Traditionally, extracting patterns from eye movement data relies on statistics of different macro-events such as fixations and saccades. This requires an additional preprocessing step to separate the eye movement subtypes, often with a number of parameters on which the classification results depend. Besides that, definitions of such macro events are formulated in different ways by different researchers. We propose an application of a new class of features to the quantitative analysis of personal eye movement trajectories structure. This new class of features based on algebraic topology allows extracting patterns from different modalities of gaze such as time series of coordinates and amplitudes, heatmaps, and point clouds in a unified way at all scales from micro to macro. We experimentally demonstrate the competitiveness of the new class of features with the traditional ones and their significant synergy while being used together for the person authentication task on the recently published eye movement trajectories dataset.
Reinforcement learning (RL) and trajectory optimization (TO) present strong complementary advantages. On one hand, RL approaches are able to learn global control policies directly from data, but generally require large sample sizes to properly converge towards feasible policies. On the other hand, TO methods are able to exploit gradient-based information extracted from simulators to quickly converge towards a locally optimal control trajectory which is only valid within the vicinity of the solution. Over the past decade, several approaches have aimed to adequately combine the two classes of methods in order to obtain the best of both worlds. Following on from this line of research, we propose several improvements on top of these approaches to learn global control policies quicker, notably by leveraging sensitivity information stemming from TO methods via Sobolev learning, and augmented Lagrangian techniques to enforce the consensus between TO and policy learning. We evaluate the benefits of these improvements on various classical tasks in robotics through comparison with existing approaches in the literature.
Upper limb movement classification, which maps input signals to the target activities, is a key building block in the control of rehabilitative robotics. Classifiers are trained for the rehabilitative system to comprehend the desires of the patient whose upper limbs do not function properly. Electromyography (EMG) signals and Electroencephalography (EEG) signals are used widely for upper limb movement classification. By analysing the classification results of the real-time EEG and EMG signals, the system can understand the intention of the user and predict the events that one would like to carry out. Accordingly, it will provide external help to the user. However, the noise in the real-time EEG and EMG data collection process contaminates the effectiveness of the data, which undermines classification performance. Moreover, not all patients process strong EMG signals due to muscle damage and neuromuscular disorder. To address these issues, this paper explores different feature extraction techniques and machine learning and deep learning models for EEG and EMG signals classification and proposes a novel decision-level multisensor fusion technique to integrate EEG signals with EMG signals. This system retrieves effective information from both sources to understand and predict the desire of the user, and thus aid. By testing out the proposed technique on a publicly available WAY-EEG-GAL dataset, which contains EEG and EMG signals that were recorded simultaneously, we manage to conclude the feasibility and effectiveness of the novel system.
LiDAR sensors are a powerful tool for robot simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) in unknown environments, but the raw point clouds they produce are dense, computationally expensive to store, and unsuited for direct use by downstream autonomy tasks, such as motion planning. For integration with motion planning, it is desirable for SLAM pipelines to generate lightweight geometric map representations. Such representations are also particularly well-suited for man-made environments, which can often be viewed as a so-called "Manhattan world" built on a Cartesian grid. In this work we present a 3D LiDAR SLAM algorithm for Manhattan world environments which extracts planar features from point clouds to achieve lightweight, real-time localization and mapping. Our approach generates plane-based maps which occupy significantly less memory than their point cloud equivalents, and are suited towards fast collision checking for motion planning. By leveraging the Manhattan world assumption, we target extraction of orthogonal planes to generate maps which are more structured and organized than those of existing plane-based LiDAR SLAM approaches. We demonstrate our approach in the high-fidelity AirSim simulator and in real-world experiments with a ground rover equipped with a Velodyne LiDAR. For both cases, we are able to generate high quality maps and trajectory estimates at a rate matching the sensor rate of 10 Hz.
Detecting dangerous traffic agents in videos captured by vehicle-mounted dashboard cameras (dashcams) is essential to facilitate safe navigation in a complex environment. Accident-related videos are just a minor portion of the driving video big data, and the transient pre-accident processes are highly dynamic and complex. Besides, risky and non-risky traffic agents can be similar in their appearance. These make risky object localization in the driving video particularly challenging. To this end, this paper proposes an attention-guided multistream feature fusion network (AM-Net) to localize dangerous traffic agents from dashcam videos. Two Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) networks use object bounding box and optical flow features extracted from consecutive video frames to capture spatio-temporal cues for distinguishing dangerous traffic agents. An attention module coupled with the GRUs learns to attend to the traffic agents relevant to an accident. Fusing the two streams of features, AM-Net predicts the riskiness scores of traffic agents in the video. In supporting this study, the paper also introduces a benchmark dataset called Risky Object Localization (ROL). The dataset contains spatial, temporal, and categorical annotations with the accident, object, and scene-level attributes. The proposed AM-Net achieves a promising performance of 85.73% AUC on the ROL dataset. Meanwhile, the AM-Net outperforms current state-of-the-art for video anomaly detection by 6.3% AUC on the DoTA dataset. A thorough ablation study further reveals AM-Net's merits by evaluating the contributions of its different components.
The robustness of signal temporal logic not only assesses whether a signal adheres to a specification but also provides a measure of how much a formula is fulfilled or violated. The calculation of robustness is based on evaluating the robustness of underlying predicates. However, the robustness of predicates is usually defined in a model-free way, i.e., without including the system dynamics. Moreover, it is often nontrivial to define the robustness of complicated predicates precisely. To address these issues, we propose a notion of model predictive robustness, which provides a more systematic way of evaluating robustness compared to previous approaches by considering model-based predictions. In particular, we use Gaussian process regression to learn the robustness based on precomputed predictions so that robustness values can be efficiently computed online. We evaluate our approach for the use case of autonomous driving with predicates used in formalized traffic rules on a recorded dataset, which highlights the advantage of our approach compared to traditional approaches in terms of expressiveness. By incorporating our robustness definitions into a trajectory planner, autonomous vehicles obey traffic rules more robustly than human drivers in the dataset.
Robustly classifying ground infrastructure such as roads and street crossings is an essential task for mobile robots operating alongside pedestrians. While many semantic segmentation datasets are available for autonomous vehicles, models trained on such datasets exhibit a large domain gap when deployed on robots operating in pedestrian spaces. Manually annotating images recorded from pedestrian viewpoints is both expensive and time-consuming. To overcome this challenge, we propose TrackletMapper, a framework for annotating ground surface types such as sidewalks, roads, and street crossings from object tracklets without requiring human-annotated data. To this end, we project the robot ego-trajectory and the paths of other traffic participants into the ego-view camera images, creating sparse semantic annotations for multiple types of ground surfaces from which a ground segmentation model can be trained. We further show that the model can be self-distilled for additional performance benefits by aggregating a ground surface map and projecting it into the camera images, creating a denser set of training annotations compared to the sparse tracklet annotations. We qualitatively and quantitatively attest our findings on a novel large-scale dataset for mobile robots operating in pedestrian areas. Code and dataset will be made available at //trackletmapper.cs.uni-freiburg.de.
Training models on data obtained from randomized experiments is ideal for making good decisions. However, randomized experiments are often time-consuming, expensive, risky, infeasible or unethical to perform, leaving decision makers little choice but to rely on observational data collected under historical policies when training models. This opens questions regarding not only which decision-making policies would perform best in practice, but also regarding the impact of different data collection protocols on the performance of various policies trained on the data, or the robustness of policy performance with respect to changes in problem characteristics such as action- or reward- specific delays in observing outcomes. We aim to answer such questions for the problem of optimizing sales channel allocations at LinkedIn, where sales accounts (leads) need to be allocated to one of three channels, with the goal of maximizing the number of successful conversions over a period of time. A key problem feature constitutes the presence of stochastic delays in observing allocation outcomes, whose distribution is both channel- and outcome- dependent. We built a discrete-time simulation that can handle our problem features and used it to evaluate: a) a historical rule-based policy; b) a supervised machine learning policy (XGBoost); and c) multi-armed bandit (MAB) policies, under different scenarios involving: i) data collection used for training (observational vs randomized); ii) lead conversion scenarios; iii) delay distributions. Our simulation results indicate that LinUCB, a simple MAB policy, consistently outperforms the other policies, achieving a 18-47% lift relative to a rule-based policy
We show that under minimal assumptions on a random vector $X\in\mathbb{R}^d$, and with high probability, given $m$ independent copies of $X$, the coordinate distribution of each vector $(\langle X_i,\theta \rangle)_{i=1}^m$ is dictated by the distribution of the true marginal $\langle X,\theta \rangle$. Formally, we show that with high probability, \[\sup_{\theta \in S^{d-1}} \left( \frac{1}{m}\sum_{i=1}^m \left|\langle X_i,\theta \rangle^\sharp - \lambda^\theta_i \right|^2 \right)^{1/2} \leq c \left( \frac{d}{m} \right)^{1/4},\] where $\lambda^{\theta}_i = m\int_{(\frac{i-1}{m}, \frac{i}{m}]} F_{ \langle X,\theta \rangle }^{-1}(u)^2 \,du$ and $a^\sharp$ denotes the monotone non-decreasing rearrangement of $a$. The proof follows from the optimal estimate on the worst Wasserstein distance between a marginal of $X$ and its empirical counterpart, $\frac{1}{m} \sum_{i=1}^m \delta_{\langle X_i, \theta \rangle}$. We then use the accurate information on the structures of the vectors $(\langle X_i,\theta \rangle)_{i=1}^m$ to construct the first non-gaussian ensemble that yields the optimal estimate in the Dvoretzky-Milman Theorem: the ensemble exhibits almost Euclidean sections in arbitrary normed spaces of the same dimension as the gaussian embedding -- despite being very far from gaussian (in fact, it happens to be heavy-tailed).
Vision-based navigation requires processing complex information to make task-orientated decisions. Applications include autonomous robots, self-driving cars, and assistive vision for humans. One of the key elements in the process is the extraction and selection of relevant features in pixel space upon which to base action choices, for which Machine Learning techniques are well suited. However, Deep Reinforcement Learning agents trained in simulation often exhibit unsatisfactory results when deployed in the real-world due to perceptual differences known as the $\textit{reality gap}$. An approach that is yet to be explored to bridge this gap is self-attention. In this paper we (1) perform a systematic exploration of the hyperparameter space for self-attention based navigation of 3D environments and qualitatively appraise behaviour observed from different hyperparameter sets, including their ability to generalise; (2) present strategies to improve the agents' generalisation abilities and navigation behaviour; and (3) show how models trained in simulation are capable of processing real world images meaningfully in real time. To our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of a self-attention based agent successfully trained in navigating a 3D action space, using less than 4000 parameters.
Recent years have witnessed the enormous success of low-dimensional vector space representations of knowledge graphs to predict missing facts or find erroneous ones. Currently, however, it is not yet well-understood how ontological knowledge, e.g. given as a set of (existential) rules, can be embedded in a principled way. To address this shortcoming, in this paper we introduce a framework based on convex regions, which can faithfully incorporate ontological knowledge into the vector space embedding. Our technical contribution is two-fold. First, we show that some of the most popular existing embedding approaches are not capable of modelling even very simple types of rules. Second, we show that our framework can represent ontologies that are expressed using so-called quasi-chained existential rules in an exact way, such that any set of facts which is induced using that vector space embedding is logically consistent and deductively closed with respect to the input ontology.