In this paper, we present a novel formulation to model the effects of a locked differential on the lateral dynamics of an autonomous open-wheel racecar. The model is used in a Model Predictive Controller in which we included a micro-steps discretization approach to accurately linearize the dynamics and produce a prediction suitable for real-time implementation. The stability analysis of the model is presented, as well as a brief description of the overall planning and control scheme which includes an offline trajectory generation pipeline, an online local speed profile planner, and a low-level longitudinal controller. An improvement of the lateral path tracking is demonstrated in preliminary experimental results that have been produced on a Dallara AV-21 during the first Indy Autonomous Challenge event on the Monza F1 racetrack. Final adjustments and tuning have been performed in a high-fidelity simulator demonstrating the effectiveness of the solution when performing close to the tire limits.
In this paper, we propose a methodology for the analysis of questionnaire data along with its application on discovering insights from investor data motivated by a day trading competition. The questionnaire includes categorical questions, which are reduced to binary questions, 'yes' or 'no'. The methodology reduces dimensionality by grouping questions and participants with similar responses using clustering analysis. Rule discovery was performed by using a conversion rate metric. Innovative visual representations were proposed to validate the cluster analysis and the relation discovery between questions. When crossing with financial data, additional insights were revealed related to the recognized clusters.
Transformers generalize to novel compositions of structures and entities after being trained on a complex dataset, but easily overfit on datasets of insufficient complexity. We observe that when the training set is sufficiently complex, the model encodes sentences that have a common syntactic structure using a systematic attention pattern. Inspired by this observation, we propose SQ-Transformer (Structurally Quantized) that explicitly encourages systematicity in the embeddings and attention layers, even with a training set of low complexity. At the embedding level, we introduce Structure-oriented Vector Quantization (SoVQ) to cluster word embeddings into several classes of structurally equivalent entities. At the attention level, we devise the Systematic Attention Layer (SAL) and an alternative, Systematically Regularized Layer (SRL) that operate on the quantized word embeddings so that sentences of the same structure are encoded with invariant or similar attention patterns. Empirically, we show that SQ-Transformer achieves stronger compositional generalization than the vanilla Transformer on multiple low-complexity semantic parsing and machine translation datasets. In our analysis, we show that SoVQ indeed learns a syntactically clustered embedding space and SAL/SRL induces generalizable attention patterns, which lead to improved systematicity.
Learning time-series models is useful for many applications, such as simulation and forecasting. In this study, we consider the problem of actively learning time-series models while taking given safety constraints into account. For time-series modeling we employ a Gaussian process with a nonlinear exogenous input structure. The proposed approach generates data appropriate for time series model learning, i.e. input and output trajectories, by dynamically exploring the input space. The approach parametrizes the input trajectory as consecutive trajectory sections, which are determined stepwise given safety requirements and past observations. We analyze the proposed algorithm and evaluate it empirically on a technical application. The results show the effectiveness of our approach in a realistic technical use case.
This paper presents a case study for the application of semiring semantics for fixed-point formulae to the analysis of strategies in B\"uchi games. Semiring semantics generalizes the classical Boolean semantics by permitting multiple truth values from certain semirings. Evaluating the fixed-point formula that defines the winning region in a given game in an appropriate semiring of polynomials provides not only the Boolean information on who wins, but also tells us how they win and which strategies they might use. This is well-understood for reachability games, where the winning region is definable as a least fixed point. The case of B\"uchi games is of special interest, not only due to their practical importance, but also because it is the simplest case where the fixed-point definition involves a genuine alternation of a greatest and a least fixed point. We show that, in a precise sense, semiring semantics provide information about all absorption-dominant strategies -- strategies that win with minimal effort, and we discuss how these relate to positional and the more general persistent strategies. This information enables applications such as game synthesis or determining minimal modifications to the game needed to change its outcome. Lastly, we discuss limitations of our approach and present questions that cannot be immediately answered by semiring semantics.
In this paper, a general framework for linear secure distributed matrix multiplication (SDMM) is introduced. The model allows for a neat treatment of straggling and Byzantine servers via a star product interpretation as well as simplified security proofs. Known properties of star products also immediately yield a lower bound for the recovery threshold as well as an upper bound for the number of colluding workers the system can tolerate. Another bound on the recovery threshold is given by the decodability condition, which generalizes a bound for GASP codes. The framework produces many of the known SDMM schemes as special cases, thereby providing unification for the previous literature on the topic. Furthermore, error behavior specific to SDMM is discussed and interleaved codes are proposed as a suitable means for efficient error correction in the proposed model. Analysis of the error correction capability under natural assumptions about the error distribution is also provided, largely based on well-known results on interleaved codes. Error detection and other error distributions are also discussed.
In this work, we examine a network of agents operating asynchronously, aiming to discover an ideal global model that suits individual local datasets. Our assumption is that each agent independently chooses when to participate throughout the algorithm and the specific subset of its neighbourhood with which it will cooperate at any given moment. When an agent chooses to take part, it undergoes multiple local updates before conveying its outcomes to the sub-sampled neighbourhood. Under this setup, we prove that the resulting asynchronous diffusion strategy is stable in the mean-square error sense and provide performance guarantees specifically for the federated learning setting. We illustrate the findings with numerical simulations.
In this paper, we tackle two challenges in multimodal learning for visual recognition: 1) when missing-modality occurs either during training or testing in real-world situations; and 2) when the computation resources are not available to finetune on heavy transformer models. To this end, we propose to utilize prompt learning and mitigate the above two challenges together. Specifically, our modality-missing-aware prompts can be plugged into multimodal transformers to handle general missing-modality cases, while only requiring less than 1% learnable parameters compared to training the entire model. We further explore the effect of different prompt configurations and analyze the robustness to missing modality. Extensive experiments are conducted to show the effectiveness of our prompt learning framework that improves the performance under various missing-modality cases, while alleviating the requirement of heavy model re-training. Code is available.
We address the task of automatically scoring the competency of candidates based on textual features, from the automatic speech recognition (ASR) transcriptions in the asynchronous video job interview (AVI). The key challenge is how to construct the dependency relation between questions and answers, and conduct the semantic level interaction for each question-answer (QA) pair. However, most of the recent studies in AVI focus on how to represent questions and answers better, but ignore the dependency information and interaction between them, which is critical for QA evaluation. In this work, we propose a Hierarchical Reasoning Graph Neural Network (HRGNN) for the automatic assessment of question-answer pairs. Specifically, we construct a sentence-level relational graph neural network to capture the dependency information of sentences in or between the question and the answer. Based on these graphs, we employ a semantic-level reasoning graph attention network to model the interaction states of the current QA session. Finally, we propose a gated recurrent unit encoder to represent the temporal question-answer pairs for the final prediction. Empirical results conducted on CHNAT (a real-world dataset) validate that our proposed model significantly outperforms text-matching based benchmark models. Ablation studies and experimental results with 10 random seeds also show the effectiveness and stability of our models.
We propose a novel method for automatic reasoning on knowledge graphs based on debate dynamics. The main idea is to frame the task of triple classification as a debate game between two reinforcement learning agents which extract arguments -- paths in the knowledge graph -- with the goal to promote the fact being true (thesis) or the fact being false (antithesis), respectively. Based on these arguments, a binary classifier, called the judge, decides whether the fact is true or false. The two agents can be considered as sparse, adversarial feature generators that present interpretable evidence for either the thesis or the antithesis. In contrast to other black-box methods, the arguments allow users to get an understanding of the decision of the judge. Since the focus of this work is to create an explainable method that maintains a competitive predictive accuracy, we benchmark our method on the triple classification and link prediction task. Thereby, we find that our method outperforms several baselines on the benchmark datasets FB15k-237, WN18RR, and Hetionet. We also conduct a survey and find that the extracted arguments are informative for users.
In this paper, we propose a novel multi-task learning architecture, which incorporates recent advances in attention mechanisms. Our approach, the Multi-Task Attention Network (MTAN), consists of a single shared network containing a global feature pool, together with task-specific soft-attention modules, which are trainable in an end-to-end manner. These attention modules allow for learning of task-specific features from the global pool, whilst simultaneously allowing for features to be shared across different tasks. The architecture can be built upon any feed-forward neural network, is simple to implement, and is parameter efficient. Experiments on the CityScapes dataset show that our method outperforms several baselines in both single-task and multi-task learning, and is also more robust to the various weighting schemes in the multi-task loss function. We further explore the effectiveness of our method through experiments over a range of task complexities, and show how our method scales well with task complexity compared to baselines.