proposed algorithm exhibits great flexibility for integrating with a variety of backbone models to generate spatial images, temporal time-series, and spatio-temporal video data.
End-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems have made significant progress in general scenarios. However, it remains challenging to transcribe contextual named entities (NEs) in the contextual ASR scenario. Previous approaches have attempted to address this by utilizing the NE dictionary. These approaches treat entities as individual tokens and generate them token-by-token, which may result in incomplete transcriptions of entities. In this paper, we treat entities as indivisible wholes and introduce the idea of copying into ASR. We design a systematic mechanism called CopyNE, which can copy entities from the NE dictionary. By copying all tokens of an entity at once, we can reduce errors during entity transcription, ensuring the completeness of the entity. Experiments demonstrate that CopyNE consistently improves the accuracy of transcribing entities compared to previous approaches. Even when based on the strong Whisper, CopyNE still achieves notable improvements.
3D occupancy-based perception pipeline has significantly advanced autonomous driving by capturing detailed scene descriptions and demonstrating strong generalizability across various object categories and shapes. Current methods predominantly rely on LiDAR or camera inputs for 3D occupancy prediction. These methods are susceptible to adverse weather conditions, limiting the all-weather deployment of self-driving cars. To improve perception robustness, we leverage the recent advances in automotive radars and introduce a novel approach that utilizes 4D imaging radar sensors for 3D occupancy prediction. Our method, RadarOcc, circumvents the limitations of sparse radar point clouds by directly processing the 4D radar tensor, thus preserving essential scene details. RadarOcc innovatively addresses the challenges associated with the voluminous and noisy 4D radar data by employing Doppler bins descriptors, sidelobe-aware spatial sparsification, and range-wise self-attention mechanisms. To minimize the interpolation errors associated with direct coordinate transformations, we also devise a spherical-based feature encoding followed by spherical-to-Cartesian feature aggregation. We benchmark various baseline methods based on distinct modalities on the public K-Radar dataset. The results demonstrate RadarOcc's state-of-the-art performance in radar-based 3D occupancy prediction and promising results even when compared with LiDAR- or camera-based methods. Additionally, we present qualitative evidence of the superior performance of 4D radar in adverse weather conditions and explore the impact of key pipeline components through ablation studies.
In practical distributed systems, workers are typically not homogeneous, and due to differences in hardware configurations and network conditions, can have highly varying processing times. We consider smooth nonconvex finite-sum (empirical risk minimization) problems in this setup and introduce a new parallel method, Freya PAGE, designed to handle arbitrarily heterogeneous and asynchronous computations. By being robust to "stragglers" and adaptively ignoring slow computations, Freya PAGE offers significantly improved time complexity guarantees compared to all previous methods, including Asynchronous SGD, Rennala SGD, SPIDER, and PAGE, while requiring weaker assumptions. The algorithm relies on novel generic stochastic gradient collection strategies with theoretical guarantees that can be of interest on their own, and may be used in the design of future optimization methods. Furthermore, we establish a lower bound for smooth nonconvex finite-sum problems in the asynchronous setup, providing a fundamental time complexity limit. This lower bound is tight and demonstrates the optimality of Freya PAGE in the large-scale regime, i.e., when $\sqrt{m} \geq n$, where $n$ is # of workers, and $m$ is # of data samples.
The Hardware Trojan (HT) problem can be thought of as a continuous game between attackers and defenders, each striving to outsmart the other by leveraging any available means for an advantage. Machine Learning (ML) has recently been key in advancing HT research. Various novel techniques, such as Reinforcement Learning (RL) and Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), have shown HT insertion and detection capabilities. HT insertion with ML techniques, specifically, has seen a spike in research activity due to the shortcomings of conventional HT benchmarks and the inherent human design bias that occurs when we create them. This work continues this innovation by presenting a tool called "TrojanForge", capable of generating HT adversarial examples that defeat HT detectors; demonstrating the capabilities of GAN-like adversarial tools for automatic HT insertion. We introduce an RL environment where the RL insertion agent interacts with HT detectors in an insertion-detection loop where the agent collects rewards based on its success in bypassing HT detectors. Our results show that this process leads to inserted HTs that evade various HT detectors, achieving high attack success percentages. This tool provides insight into why HT insertion fails in some instances and how we can leverage this knowledge in defense.
As an emerging task that integrates perception and reasoning, topology reasoning in autonomous driving scenes has recently garnered widespread attention. However, existing work often emphasizes "perception over reasoning": they typically boost reasoning performance by enhancing the perception of lanes and directly adopt MLP to learn lane topology from lane query. This paradigm overlooks the geometric features intrinsic to the lanes themselves and are prone to being influenced by inherent endpoint shifts in lane detection. To tackle this issue, we propose an interpretable method for lane topology reasoning based on lane geometric distance and lane query similarity, named TopoLogic. This method mitigates the impact of endpoint shifts in geometric space, and introduces explicit similarity calculation in semantic space as a complement. By integrating results from both spaces, our methods provides more comprehensive information for lane topology. Ultimately, our approach significantly outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods on the mainstream benchmark OpenLane-V2 (23.9 v.s. 10.9 in TOP$_{ll}$ and 44.1 v.s. 39.8 in OLS on subset_A. Additionally, our proposed geometric distance topology reasoning method can be incorporated into well-trained models without re-training, significantly boost the performance of lane topology reasoning. The code is released at //github.com/Franpin/TopoLogic.
Before deploying outputs from foundation models in high-stakes tasks, it is imperative to ensure that they align with human values. For instance, in radiology report generation, reports generated by a vision-language model must align with human evaluations before their use in medical decision-making. This paper presents Conformal Alignment, a general framework for identifying units whose outputs meet a user-specified alignment criterion. It is guaranteed that on average, a prescribed fraction of selected units indeed meet the alignment criterion, regardless of the foundation model or the data distribution. Given any pre-trained model and new units with model-generated outputs, Conformal Alignment leverages a set of reference data with ground-truth alignment status to train an alignment predictor. It then selects new units whose predicted alignment scores surpass a data-dependent threshold, certifying their corresponding outputs as trustworthy. Through applications to question answering and radiology report generation, we demonstrate that our method is able to accurately identify units with trustworthy outputs via lightweight training over a moderate amount of reference data. En route, we investigate the informativeness of various features in alignment prediction and combine them with standard models to construct the alignment predictor.
Transformer is a promising neural network learner, and has achieved great success in various machine learning tasks. Thanks to the recent prevalence of multimodal applications and big data, Transformer-based multimodal learning has become a hot topic in AI research. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of Transformer techniques oriented at multimodal data. The main contents of this survey include: (1) a background of multimodal learning, Transformer ecosystem, and the multimodal big data era, (2) a theoretical review of Vanilla Transformer, Vision Transformer, and multimodal Transformers, from a geometrically topological perspective, (3) a review of multimodal Transformer applications, via two important paradigms, i.e., for multimodal pretraining and for specific multimodal tasks, (4) a summary of the common challenges and designs shared by the multimodal Transformer models and applications, and (5) a discussion of open problems and potential research directions for the community.
ASR (automatic speech recognition) systems like Siri, Alexa, Google Voice or Cortana has become quite popular recently. One of the key techniques enabling the practical use of such systems in people's daily life is deep learning. Though deep learning in computer vision is known to be vulnerable to adversarial perturbations, little is known whether such perturbations are still valid on the practical speech recognition. In this paper, we not only demonstrate such attacks can happen in reality, but also show that the attacks can be systematically conducted. To minimize users' attention, we choose to embed the voice commands into a song, called CommandSong. In this way, the song carrying the command can spread through radio, TV or even any media player installed in the portable devices like smartphones, potentially impacting millions of users in long distance. In particular, we overcome two major challenges: minimizing the revision of a song in the process of embedding commands, and letting the CommandSong spread through the air without losing the voice "command". Our evaluation demonstrates that we can craft random songs to "carry" any commands and the modify is extremely difficult to be noticed. Specially, the physical attack that we play the CommandSongs over the air and record them can success with 94 percentage.