Learning-based vehicle planning is receiving increasing attention with the emergence of diverse driving simulators and large-scale driving datasets. While offline reinforcement learning (RL) is well suited for these safety-critical tasks, it still struggles to plan over extended periods. In this work, we present a skill-based framework that enhances offline RL to overcome the long-horizon vehicle planning challenge. Specifically, we design a variational autoencoder (VAE) to learn skills from offline demonstrations. To mitigate posterior collapse of common VAEs, we introduce a two-branch sequence encoder to capture both discrete options and continuous variations of the complex driving skills. The final policy treats learned skills as actions and can be trained by any off-the-shelf offline RL algorithms. This facilitates a shift in focus from per-step actions to temporally extended skills, thereby enabling long-term reasoning into the future. Extensive results on CARLA prove that our model consistently outperforms strong baselines at both training and new scenarios. Additional visualizations and experiments demonstrate the interpretability and transferability of extracted skills.
Electric vehicle (EV) adoption in long-distance logistics faces challenges such as range anxiety and uneven distribution of charging stations. Two pivotal questions emerge: How can EVs be efficiently routed in a charging network considering range limits, charging speeds and prices? And, can the existing charging infrastructure sustain the increasing demand for EVs in long-distance logistics? This paper addresses these questions by introducing a novel theoretical and computational framework to study the EV network flow problems. We present an EV network flow model that incorporates range constraints and nonlinear charging rates, and identify conditions under which polynomial-time solutions can be obtained for optimal single EV routing, maximum flow, and minimum-cost flow problems. Our findings provide insights for optimizing EV routing in logistics, ensuring an efficient and sustainable future.
Frequency-based methods have been successfully employed in creating high fidelity data-driven reduced order models (DDROMs) for linear dynamical systems. These methods require access to values (and sometimes derivatives) of the frequency-response function (transfer function) in the complex plane. These frequency domain values can at times be costly or difficult to obtain (especially if the method of choice requires resampling); instead one may have access to only time-domain input-output data. The data informativity approach to moment matching provides a powerful new framework for recovering the required frequency data from a single time-domain trajectory. In this work, we analyze and extend upon this framework, resulting in vastly improved conditioning of the associated linear systems, an error indicator, and removal of an assumption that the system order is known. This analysis leads to a robust algorithm for recovering frequency information from time-domain data, suitable for large scale systems. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm by forming frequency based DDROMs from time-domain data of several dynamical systems.
Non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) is a dimensionality reduction technique that has shown promise for analyzing noisy data, especially astronomical data. For these datasets, the observed data may contain negative values due to noise even when the true underlying physical signal is strictly positive. Prior NMF work has not treated negative data in a statistically consistent manner, which becomes problematic for low signal-to-noise data with many negative values. In this paper we present two algorithms, Shift-NMF and Nearly-NMF, that can handle both the noisiness of the input data and also any introduced negativity. Both of these algorithms use the negative data space without clipping, and correctly recover non-negative signals without any introduced positive offset that occurs when clipping negative data. We demonstrate this numerically on both simple and more realistic examples, and prove that both algorithms have monotonically decreasing update rules.
As a classical generative modeling approach, energy-based models have the natural advantage of flexibility in the form of the energy function. Recently, energy-based models have achieved great success in modeling high-dimensional data in computer vision and natural language processing. In line with these advancements, we build a multi-purpose energy-based probabilistic model for High Energy Physics events at the Large Hadron Collider. This framework builds on a powerful generative model and describes higher-order inter-particle interactions. It suits different encoding architectures and builds on implicit generation. As for applicational aspects, it can serve as a powerful parameterized event generator for physics simulation, a generic anomalous signal detector free from spurious correlations, and an augmented event classifier for particle identification.
Full-waveform inversion (FWI) is a powerful geophysical imaging technique that infers high-resolution subsurface physical parameters by solving a non-convex optimization problem. However, due to limitations in observation, e.g., limited shots or receivers, and random noise, conventional inversion methods are confronted with numerous challenges, such as the local-minimum problem. In recent years, a substantial body of work has demonstrated that the integration of deep neural networks and partial differential equations for solving full-waveform inversion problems has shown promising performance. In this work, drawing inspiration from the expressive capacity of neural networks, we provide an unsupervised learning approach aimed at accurately reconstructing subsurface physical velocity parameters. This method is founded on a re-parametrization technique for Bayesian inference, achieved through a deep neural network with random weights. Notably, our proposed approach does not hinge upon the requirement of the labeled training dataset, rendering it exceedingly versatile and adaptable to diverse subsurface models. Extensive experiments show that the proposed approach performs noticeably better than existing conventional inversion methods.
Our goal is to perform out-of-distribution (OOD) detection, i.e., to detect when a robot is operating in environments drawn from a different distribution than the ones used to train the robot. We leverage Probably Approximately Correct (PAC)-Bayes theory to train a policy with a guaranteed bound on performance on the training distribution. Our idea for OOD detection relies on the following intuition: violation of the performance bound on test environments provides evidence that the robot is operating OOD. We formalize this via statistical techniques based on p-values and concentration inequalities. The approach provides guaranteed confidence bounds on OOD detection including bounds on both the false positive and false negative rates of the detector and is task-driven and only sensitive to changes that impact the robot's performance. We demonstrate our approach in simulation and hardware for a grasping task using objects with unfamiliar shapes or poses and a drone performing vision-based obstacle avoidance in environments with wind disturbances and varied obstacle densities. Our examples demonstrate that we can perform task-driven OOD detection within just a handful of trials.
Variational integrators for Euler--Lagrange equations and Hamilton's equations are a class of structure-preserving numerical methods that respect the conservative properties of such systems. Lie group variational integrators are a particular class of these integrators that apply to systems which evolve over the tangent bundle and cotangent bundle of Lie groups. Traditionally, these are constructed from a variational principle which assumes fixed position endpoints. In this paper, we instead construct Lie group variational integrators with a novel Type II variational principle on the cotangent bundle of a Lie group which allows for Type II boundary conditions, i.e., fixed initial position and final momenta; these boundary conditions are particularly important for adjoint sensitivity analysis, which is the motivating application in our paper. In general, such Type II variational principles are only globally defined on vector spaces or locally defined on general manifolds; however, by left translation, we are able to define this variational principle globally on cotangent bundles of Lie groups. By developing the continuous and discrete Type II variational principles over Lie groups, we construct a structure-preserving Lie group variational integrator that is both symplectic and momentum-preserving. Subsequently, we introduce adjoint systems on Lie groups, and show how these adjoint systems can be used to perform geometric adjoint sensitivity analysis for optimization problems on Lie groups. Finally, we conclude with two numerical examples to show how adjoint sensitivity analysis can be used to solve initial-value optimization problems and optimal control problems on Lie groups.
Model fusion is becoming a crucial component in the context of model-as-a-service scenarios, enabling the delivery of high-quality model services to local users. However, this approach introduces privacy risks and imposes certain limitations on its applications. Ensuring secure model exchange and knowledge fusion among users becomes a significant challenge in this setting. To tackle this issue, we propose PrivFusion, a novel architecture that preserves privacy while facilitating model fusion under the constraints of local differential privacy. PrivFusion leverages a graph-based structure, enabling the fusion of models from multiple parties without necessitating retraining. By employing randomized mechanisms, PrivFusion ensures privacy guarantees throughout the fusion process. To enhance model privacy, our approach incorporates a hybrid local differentially private mechanism and decentralized federated graph matching, effectively protecting both activation values and weights. Additionally, we introduce a perturbation filter adapter to alleviate the impact of randomized noise, thereby preserving the utility of the fused model. Through extensive experiments conducted on diverse image datasets and real-world healthcare applications, we provide empirical evidence showcasing the effectiveness of PrivFusion in maintaining model performance while preserving privacy. Our contributions offer valuable insights and practical solutions for secure and collaborative data analysis within the domain of privacy-preserving model fusion.
The existence of representative datasets is a prerequisite of many successful artificial intelligence and machine learning models. However, the subsequent application of these models often involves scenarios that are inadequately represented in the data used for training. The reasons for this are manifold and range from time and cost constraints to ethical considerations. As a consequence, the reliable use of these models, especially in safety-critical applications, is a huge challenge. Leveraging additional, already existing sources of knowledge is key to overcome the limitations of purely data-driven approaches, and eventually to increase the generalization capability of these models. Furthermore, predictions that conform with knowledge are crucial for making trustworthy and safe decisions even in underrepresented scenarios. This work provides an overview of existing techniques and methods in the literature that combine data-based models with existing knowledge. The identified approaches are structured according to the categories integration, extraction and conformity. Special attention is given to applications in the field of autonomous driving.
Deep neural networks (DNNs) have been found to be vulnerable to adversarial examples resulting from adding small-magnitude perturbations to inputs. Such adversarial examples can mislead DNNs to produce adversary-selected results. Different attack strategies have been proposed to generate adversarial examples, but how to produce them with high perceptual quality and more efficiently requires more research efforts. In this paper, we propose AdvGAN to generate adversarial examples with generative adversarial networks (GANs), which can learn and approximate the distribution of original instances. For AdvGAN, once the generator is trained, it can generate adversarial perturbations efficiently for any instance, so as to potentially accelerate adversarial training as defenses. We apply AdvGAN in both semi-whitebox and black-box attack settings. In semi-whitebox attacks, there is no need to access the original target model after the generator is trained, in contrast to traditional white-box attacks. In black-box attacks, we dynamically train a distilled model for the black-box model and optimize the generator accordingly. Adversarial examples generated by AdvGAN on different target models have high attack success rate under state-of-the-art defenses compared to other attacks. Our attack has placed the first with 92.76% accuracy on a public MNIST black-box attack challenge.