Robotic Information Gathering (RIG) is a foundational research topic that answers how a robot (team) collects informative data to efficiently build an accurate model of an unknown target function under robot embodiment constraints. RIG has many applications, including but not limited to autonomous exploration and mapping, 3D reconstruction or inspection, search and rescue, and environmental monitoring. A RIG system relies on a probabilistic model's prediction uncertainty to identify critical areas for informative data collection. Gaussian Processes (GPs) with stationary kernels have been widely adopted for spatial modeling. However, real-world spatial data is typically non-stationary -- different locations do not have the same degree of variability. As a result, the prediction uncertainty does not accurately reveal prediction error, limiting the success of RIG algorithms. We propose a family of non-stationary kernels named Attentive Kernel (AK), which is simple, robust, and can extend any existing kernel to a non-stationary one. We evaluate the new kernel in elevation mapping tasks, where AK provides better accuracy and uncertainty quantification over the commonly used stationary kernels and the leading non-stationary kernels. The improved uncertainty quantification guides the downstream informative planner to collect more valuable data around the high-error area, further increasing prediction accuracy. A field experiment demonstrates that the proposed method can guide an Autonomous Surface Vehicle (ASV) to prioritize data collection in locations with significant spatial variations, enabling the model to characterize salient environmental features.
One-bit quantization with time-varying sampling thresholds (also known as random dithering) has recently found significant utilization potential in statistical signal processing applications due to its relatively low power consumption and low implementation cost. In addition to such advantages, an attractive feature of one-bit analog-to-digital converters (ADCs) is their superior sampling rates as compared to their conventional multi-bit counterparts. This characteristic endows one-bit signal processing frameworks with what one may refer to as sample abundance. We show that sample abundance plays a pivotal role in many signal recovery and optimization problems that are formulated as (possibly non-convex) quadratic programs with linear feasibility constraints. Of particular interest to our work are low-rank matrix recovery and compressed sensing applications that take advantage of one-bit quantization. We demonstrate that the sample abundance paradigm allows for the transformation of such problems to merely linear feasibility problems by forming large-scale overdetermined linear systems -- thus removing the need for handling costly optimization constraints and objectives. To make the proposed computational cost savings achievable, we offer enhanced randomized Kaczmarz algorithms to solve these highly overdetermined feasibility problems and provide theoretical guarantees in terms of their convergence, sample size requirements, and overall performance. Several numerical results are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodologies.
The recent increase in data availability and reliability has led to a surge in the development of learning-based model predictive control (MPC) frameworks for robot systems. Despite attaining substantial performance improvements over their non-learning counterparts, many of these frameworks rely on an offline learning procedure to synthesize a dynamics model. This implies that uncertainties encountered by the robot during deployment are not accounted for in the learning process. On the other hand, learning-based MPC methods that learn dynamics models online are computationally expensive and often require a significant amount of data. To alleviate these shortcomings, we propose a novel learning-enhanced MPC framework that incorporates components from $\mathcal{L}_1$ adaptive control into learning-based MPC. This integration enables the accurate compensation of both matched and unmatched uncertainties in a sample-efficient way, enhancing the control performance during deployment. In our proposed framework, we present two variants and apply them to the control of a quadrotor system. Through simulations and physical experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed framework not only allows the synthesis of an accurate dynamics model on-the-fly, but also significantly improves the closed-loop control performance under a wide range of spatio-temporal uncertainties.
Sampling from Gibbs distributions $p(x) \propto \exp(-V(x)/\varepsilon)$ and computing their log-partition function are fundamental tasks in statistics, machine learning, and statistical physics. However, while efficient algorithms are known for convex potentials $V$, the situation is much more difficult in the non-convex case, where algorithms necessarily suffer from the curse of dimensionality in the worst case. For optimization, which can be seen as a low-temperature limit of sampling, it is known that smooth functions $V$ allow faster convergence rates. Specifically, for $m$-times differentiable functions in $d$ dimensions, the optimal rate for algorithms with $n$ function evaluations is known to be $O(n^{-m/d})$, where the constant can potentially depend on $m, d$ and the function to be optimized. Hence, the curse of dimensionality can be alleviated for smooth functions at least in terms of the convergence rate. Recently, it has been shown that similarly fast rates can also be achieved with polynomial runtime $O(n^{3.5})$, where the exponent $3.5$ is independent of $m$ or $d$. Hence, it is natural to ask whether similar rates for sampling and log-partition computation are possible, and whether they can be realized in polynomial time with an exponent independent of $m$ and $d$. We show that the optimal rates for sampling and log-partition computation are sometimes equal and sometimes faster than for optimization. We then analyze various polynomial-time sampling algorithms, including an extension of a recent promising optimization approach, and find that they sometimes exhibit interesting behavior but no near-optimal rates. Our results also give further insights on the relation between sampling, log-partition, and optimization problems.
Shape completion, i.e., predicting the complete geometry of an object from a partial observation, is highly relevant for several downstream tasks, most notably robotic manipulation. When basing planning or prediction of real grasps on object shape reconstruction, an indication of severe geometric uncertainty is indispensable. In particular, there can be an irreducible uncertainty in extended regions about the presence of entire object parts when given ambiguous object views. To treat this important case, we propose two novel methods for predicting such uncertain regions as straightforward extensions of any method for predicting local spatial occupancy, one through postprocessing occupancy scores, the other through direct prediction of an uncertainty indicator. We compare these methods together with two known approaches to probabilistic shape completion. Moreover, we generate a dataset, derived from ShapeNet, of realistically rendered depth images of object views with ground-truth annotations for the uncertain regions. We train on this dataset and test each method in shape completion and prediction of uncertain regions for known and novel object instances and on synthetic and real data. While direct uncertainty prediction is by far the most accurate in the segmentation of uncertain regions, both novel methods outperform the two baselines in shape completion and uncertain region prediction, and avoiding the predicted uncertain regions increases the quality of grasps for all tested methods. Web: //github.com/DLR-RM/shape-completion
This article proposes a novel framework that utilizes an over-the-air Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) to learn Metaverse users' expectations. By interpreting users' brain activities, our framework can help to optimize physical resources and enhance Quality-of-Experience (QoE) for users. To achieve this, we leverage a Wireless Edge Server (WES) to process electroencephalography (EEG) signals via uplink wireless channels, thus eliminating the computational burden for Metaverse users' devices. As a result, the WES can learn human behaviors, adapt system configurations, and allocate radio resources to tailor personalized user settings. Despite the potential of BCI, the inherent noisy wireless channels and uncertainty of the EEG signals make the related resource allocation and learning problems especially challenging. We formulate the joint learning and resource allocation problem as mixed integer programming problem. Our solution involves two algorithms that are a hybrid learning algorithm and a meta-learning algorithm. The hybrid learning algorithm can effectively find the solution for the formulated problem. Specifically, the meta-learning algorithm can further exploit the neurodiversity of the EEG signals across multiple users, leading to higher classification accuracy. Extensive simulation results with real-world BCI datasets show the effectiveness of our framework with low latency and high EEG signal classification accuracy.
In recent years, there has been a growing interest in understanding complex microstructures and their effect on macroscopic properties. In general, it is difficult to derive an effective constitutive law for such microstructures with reasonable accuracy and meaningful parameters. One numerical approach to bridge the scales is computational homogenization, in which a microscopic problem is solved at every macroscopic point, essentially replacing the effective constitutive model. Such approaches are, however, computationally expensive and typically infeasible in multi-query contexts such as optimization and material design. To render these analyses tractable, surrogate models that can accurately approximate and accelerate the microscopic problem over a large design space of shapes, material and loading parameters are required. In previous works, such models were constructed in a data-driven manner using methods such as Neural Networks (NN) or Gaussian Process Regression (GPR). However, these approaches currently suffer from issues, such as need for large amounts of training data, lack of physics, and considerable extrapolation errors. In this work, we develop a reduced order model based on Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD), Empirical Cubature Method (ECM) and a geometrical transformation method with the following key features: (i) large shape variations of the microstructure are captured, (ii) only relatively small amounts of training data are necessary, and (iii) highly non-linear history-dependent behaviors are treated. The proposed framework is tested and examined in two numerical examples, involving two scales and large geometrical variations. In both cases, high speed-ups and accuracies are achieved while observing good extrapolation behavior.
A key challenge in off-road navigation is that even visually similar terrains or ones from the same semantic class may have substantially different traction properties. Existing work typically assumes no wheel slip or uses the expected traction for motion planning, where the predicted trajectories provide a poor indication of the actual performance if the terrain traction has high uncertainty. In contrast, this work proposes to analyze terrain traversability with the empirical distribution of traction parameters in unicycle dynamics, which can be learned by a neural network in a self-supervised fashion. The probabilistic traction model leads to two risk-aware cost formulations that account for the worst-case expected cost and traction. To help the learned model generalize to unseen environment, terrains with features that lead to unreliable predictions are detected via a density estimator fit to the trained network's latent space and avoided via auxiliary penalties during planning. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms existing work that assumes no slip or uses the expected traction in both navigation success rate and completion time. Furthermore, avoiding terrains with low density-based confidence score achieves up to 30% improvement in success rate when the learned traction model is used in a novel environment.
In a decentralized machine learning system, data is typically partitioned among multiple devices or nodes, each of which trains a local model using its own data. These local models are then shared and combined to create a global model that can make accurate predictions on new data. In this paper, we start exploring the role of the network topology connecting nodes on the performance of a Machine Learning model trained through direct collaboration between nodes. We investigate how different types of topologies impact the "spreading of knowledge", i.e., the ability of nodes to incorporate in their local model the knowledge derived by learning patterns in data available in other nodes across the networks. Specifically, we highlight the different roles in this process of more or less connected nodes (hubs and leaves), as well as that of macroscopic network properties (primarily, degree distribution and modularity). Among others, we show that, while it is known that even weak connectivity among network components is sufficient for information spread, it may not be sufficient for knowledge spread. More intuitively, we also find that hubs have a more significant role than leaves in spreading knowledge, although this manifests itself not only for heavy-tailed distributions but also when "hubs" have only moderately more connections than leaves. Finally, we show that tightly knit communities severely hinder knowledge spread.
Deep reinforcement learning algorithms can perform poorly in real-world tasks due to the discrepancy between source and target environments. This discrepancy is commonly viewed as the disturbance in transition dynamics. Many existing algorithms learn robust policies by modeling the disturbance and applying it to source environments during training, which usually requires prior knowledge about the disturbance and control of simulators. However, these algorithms can fail in scenarios where the disturbance from target environments is unknown or is intractable to model in simulators. To tackle this problem, we propose a novel model-free actor-critic algorithm -- namely, state-conservative policy optimization (SCPO) -- to learn robust policies without modeling the disturbance in advance. Specifically, SCPO reduces the disturbance in transition dynamics to that in state space and then approximates it by a simple gradient-based regularizer. The appealing features of SCPO include that it is simple to implement and does not require additional knowledge about the disturbance or specially designed simulators. Experiments in several robot control tasks demonstrate that SCPO learns robust policies against the disturbance in transition dynamics.
Unsupervised domain adaptation has recently emerged as an effective paradigm for generalizing deep neural networks to new target domains. However, there is still enormous potential to be tapped to reach the fully supervised performance. In this paper, we present a novel active learning strategy to assist knowledge transfer in the target domain, dubbed active domain adaptation. We start from an observation that energy-based models exhibit free energy biases when training (source) and test (target) data come from different distributions. Inspired by this inherent mechanism, we empirically reveal that a simple yet efficient energy-based sampling strategy sheds light on selecting the most valuable target samples than existing approaches requiring particular architectures or computation of the distances. Our algorithm, Energy-based Active Domain Adaptation (EADA), queries groups of targe data that incorporate both domain characteristic and instance uncertainty into every selection round. Meanwhile, by aligning the free energy of target data compact around the source domain via a regularization term, domain gap can be implicitly diminished. Through extensive experiments, we show that EADA surpasses state-of-the-art methods on well-known challenging benchmarks with substantial improvements, making it a useful option in the open world. Code is available at //github.com/BIT-DA/EADA.