Accurately predicting possible behaviors of traffic participants is an essential capability for autonomous vehicles. Since autonomous vehicles need to navigate in dynamically changing environments, they are expected to make accurate predictions regardless of where they are and what driving circumstances they encountered. Therefore, generalization capability to unseen domains is crucial for prediction models when autonomous vehicles are deployed in the real world. In this paper, we aim to address the domain generalization problem for vehicle intention prediction tasks and a causal-based time series domain generalization (CTSDG) model is proposed. We construct a structural causal model for vehicle intention prediction tasks to learn an invariant representation of input driving data for domain generalization. We further integrate a recurrent latent variable model into our structural causal model to better capture temporal latent dependencies from time-series input data. The effectiveness of our approach is evaluated via real-world driving data. We demonstrate that our proposed method has consistent improvement on prediction accuracy compared to other state-of-the-art domain generalization and behavior prediction methods.
While huge volumes of unlabeled data are generated and made available in many domains, the demand for automated understanding of visual data is higher than ever before. Most existing machine learning models typically rely on massive amounts of labeled training data to achieve high performance. Unfortunately, such a requirement cannot be met in real-world applications. The number of labels is limited and manually annotating data is expensive and time-consuming. It is often necessary to transfer knowledge from an existing labeled domain to a new domain. However, model performance degrades because of the differences between domains (domain shift or dataset bias). To overcome the burden of annotation, Domain Adaptation (DA) aims to mitigate the domain shift problem when transferring knowledge from one domain into another similar but different domain. Unsupervised DA (UDA) deals with a labeled source domain and an unlabeled target domain. The principal objective of UDA is to reduce the domain discrepancy between the labeled source data and unlabeled target data and to learn domain-invariant representations across the two domains during training. In this paper, we first define UDA problem. Secondly, we overview the state-of-the-art methods for different categories of UDA from both traditional methods and deep learning based methods. Finally, we collect frequently used benchmark datasets and report results of the state-of-the-art methods of UDA on visual recognition problem.
Generalization to out-of-distribution (OOD) data is a capability natural to humans yet challenging for machines to reproduce. This is because most learning algorithms strongly rely on the i.i.d.~assumption on source/target data, which is often violated in practice due to domain shift. Domain generalization (DG) aims to achieve OOD generalization by using only source data for model learning. Since first introduced in 2011, research in DG has made great progresses. In particular, intensive research in this topic has led to a broad spectrum of methodologies, e.g., those based on domain alignment, meta-learning, data augmentation, or ensemble learning, just to name a few; and has covered various vision applications such as object recognition, segmentation, action recognition, and person re-identification. In this paper, for the first time a comprehensive literature review is provided to summarize the developments in DG for computer vision over the past decade. Specifically, we first cover the background by formally defining DG and relating it to other research fields like domain adaptation and transfer learning. Second, we conduct a thorough review into existing methods and present a categorization based on their methodologies and motivations. Finally, we conclude this survey with insights and discussions on future research directions.
Deep neural networks have significantly contributed to the success in predictive accuracy for classification tasks. However, they tend to make over-confident predictions in real-world settings, where domain shifting and out-of-distribution (OOD) examples exist. Most research on uncertainty estimation focuses on computer vision because it provides visual validation on uncertainty quality. However, few have been presented in the natural language process domain. Unlike Bayesian methods that indirectly infer uncertainty through weight uncertainties, current evidential uncertainty-based methods explicitly model the uncertainty of class probabilities through subjective opinions. They further consider inherent uncertainty in data with different root causes, vacuity (i.e., uncertainty due to a lack of evidence) and dissonance (i.e., uncertainty due to conflicting evidence). In our paper, we firstly apply evidential uncertainty in OOD detection for text classification tasks. We propose an inexpensive framework that adopts both auxiliary outliers and pseudo off-manifold samples to train the model with prior knowledge of a certain class, which has high vacuity for OOD samples. Extensive empirical experiments demonstrate that our model based on evidential uncertainty outperforms other counterparts for detecting OOD examples. Our approach can be easily deployed to traditional recurrent neural networks and fine-tuned pre-trained transformers.
In the domain generalization literature, a common objective is to learn representations independent of the domain after conditioning on the class label. We show that this objective is not sufficient: there exist counter-examples where a model fails to generalize to unseen domains even after satisfying class-conditional domain invariance. We formalize this observation through a structural causal model and show the importance of modeling within-class variations for generalization. Specifically, classes contain objects that characterize specific causal features, and domains can be interpreted as interventions on these objects that change non-causal features. We highlight an alternative condition: inputs across domains should have the same representation if they are derived from the same object. Based on this objective, we propose matching-based algorithms when base objects are observed (e.g., through data augmentation) and approximate the objective when objects are not observed (MatchDG). Our simple matching-based algorithms are competitive to prior work on out-of-domain accuracy for rotated MNIST, Fashion-MNIST, PACS, and Chest-Xray datasets. Our method MatchDG also recovers ground-truth object matches: on MNIST and Fashion-MNIST, top-10 matches from MatchDG have over 50% overlap with ground-truth matches.
Conventional supervised learning methods, especially deep ones, are found to be sensitive to out-of-distribution (OOD) examples, largely because the learned representation mixes the semantic factor with the variation factor due to their domain-specific correlation, while only the semantic factor causes the output. To address the problem, we propose a Causal Semantic Generative model (CSG) based on a causal reasoning so that the two factors are modeled separately, and develop methods for OOD prediction from a single training domain, which is common and challenging. The methods are based on the causal invariance principle, with a novel design for both efficient learning and easy prediction. Theoretically, we prove that under certain conditions, CSG can identify the semantic factor by fitting training data, and this semantic-identification guarantees the boundedness of OOD generalization error and the success of adaptation. Empirical study shows improved OOD performance over prevailing baselines.
Invariant approaches have been remarkably successful in tackling the problem of domain generalization, where the objective is to perform inference on data distributions different from those used in training. In our work, we investigate whether it is possible to leverage domain information from the unseen test samples themselves. We propose a domain-adaptive approach consisting of two steps: a) we first learn a discriminative domain embedding from unsupervised training examples, and b) use this domain embedding as supplementary information to build a domain-adaptive model, that takes both the input as well as its domain into account while making predictions. For unseen domains, our method simply uses few unlabelled test examples to construct the domain embedding. This enables adaptive classification on any unseen domain. Our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on various domain generalization benchmarks. In addition, we introduce the first real-world, large-scale domain generalization benchmark, Geo-YFCC, containing 1.1M samples over 40 training, 7 validation, and 15 test domains, orders of magnitude larger than prior work. We show that the existing approaches either do not scale to this dataset or underperform compared to the simple baseline of training a model on the union of data from all training domains. In contrast, our approach achieves a significant improvement.
The accurate and interpretable prediction of future events in time-series data often requires the capturing of representative patterns (or referred to as states) underpinning the observed data. To this end, most existing studies focus on the representation and recognition of states, but ignore the changing transitional relations among them. In this paper, we present evolutionary state graph, a dynamic graph structure designed to systematically represent the evolving relations (edges) among states (nodes) along time. We conduct analysis on the dynamic graphs constructed from the time-series data and show that changes on the graph structures (e.g., edges connecting certain state nodes) can inform the occurrences of events (i.e., time-series fluctuation). Inspired by this, we propose a novel graph neural network model, Evolutionary State Graph Network (EvoNet), to encode the evolutionary state graph for accurate and interpretable time-series event prediction. Specifically, Evolutionary State Graph Network models both the node-level (state-to-state) and graph-level (segment-to-segment) propagation, and captures the node-graph (state-to-segment) interactions over time. Experimental results based on five real-world datasets show that our approach not only achieves clear improvements compared with 11 baselines, but also provides more insights towards explaining the results of event predictions.
While supervised learning has enabled great progress in many applications, unsupervised learning has not seen such widespread adoption, and remains an important and challenging endeavor for artificial intelligence. In this work, we propose a universal unsupervised learning approach to extract useful representations from high-dimensional data, which we call Contrastive Predictive Coding. The key insight of our model is to learn such representations by predicting the future in latent space by using powerful autoregressive models. We use a probabilistic contrastive loss which induces the latent space to capture information that is maximally useful to predict future samples. It also makes the model tractable by using negative sampling. While most prior work has focused on evaluating representations for a particular modality, we demonstrate that our approach is able to learn useful representations achieving strong performance on four distinct domains: speech, images, text and reinforcement learning in 3D environments.
Given a single image x from domain A and a set of images from domain B, our task is to generate the analogous of x in B. We argue that this task could be a key AI capability that underlines the ability of cognitive agents to act in the world and present empirical evidence that the existing unsupervised domain translation methods fail on this task. Our method follows a two step process. First, a variational autoencoder for domain B is trained. Then, given the new sample x, we create a variational autoencoder for domain A by adapting the layers that are close to the image in order to directly fit x, and only indirectly adapt the other layers. Our experiments indicate that the new method does as well, when trained on one sample x, as the existing domain transfer methods, when these enjoy a multitude of training samples from domain A. Our code is made publicly available at //github.com/sagiebenaim/OneShotTranslation
Tracking humans that are interacting with the other subjects or environment remains unsolved in visual tracking, because the visibility of the human of interests in videos is unknown and might vary over time. In particular, it is still difficult for state-of-the-art human trackers to recover complete human trajectories in crowded scenes with frequent human interactions. In this work, we consider the visibility status of a subject as a fluent variable, whose change is mostly attributed to the subject's interaction with the surrounding, e.g., crossing behind another object, entering a building, or getting into a vehicle, etc. We introduce a Causal And-Or Graph (C-AOG) to represent the causal-effect relations between an object's visibility fluent and its activities, and develop a probabilistic graph model to jointly reason the visibility fluent change (e.g., from visible to invisible) and track humans in videos. We formulate this joint task as an iterative search of a feasible causal graph structure that enables fast search algorithm, e.g., dynamic programming method. We apply the proposed method on challenging video sequences to evaluate its capabilities of estimating visibility fluent changes of subjects and tracking subjects of interests over time. Results with comparisons demonstrate that our method outperforms the alternative trackers and can recover complete trajectories of humans in complicated scenarios with frequent human interactions.