With the unprecedented shift towards automated urban environments in recent years, a new paradigm is required to study pedestrian behaviour. Studying pedestrian behaviour in futuristic scenarios requires modern data sources that consider both the Automated Vehicle (AV) and pedestrian perspectives. Current open datasets on AVs predominantly fail to account for the latter, as they do not include an adequate number of events and associated details that involve pedestrian and vehicle interactions. To address this issue, we propose using Virtual Reality (VR) data as a complementary resource to current datasets, which can be designed to measure pedestrian behaviour under specific conditions. In this research, we focus on the context-aware pedestrian trajectory prediction framework for automated vehicles at mid-block unsignalized crossings. For this purpose, we develop a novel multi-input network of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and fully connected dense layers. In addition to past trajectories, the proposed framework incorporates pedestrian head orientations and distance to the upcoming vehicles as sequential input data. By merging the sequential data with contextual information of the environment, we train a model to predict the future pedestrian trajectory. Our results show that the prediction error and overfitting to the training data are reduced by considering contextual information in the model. To analyze the application of the methods to real AV data, the proposed framework is trained and applied to pedestrian trajectory extracted from an open-access video dataset. Finally, by implementing a game theory-based model interpretability method, we provide detailed insights and propose recommendations to improve the current automated vehicle sensing systems from a pedestrian-oriented point of view.
Stock prices move as piece-wise trending fluctuation rather than a purely random walk. Traditionally, the prediction of future stock movements is based on the historical trading record. Nowadays, with the development of social media, many active participants in the market choose to publicize their strategies, which provides a window to glimpse over the whole market's attitude towards future movements by extracting the semantics behind social media. However, social media contains conflicting information and cannot replace historical records completely. In this work, we propose a multi-modality attention network to reduce conflicts and integrate semantic and numeric features to predict future stock movements comprehensively. Specifically, we first extract semantic information from social media and estimate their credibility based on posters' identity and public reputation. Then we incorporate the semantic from online posts and numeric features from historical records to make the trading strategy. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms previous methods by a significant margin in both prediction accuracy (61.20\%) and trading profits (9.13\%). It demonstrates that our method improves the performance of stock movements prediction and informs future research on multi-modality fusion towards stock prediction.
Over the years, the separate fields of motion planning, mapping, and human trajectory prediction have advanced considerably. However, the literature is still sparse in providing practical frameworks that enable mobile manipulators to perform whole-body movements and account for the predicted motion of moving obstacles. Previous optimisation-based motion planning approaches that use distance fields have suffered from the high computational cost required to update the environment representation. We demonstrate that GPU-accelerated predicted composite distance fields significantly reduce the computation time compared to calculating distance fields from scratch. We integrate this technique with a complete motion planning and perception framework that accounts for the predicted motion of humans in dynamic environments, enabling reactive and pre-emptive motion planning that incorporates predicted motions. To achieve this, we propose and implement a novel human trajectory prediction method that combines intention recognition with trajectory optimisation-based motion planning. We validate our resultant framework on a real-world Toyota Human Support Robot (HSR) using live RGB-D sensor data from the onboard camera. In addition to providing analysis on a publicly available dataset, we release the Oxford Indoor Human Motion (Oxford-IHM) dataset and demonstrate state-of-the-art performance in human trajectory prediction. The Oxford-IHM dataset is a human trajectory prediction dataset in which people walk between regions of interest in an indoor environment. Both static and robot-mounted RGB-D cameras observe the people while tracked with a motion-capture system.
Trajectory prediction is a critical component for autonomous vehicles (AVs) to perform safe planning and navigation. However, few studies have analyzed the adversarial robustness of trajectory prediction or investigated whether the worst-case prediction can still lead to safe planning. To bridge this gap, we study the adversarial robustness of trajectory prediction models by proposing a new adversarial attack that perturbs normal vehicle trajectories to maximize the prediction error. Our experiments on three models and three datasets show that the adversarial prediction increases the prediction error by more than 150%. Our case studies show that if an adversary drives a vehicle close to the target AV following the adversarial trajectory, the AV may make an inaccurate prediction and even make unsafe driving decisions. We also explore possible mitigation techniques via data augmentation and trajectory smoothing.
Click-Through Rate (CTR) prediction is a crucial component in the online advertising industry. In order to produce a personalized CTR prediction, an industry-level CTR prediction model commonly takes a high-dimensional (e.g., 100 or 1000 billions of features) sparse vector (that is encoded from query keywords, user portraits, etc.) as input. As a result, the model requires Terabyte scale parameters to embed the high-dimensional input. Hierarchical distributed GPU parameter server has been proposed to enable GPU with limited memory to train the massive network by leveraging CPU main memory and SSDs as secondary storage. We identify two major challenges in the existing GPU training framework for massive-scale ad models and propose a collection of optimizations to tackle these challenges: (a) the GPU, CPU, SSD rapidly communicate with each other during the training. The connections between GPUs and CPUs are non-uniform due to the hardware topology. The data communication route should be optimized according to the hardware topology; (b) GPUs in different computing nodes frequently communicates to synchronize parameters. We are required to optimize the communications so that the distributed system can become scalable. In this paper, we propose a hardware-aware training workflow that couples the hardware topology into the algorithm design. To reduce the extensive communication between computing nodes, we introduce a $k$-step model merging algorithm for the popular Adam optimizer and provide its convergence rate in non-convex optimization. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first application of $k$-step adaptive optimization method in industrial-level CTR model training. The numerical results on real-world data confirm that the optimized system design considerably reduces the training time of the massive model, with essentially no loss in accuracy.
The current electricity networks were not initially designed for the high integration of variable generation technologies. They suffer significant losses due to the combustion of fossil fuels, the long-distance transmission, and distribution of the power to the network. Recently, \emph{prosumers}, both consumers and producers, emerge with the increasing affordability to invest in domestic solar systems. Prosumers may trade within their communities to better manage their demand and supply as well as providing social and economic benefits. In this paper, we explore the use of Blockchain technologies and auction mechanisms to facilitate autonomous peer-to-peer energy trading within microgrids. We design two frameworks that utilize the smart contract functionality in Ethereum and employ the continuous double auction and uniform-price double-sided auction mechanisms, respectively. We validate our design by conducting A/B tests to compare the performance of different frameworks on a real-world dataset. The key characteristics of the two frameworks and several cost analyses are presented for comparison. Our results demonstrate that a P2P trading platform that integrates the blockchain technologies and agent-based systems is promising to complement the current centralized energy grid. We also identify a number of limitations, alternative solutions, and directions for future work.
We develop a novel human trajectory prediction system that incorporates the scene information (Scene-LSTM) as well as individual pedestrian movement (Pedestrian-LSTM) trained simultaneously within static crowded scenes. We superimpose a two-level grid structure (grid cells and subgrids) on the scene to encode spatial granularity plus common human movements. The Scene-LSTM captures the commonly traveled paths that can be used to significantly influence the accuracy of human trajectory prediction in local areas (i.e. grid cells). We further design scene data filters, consisting of a hard filter and a soft filter, to select the relevant scene information in a local region when necessary and combine it with Pedestrian-LSTM for forecasting a pedestrian's future locations. The experimental results on several publicly available datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms related works and can produce more accurate predicted trajectories in different scene contexts.
To solve complex real-world problems with reinforcement learning, we cannot rely on manually specified reward functions. Instead, we can have humans communicate an objective to the agent directly. In this work, we combine two approaches to learning from human feedback: expert demonstrations and trajectory preferences. We train a deep neural network to model the reward function and use its predicted reward to train an DQN-based deep reinforcement learning agent on 9 Atari games. Our approach beats the imitation learning baseline in 7 games and achieves strictly superhuman performance on 2 games without using game rewards. Additionally, we investigate the goodness of fit of the reward model, present some reward hacking problems, and study the effects of noise in the human labels.
We train a recurrent neural network language model using a distributed, on-device learning framework called federated learning for the purpose of next-word prediction in a virtual keyboard for smartphones. Server-based training using stochastic gradient descent is compared with training on client devices using the Federated Averaging algorithm. The federated algorithm, which enables training on a higher-quality dataset for this use case, is shown to achieve better prediction recall. This work demonstrates the feasibility and benefit of training language models on client devices without exporting sensitive user data to servers. The federated learning environment gives users greater control over their data and simplifies the task of incorporating privacy by default with distributed training and aggregation across a population of client devices.
Tracking by detection is a common approach to solving the Multiple Object Tracking problem. In this paper we show how deep metric learning can be used to improve three aspects of tracking by detection. We train a convolutional neural network to learn an embedding function in a Siamese configuration on a large person re-identification dataset offline. It is then used to improve the online performance of tracking while retaining a high frame rate. We use this learned appearance metric to robustly build estimates of pedestrian's trajectories in the MOT16 dataset. In breaking with the tracking by detection model, we use our appearance metric to propose detections using the predicted state of a tracklet as a prior in the case where the detector fails. This method achieves competitive results in evaluation, especially among online, real-time approaches. We present an ablative study showing the impact of each of the three uses of our deep appearance metric.
Current multi-person localisation and tracking systems have an over reliance on the use of appearance models for target re-identification and almost no approaches employ a complete deep learning solution for both objectives. We present a novel, complete deep learning framework for multi-person localisation and tracking. In this context we first introduce a light weight sequential Generative Adversarial Network architecture for person localisation, which overcomes issues related to occlusions and noisy detections, typically found in a multi person environment. In the proposed tracking framework we build upon recent advances in pedestrian trajectory prediction approaches and propose a novel data association scheme based on predicted trajectories. This removes the need for computationally expensive person re-identification systems based on appearance features and generates human like trajectories with minimal fragmentation. The proposed method is evaluated on multiple public benchmarks including both static and dynamic cameras and is capable of generating outstanding performance, especially among other recently proposed deep neural network based approaches.