Motion planning has been an important research topic in achieving safe and flexible maneuvers for intelligent vehicles. However, it remains challenging to realize efficient and optimal planning in the presence of uncertain model dynamics. In this paper, a sparse kernel-based reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm with Gaussian Process (GP) Regression (called GP-SKRL) is proposed to achieve online adaption and near-optimal motion planning performance. In this algorithm, we design an efficient sparse GP regression method to learn the uncertain dynamics. Based on the updated model, a sparse kernel-based policy iteration algorithm with an exponential barrier function is designed to learn the near-optimal planning policies with the capability to avoid dynamic obstacles. Thereby, batch-mode GP-SKRL with online adaption capability can estimate the changing system dynamics. The converged RL policies are then deployed on vehicles efficiently under a safety-aware module. As a result, the produced driving actions are safe and less conservative, and the planning performance has been noticeably improved. Extensive simulation results show that GP-SKRL outperforms several advanced motion planning methods in terms of average cumulative cost, trajectory length, and task completion time. In particular, experiments on a Hongqi E-HS3 vehicle demonstrate that superior GP-SKRL provides a practical planning solution.
Computer vision research has long aimed to build systems that are robust to spatial transformations found in natural data. Traditionally, this is done using data augmentation or hard-coding invariances into the architecture. However, too much or too little invariance can hurt, and the correct amount is unknown a priori and dependent on the instance. Ideally, the appropriate invariance would be learned from data and inferred at test-time. We treat invariance as a prediction problem. Given any image, we use a normalizing flow to predict a distribution over transformations and average the predictions over them. Since this distribution only depends on the instance, we can align instances before classifying them and generalize invariance across classes. The same distribution can also be used to adapt to out-of-distribution poses. This normalizing flow is trained end-to-end and can learn a much larger range of transformations than Augerino and InstaAug. When used as data augmentation, our method shows accuracy and robustness gains on CIFAR 10, CIFAR10-LT, and TinyImageNet.
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown great promise for efficiently learning force control policies in peg-in-hole tasks. However, robots often face difficulties due to visual occlusions by the gripper and uncertainties in the initial grasping pose of the peg. These challenges often restrict force-controlled insertion policies to situations where the peg is rigidly fixed to the end-effector. While vision-based tactile sensors offer rich tactile feedback that could potentially address these issues, utilizing them to learn effective tactile policies is both computationally intensive and difficult to generalize. In this paper, we propose a robust tactile insertion policy that can align the tilted peg with the hole using active inference, without the need for extensive training on large datasets. Our approach employs a dual-policy architecture: one policy focuses on insertion, integrating force control and RL to guide the object into the hole, while the other policy performs active inference based on tactile feedback to align the tilted peg with the hole. In real-world experiments, our dual-policy architecture achieved 90% success rate into a hole with a clearance of less than 0.1 mm, significantly outperforming previous methods that lack tactile sensory feedback (5%). To assess the generalizability of our alignment policy, we conducted experiments with five different pegs, demonstrating its effective adaptation to multiple objects.
One of the problems in quantitative finance that has received the most attention is the portfolio optimization problem. Regarding its solving, this problem has been approached using different techniques, with those related to quantum computing being especially prolific in recent years. In this study, we present a system called Quantum Computing-based System for Portfolio Optimization with Future Asset Values and Automatic Universe Reduction (Q4FuturePOP), which deals with the Portfolio Optimization Problem considering the following innovations: i) the developed tool is modeled for working with future prediction of assets, instead of historical values; and ii) Q4FuturePOP includes an automatic universe reduction module, which is conceived to intelligently reduce the complexity of the problem. We also introduce a brief discussion about the preliminary performance of the different modules that compose the prototypical version of Q4FuturePOP.
Multi-behavioral sequential recommendation has recently attracted increasing attention. However, existing methods suffer from two major limitations. Firstly, user preferences and intents can be described in fine-grained detail from multiple perspectives; yet, these methods fail to capture their multi-aspect nature. Secondly, user behaviors may contain noises, and most existing methods could not effectively deal with noises. In this paper, we present an attentive recurrent model with multiple projections to capture Multi-Aspect preferences and INTents (MAINT in short). To extract multi-aspect preferences from target behaviors, we propose a multi-aspect projection mechanism for generating multiple preference representations from multiple aspects. To extract multi-aspect intents from multi-typed behaviors, we propose a behavior-enhanced LSTM and a multi-aspect refinement attention mechanism. The attention mechanism can filter out noises and generate multiple intent representations from different aspects. To adaptively fuse user preferences and intents, we propose a multi-aspect gated fusion mechanism. Extensive experiments conducted on real-world datasets have demonstrated the effectiveness of our model.
Sampling-based planning algorithms like Rapidly-exploring Random Tree (RRT) are versatile in solving path planning problems. RRT* offers asymptotical optimality but requires growing the tree uniformly over the free space, which leaves room for efficiency improvement. To accelerate convergence, informed approaches sample states in an ellipsoidal subset of the search space determined by current path cost during iteration. Learning-based alternatives model the topology of the search space and infer the states close to the optimal path to guide planning. We combine the strengths from both sides and propose Neural Informed RRT* with Point-based Network Guidance. We introduce Point-based Network to infer the guidance states, and integrate the network into Informed RRT* for guidance state refinement. We use Neural Connect to build connectivity of the guidance state set and further boost performance in challenging planning problems. Our method surpasses previous works in path planning benchmarks while preserving probabilistic completeness and asymptotical optimality. We demonstrate the deployment of our method on mobile robot navigation in the real world.
Place recognition is crucial for robotic localization and loop closure in simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). Recently, LiDARs have gained popularity due to their robust sensing capability and measurement consistency, even in the illumination-variant environment, offering an advantage over traditional imaging sensors. Spinning LiDARs are widely accepted among many types, while non-repetitive scanning patterns have recently been utilized in robotic applications. Beyond the range measurements, some LiDARs offer additional measurements, such as reflectivity, Near Infrared (NIR), and velocity (e.g., FMCW LiDARs). Despite these advancements, a noticeable dearth of datasets comprehensively reflects the broad spectrum of LiDAR configurations optimized for place recognition. To tackle this issue, our paper proposes the HeLiPR dataset, curated especially for place recognition with heterogeneous LiDAR systems, embodying spatial-temporal variations. To the best of our knowledge, the HeLiPR dataset is the first heterogeneous LiDAR dataset designed to support inter-LiDAR place recognition with both non-repetitive and spinning LiDARs, accommodating different field of view (FOV) and varying numbers of rays. Encompassing the distinct LiDAR configurations, it captures varied environments ranging from urban cityscapes to high-dynamic freeways over a month, designed to enhance the adaptability and robustness of place recognition across diverse scenarios. Notably, the HeLiPR dataset also includes trajectories that parallel sequences from MulRan, underscoring its utility for research in heterogeneous LiDAR place recognition and long-term studies. The dataset is accessible at https: //sites.google.com/view/heliprdataset.
Human-in-the-loop aims to train an accurate prediction model with minimum cost by integrating human knowledge and experience. Humans can provide training data for machine learning applications and directly accomplish some tasks that are hard for computers in the pipeline with the help of machine-based approaches. In this paper, we survey existing works on human-in-the-loop from a data perspective and classify them into three categories with a progressive relationship: (1) the work of improving model performance from data processing, (2) the work of improving model performance through interventional model training, and (3) the design of the system independent human-in-the-loop. Using the above categorization, we summarize major approaches in the field, along with their technical strengths/ weaknesses, we have simple classification and discussion in natural language processing, computer vision, and others. Besides, we provide some open challenges and opportunities. This survey intends to provide a high-level summarization for human-in-the-loop and motivates interested readers to consider approaches for designing effective human-in-the-loop solutions.
Link prediction on knowledge graphs (KGs) is a key research topic. Previous work mainly focused on binary relations, paying less attention to higher-arity relations although they are ubiquitous in real-world KGs. This paper considers link prediction upon n-ary relational facts and proposes a graph-based approach to this task. The key to our approach is to represent the n-ary structure of a fact as a small heterogeneous graph, and model this graph with edge-biased fully-connected attention. The fully-connected attention captures universal inter-vertex interactions, while with edge-aware attentive biases to particularly encode the graph structure and its heterogeneity. In this fashion, our approach fully models global and local dependencies in each n-ary fact, and hence can more effectively capture associations therein. Extensive evaluation verifies the effectiveness and superiority of our approach. It performs substantially and consistently better than current state-of-the-art across a variety of n-ary relational benchmarks. Our code is publicly available.
Translational distance-based knowledge graph embedding has shown progressive improvements on the link prediction task, from TransE to the latest state-of-the-art RotatE. However, N-1, 1-N and N-N predictions still remain challenging. In this work, we propose a novel translational distance-based approach for knowledge graph link prediction. The proposed method includes two-folds, first we extend the RotatE from 2D complex domain to high dimension space with orthogonal transforms to model relations for better modeling capacity. Second, the graph context is explicitly modeled via two directed context representations. These context representations are used as part of the distance scoring function to measure the plausibility of the triples during training and inference. The proposed approach effectively improves prediction accuracy on the difficult N-1, 1-N and N-N cases for knowledge graph link prediction task. The experimental results show that it achieves better performance on two benchmark data sets compared to the baseline RotatE, especially on data set (FB15k-237) with many high in-degree connection nodes.
The recent proliferation of knowledge graphs (KGs) coupled with incomplete or partial information, in the form of missing relations (links) between entities, has fueled a lot of research on knowledge base completion (also known as relation prediction). Several recent works suggest that convolutional neural network (CNN) based models generate richer and more expressive feature embeddings and hence also perform well on relation prediction. However, we observe that these KG embeddings treat triples independently and thus fail to cover the complex and hidden information that is inherently implicit in the local neighborhood surrounding a triple. To this effect, our paper proposes a novel attention based feature embedding that captures both entity and relation features in any given entity's neighborhood. Additionally, we also encapsulate relation clusters and multihop relations in our model. Our empirical study offers insights into the efficacy of our attention based model and we show marked performance gains in comparison to state of the art methods on all datasets.