Reliable localization is an essential capability for marine robots navigating in GPS-denied environments. SLAM, commonly used to mitigate dead reckoning errors, still fails in feature-sparse environments or with limited-range sensors. Pose estimation can be improved by incorporating the uncertainty prediction of future poses into the planning process and choosing actions that reduce uncertainty. However, performing belief propagation is computationally costly, especially when operating in large-scale environments. This work proposes a computationally efficient planning under uncertainty frame-work suitable for large-scale, feature-sparse environments. Our strategy leverages SLAM graph and occupancy map data obtained from a prior exploration phase to create a virtual map, describing the uncertainty of each map cell using a multivariate Gaussian. The virtual map is then used as a cost map in the planning phase, and performing belief propagation at each step is avoided. A receding horizon planning strategy is implemented, managing a goal-reaching and uncertainty-reduction tradeoff. Simulation experiments in a realistic underwater environment validate this approach. Experimental comparisons against a full belief propagation approach and a standard shortest-distance approach are conducted.
Graphs are important data representations for describing objects and their relationships, which appear in a wide diversity of real-world scenarios. As one of a critical problem in this area, graph generation considers learning the distributions of given graphs and generating more novel graphs. Owing to their wide range of applications, generative models for graphs, which have a rich history, however, are traditionally hand-crafted and only capable of modeling a few statistical properties of graphs. Recent advances in deep generative models for graph generation is an important step towards improving the fidelity of generated graphs and paves the way for new kinds of applications. This article provides an extensive overview of the literature in the field of deep generative models for graph generation. Firstly, the formal definition of deep generative models for the graph generation and the preliminary knowledge are provided. Secondly, taxonomies of deep generative models for both unconditional and conditional graph generation are proposed respectively; the existing works of each are compared and analyzed. After that, an overview of the evaluation metrics in this specific domain is provided. Finally, the applications that deep graph generation enables are summarized and five promising future research directions are highlighted.
Hyperproperties are commonly used in computer security to define information-flow policies and other requirements that reason about the relationship between multiple computations. In this paper, we study a novel class of hyperproperties where the individual computation paths are chosen by the strategic choices of a coalition of agents in a multi-agent system. We introduce HyperATL*, an extension of computation tree logic with path variables and strategy quantifiers. Our logic can express strategic hyperproperties, such as that the scheduler in a concurrent system has a strategy to avoid information leakage. HyperATL* is particularly useful to specify asynchronous hyperproperties, i.e., hyperproperties where the speed of the execution on the different computation paths depends on the choices of the scheduler. Unlike other recent logics for the specification of asynchronous hyperproperties, our logic is the first to admit decidable model checking for the full logic. We present a model checking algorithm for HyperATL* based on alternating automata, and show that our algorithm is asymptotically optimal by providing a matching lower bound. We have implemented a prototype model checker for a fragment of HyperATL*, able to check various security properties on small programs.
We describe ACE0, a lightweight platform for evaluating the suitability and viability of AI methods for behaviour discovery in multiagent simulations. Specifically, ACE0 was designed to explore AI methods for multi-agent simulations used in operations research studies related to new technologies such as autonomous aircraft. Simulation environments used in production are often high-fidelity, complex, require significant domain knowledge and as a result have high R&D costs. Minimal and lightweight simulation environments can help researchers and engineers evaluate the viability of new AI technologies for behaviour discovery in a more agile and potentially cost effective manner. In this paper we describe the motivation for the development of ACE0.We provide a technical overview of the system architecture, describe a case study of behaviour discovery in the aerospace domain, and provide a qualitative evaluation of the system. The evaluation includes a brief description of collaborative research projects with academic partners, exploring different AI behaviour discovery methods.
Federated Learning (FL) is a decentralized machine-learning paradigm, in which a global server iteratively averages the model parameters of local users without accessing their data. User heterogeneity has imposed significant challenges to FL, which can incur drifted global models that are slow to converge. Knowledge Distillation has recently emerged to tackle this issue, by refining the server model using aggregated knowledge from heterogeneous users, other than directly averaging their model parameters. This approach, however, depends on a proxy dataset, making it impractical unless such a prerequisite is satisfied. Moreover, the ensemble knowledge is not fully utilized to guide local model learning, which may in turn affect the quality of the aggregated model. Inspired by the prior art, we propose a data-free knowledge distillation} approach to address heterogeneous FL, where the server learns a lightweight generator to ensemble user information in a data-free manner, which is then broadcasted to users, regulating local training using the learned knowledge as an inductive bias. Empirical studies powered by theoretical implications show that, our approach facilitates FL with better generalization performance using fewer communication rounds, compared with the state-of-the-art.
Vast amount of data generated from networks of sensors, wearables, and the Internet of Things (IoT) devices underscores the need for advanced modeling techniques that leverage the spatio-temporal structure of decentralized data due to the need for edge computation and licensing (data access) issues. While federated learning (FL) has emerged as a framework for model training without requiring direct data sharing and exchange, effectively modeling the complex spatio-temporal dependencies to improve forecasting capabilities still remains an open problem. On the other hand, state-of-the-art spatio-temporal forecasting models assume unfettered access to the data, neglecting constraints on data sharing. To bridge this gap, we propose a federated spatio-temporal model -- Cross-Node Federated Graph Neural Network (CNFGNN) -- which explicitly encodes the underlying graph structure using graph neural network (GNN)-based architecture under the constraint of cross-node federated learning, which requires that data in a network of nodes is generated locally on each node and remains decentralized. CNFGNN operates by disentangling the temporal dynamics modeling on devices and spatial dynamics on the server, utilizing alternating optimization to reduce the communication cost, facilitating computations on the edge devices. Experiments on the traffic flow forecasting task show that CNFGNN achieves the best forecasting performance in both transductive and inductive learning settings with no extra computation cost on edge devices, while incurring modest communication cost.
We present a large-scale study on unsupervised spatiotemporal representation learning from videos. With a unified perspective on four recent image-based frameworks, we study a simple objective that can easily generalize all these methods to space-time. Our objective encourages temporally-persistent features in the same video, and in spite of its simplicity, it works surprisingly well across: (i) different unsupervised frameworks, (ii) pre-training datasets, (iii) downstream datasets, and (iv) backbone architectures. We draw a series of intriguing observations from this study, e.g., we discover that encouraging long-spanned persistency can be effective even if the timespan is 60 seconds. In addition to state-of-the-art results in multiple benchmarks, we report a few promising cases in which unsupervised pre-training can outperform its supervised counterpart. Code is made available at //github.com/facebookresearch/SlowFast
Approaches based on deep neural networks have achieved striking performance when testing data and training data share similar distribution, but can significantly fail otherwise. Therefore, eliminating the impact of distribution shifts between training and testing data is crucial for building performance-promising deep models. Conventional methods assume either the known heterogeneity of training data (e.g. domain labels) or the approximately equal capacities of different domains. In this paper, we consider a more challenging case where neither of the above assumptions holds. We propose to address this problem by removing the dependencies between features via learning weights for training samples, which helps deep models get rid of spurious correlations and, in turn, concentrate more on the true connection between discriminative features and labels. Extensive experiments clearly demonstrate the effectiveness of our method on multiple distribution generalization benchmarks compared with state-of-the-art counterparts. Through extensive experiments on distribution generalization benchmarks including PACS, VLCS, MNIST-M, and NICO, we show the effectiveness of our method compared with state-of-the-art counterparts.
Knowledge graph embedding, which aims to represent entities and relations as low dimensional vectors (or matrices, tensors, etc.), has been shown to be a powerful technique for predicting missing links in knowledge graphs. Existing knowledge graph embedding models mainly focus on modeling relation patterns such as symmetry/antisymmetry, inversion, and composition. However, many existing approaches fail to model semantic hierarchies, which are common in real-world applications. To address this challenge, we propose a novel knowledge graph embedding model---namely, Hierarchy-Aware Knowledge Graph Embedding (HAKE)---which maps entities into the polar coordinate system. HAKE is inspired by the fact that concentric circles in the polar coordinate system can naturally reflect the hierarchy. Specifically, the radial coordinate aims to model entities at different levels of the hierarchy, and entities with smaller radii are expected to be at higher levels; the angular coordinate aims to distinguish entities at the same level of the hierarchy, and these entities are expected to have roughly the same radii but different angles. Experiments demonstrate that HAKE can effectively model the semantic hierarchies in knowledge graphs, and significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets for the link prediction task.
Multi-relation Question Answering is a challenging task, due to the requirement of elaborated analysis on questions and reasoning over multiple fact triples in knowledge base. In this paper, we present a novel model called Interpretable Reasoning Network that employs an interpretable, hop-by-hop reasoning process for question answering. The model dynamically decides which part of an input question should be analyzed at each hop; predicts a relation that corresponds to the current parsed results; utilizes the predicted relation to update the question representation and the state of the reasoning process; and then drives the next-hop reasoning. Experiments show that our model yields state-of-the-art results on two datasets. More interestingly, the model can offer traceable and observable intermediate predictions for reasoning analysis and failure diagnosis, thereby allowing manual manipulation in predicting the final answer.
Text in natural images is of arbitrary orientations, requiring detection in terms of oriented bounding boxes. Normally, a multi-oriented text detector often involves two key tasks: 1) text presence detection, which is a classification problem disregarding text orientation; 2) oriented bounding box regression, which concerns about text orientation. Previous methods rely on shared features for both tasks, resulting in degraded performance due to the incompatibility of the two tasks. To address this issue, we propose to perform classification and regression on features of different characteristics, extracted by two network branches of different designs. Concretely, the regression branch extracts rotation-sensitive features by actively rotating the convolutional filters, while the classification branch extracts rotation-invariant features by pooling the rotation-sensitive features. The proposed method named Rotation-sensitive Regression Detector (RRD) achieves state-of-the-art performance on three oriented scene text benchmark datasets, including ICDAR 2015, MSRA-TD500, RCTW-17 and COCO-Text. Furthermore, RRD achieves a significant improvement on a ship collection dataset, demonstrating its generality on oriented object detection.