This paper proposes a method for modeling human driver interactions that relies on multi-output gaussian processes. The proposed method is developed as a refinement of the game theoretical hierarchical reasoning approach called "level-k reasoning" which conventionally assigns discrete levels of behaviors to agents. Although it is shown to be an effective modeling tool, the level-k reasoning approach may pose undesired constraints for predicting human decision making due to a limited number (usually 2 or 3) of driver policies it extracts. The proposed approach is put forward to fill this gap in the literature by introducing a continuous domain framework that enables an infinite policy space. By using the approach presented in this paper, more accurate driver models can be obtained, which can then be employed for creating high fidelity simulation platforms for the validation of autonomous vehicle control algorithms. The proposed method is validated on a real traffic dataset and compared with the conventional level-k approach to demonstrate its contributions and implications.
Current challenges of the manufacturing industry require modular and changeable manufacturing systems that can be adapted to variable conditions with little effort. At the same time, production recipes typically represent important company know-how that should not be directly tied to changing plant configurations. Thus, there is a need to model general production recipes independent of specific plant layouts. For execution of such a recipe however, a binding to then available production resources needs to be made. In this contribution, select a suitable modeling language to model and execute such recipes. Furthermore, we present an approach to solve the issue of recipe modeling and execution in modular plants using semantically modeled capabilities and skills as well as BPMN. We make use of BPMN to model \emph{capability processes}, i.e. production processes referencing abstract descriptions of resource functions. These capability processes are not bound to a certain plant layout, as there can be multiple resources fulfilling the same capability. For execution, every capability in a capability process is replaced by a skill realizing it, effectively creating a \emph{skill process} consisting of various skill invocations. The presented solution is capable of orchestrating and executing complex processes that integrate production steps with typical IT functionalities such as error handling, user interactions and notifications. Benefits of the approach are demonstrated using a flexible manufacturing system.
Free-space-oriented roadmaps typically generate a series of convex geometric primitives, which constitute the safe region for motion planning. However, a static environment is assumed for this kind of roadmap. This assumption makes it unable to deal with dynamic obstacles and limits its applications. In this paper, we present a dynamic free-space roadmap, which provides feasible spaces and a navigation graph for safe quadrotor motion planning. Our roadmap is constructed by continuously seeding and extracting free regions in the environment. In order to adapt our map to environments with dynamic obstacles, we incrementally decompose the polyhedra intersecting with obstacles into obstacle-free regions, while the graph is also updated by our well-designed mechanism. Extensive simulations and real-world experiments demonstrate that our method is practically applicable and efficient.
Numerical solution of heterogeneous Helmholtz problems presents various computational challenges, with descriptive theory remaining out of reach for many popular approaches. Robustness and scalability are key for practical and reliable solvers in large-scale applications, especially for large wave number problems. In this work we explore the use of a GenEO-type coarse space to build a two-level additive Schwarz method applicable to highly indefinite Helmholtz problems. Through a range of numerical tests on a 2D model problem, discretised by finite elements on pollution-free meshes, we observe robust convergence, iteration counts that do not increase with the wave number, and good scalability of our approach. We further provide results showing a favourable comparison with the DtN coarse space. Our numerical study shows promise that our solver methodology can be effective for challenging heterogeneous applications.
We present a data-efficient framework for solving sequential decision-making problems which exploits the combination of reinforcement learning (RL) and latent variable generative models. The framework, called GenRL, trains deep policies by introducing an action latent variable such that the feed-forward policy search can be divided into two parts: (i) training a sub-policy that outputs a distribution over the action latent variable given a state of the system, and (ii) unsupervised training of a generative model that outputs a sequence of motor actions conditioned on the latent action variable. GenRL enables safe exploration and alleviates the data-inefficiency problem as it exploits prior knowledge about valid sequences of motor actions. Moreover, we provide a set of measures for evaluation of generative models such that we are able to predict the performance of the RL policy training prior to the actual training on a physical robot. We experimentally determine the characteristics of generative models that have most influence on the performance of the final policy training on two robotics tasks: shooting a hockey puck and throwing a basketball. Furthermore, we empirically demonstrate that GenRL is the only method which can safely and efficiently solve the robotics tasks compared to two state-of-the-art RL methods.
Annotating data for supervised learning can be costly. When the annotation budget is limited, active learning can be used to select and annotate those observations that are likely to give the most gain in model performance. We propose an active learning algorithm that, in addition to selecting which observation to annotate, selects the precision of the annotation that is acquired. Assuming that annotations with low precision are cheaper to obtain, this allows the model to explore a larger part of the input space, with the same annotation costs. We build our acquisition function on the previously proposed BALD objective for Gaussian Processes, and empirically demonstrate the gains of being able to adjust the annotation precision in the active learning loop.
Bayesian model selection provides a powerful framework for objectively comparing models directly from observed data, without reference to ground truth data. However, Bayesian model selection requires the computation of the marginal likelihood (model evidence), which is computationally challenging, prohibiting its use in many high-dimensional Bayesian inverse problems. With Bayesian imaging applications in mind, in this work we present the proximal nested sampling methodology to objectively compare alternative Bayesian imaging models for applications that use images to inform decisions under uncertainty. The methodology is based on nested sampling, a Monte Carlo approach specialised for model comparison, and exploits proximal Markov chain Monte Carlo techniques to scale efficiently to large problems and to tackle models that are log-concave and not necessarily smooth (e.g., involving l_1 or total-variation priors). The proposed approach can be applied computationally to problems of dimension O(10^6) and beyond, making it suitable for high-dimensional inverse imaging problems. It is validated on large Gaussian models, for which the likelihood is available analytically, and subsequently illustrated on a range of imaging problems where it is used to analyse different choices of dictionary and measurement model.
Latent Gaussian models and boosting are widely used techniques in statistics and machine learning. Tree-boosting shows excellent prediction accuracy on many data sets, but potential drawbacks are that it assumes conditional independence of samples, produces discontinuous predictions for, e.g., spatial data, and it can have difficulty with high-cardinality categorical variables. Latent Gaussian models, such as Gaussian process and grouped random effects models, are flexible prior models which explicitly model dependence among samples and which allow for efficient learning of predictor functions and for making probabilistic predictions. However, existing latent Gaussian models usually assume either a zero or a linear prior mean function which can be an unrealistic assumption. This article introduces a novel approach that combines boosting and latent Gaussian models to remedy the above-mentioned drawbacks and to leverage the advantages of both techniques. We obtain increased prediction accuracy compared to existing approaches in both simulated and real-world data experiments.
Proactive dialogue system is able to lead the conversation to a goal topic and has advantaged potential in bargain, persuasion and negotiation. Current corpus-based learning manner limits its practical application in real-world scenarios. To this end, we contribute to advance the study of the proactive dialogue policy to a more natural and challenging setting, i.e., interacting dynamically with users. Further, we call attention to the non-cooperative user behavior -- the user talks about off-path topics when he/she is not satisfied with the previous topics introduced by the agent. We argue that the targets of reaching the goal topic quickly and maintaining a high user satisfaction are not always converge, because the topics close to the goal and the topics user preferred may not be the same. Towards this issue, we propose a new solution named I-Pro that can learn Proactive policy in the Interactive setting. Specifically, we learn the trade-off via a learned goal weight, which consists of four factors (dialogue turn, goal completion difficulty, user satisfaction estimation, and cooperative degree). The experimental results demonstrate I-Pro significantly outperforms baselines in terms of effectiveness and interpretability.
The adaptive processing of structured data is a long-standing research topic in machine learning that investigates how to automatically learn a mapping from a structured input to outputs of various nature. Recently, there has been an increasing interest in the adaptive processing of graphs, which led to the development of different neural network-based methodologies. In this thesis, we take a different route and develop a Bayesian Deep Learning framework for graph learning. The dissertation begins with a review of the principles over which most of the methods in the field are built, followed by a study on graph classification reproducibility issues. We then proceed to bridge the basic ideas of deep learning for graphs with the Bayesian world, by building our deep architectures in an incremental fashion. This framework allows us to consider graphs with discrete and continuous edge features, producing unsupervised embeddings rich enough to reach the state of the art on several classification tasks. Our approach is also amenable to a Bayesian nonparametric extension that automatizes the choice of almost all model's hyper-parameters. Two real-world applications demonstrate the efficacy of deep learning for graphs. The first concerns the prediction of information-theoretic quantities for molecular simulations with supervised neural models. After that, we exploit our Bayesian models to solve a malware-classification task while being robust to intra-procedural code obfuscation techniques. We conclude the dissertation with an attempt to blend the best of the neural and Bayesian worlds together. The resulting hybrid model is able to predict multimodal distributions conditioned on input graphs, with the consequent ability to model stochasticity and uncertainty better than most works. Overall, we aim to provide a Bayesian perspective into the articulated research field of deep learning for graphs.
Dynamic programming (DP) solves a variety of structured combinatorial problems by iteratively breaking them down into smaller subproblems. In spite of their versatility, DP algorithms are usually non-differentiable, which hampers their use as a layer in neural networks trained by backpropagation. To address this issue, we propose to smooth the max operator in the dynamic programming recursion, using a strongly convex regularizer. This allows to relax both the optimal value and solution of the original combinatorial problem, and turns a broad class of DP algorithms into differentiable operators. Theoretically, we provide a new probabilistic perspective on backpropagating through these DP operators, and relate them to inference in graphical models. We derive two particular instantiations of our framework, a smoothed Viterbi algorithm for sequence prediction and a smoothed DTW algorithm for time-series alignment. We showcase these instantiations on two structured prediction tasks and on structured and sparse attention for neural machine translation.