Verification and validation of fully automated vehicles is linked to an almost intractable challenge of reflecting the real world with all its interactions in a virtual environment. Influential stochastic parameters need to be extracted from real-world measurements and real-time data, capturing all interdependencies, for an accurate simulation of reality. A copula is a probability model that represents a multivariate distribution, examining the dependence between the underlying variables. This model is used on drone measurement data from a roundabout containing dependent stochastic parameters. With the help of the copula model, samples are generated that reflect the real-time data. Resulting applications and possible extensions are discussed and explored.
This paper addresses the problem of reliably and efficiently solving broad classes of long-horizon stochastic path planning problems. Starting with a vanilla RL formulation with a stochastic dynamics simulator and an occupancy matrix of the environment, our approach computes useful options with policies as well as high-level paths that compose the discovered options. Our main contributions are (1) data-driven methods for creating abstract states that serve as endpoints for helpful options, (2) methods for computing option policies using auto-generated option guides in the form of dense pseudo-reward functions, and (3) an overarching algorithm for composing the computed options. We show that this approach yields strong guarantees of executability and solvability: under fairly general conditions, the computed option guides lead to composable option policies and consequently ensure downward refinability. Empirical evaluation on a range of robots, environments, and tasks shows that this approach effectively transfers knowledge across related tasks and that it outperforms existing approaches by a significant margin.
As more and more artificial intelligence (AI) technologies move from the laboratory to real-world applications, the open-set and robustness challenges brought by data from the real world have received increasing attention. Data augmentation is a widely used method to improve model performance, and some recent works have also confirmed its positive effect on the robustness of AI models. However, most of the existing data augmentation methods are heuristic, lacking the exploration of their internal mechanisms. We apply the explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) method, explore the internal mechanisms of popular data augmentation methods, analyze the relationship between game interactions and some widely used robustness metrics, and propose a new proxy for model robustness in the open-set environment. Based on the analysis of the internal mechanisms, we develop a mask-based boosting method for data augmentation that comprehensively improves several robustness measures of AI models and beats state-of-the-art data augmentation approaches. Experiments show that our method can be widely applied to many popular data augmentation methods. Different from the adversarial training, our boosting method not only significantly improves the robustness of models, but also improves the accuracy of test sets. Our code is available at \url{//github.com/Anonymous_for_submission}.
Agent-based model (ABM) has been widely used to study infectious disease transmission by simulating behaviors and interactions of autonomous individuals called agents. In the ABM, agent states, for example infected or susceptible, are assigned according to a set of simple rules, and a complex dynamics of disease transmission is described by the collective states of agents over time. Despite the flexibility in real-world modeling, ABMs have received less attention by statisticians because of the intractable likelihood functions which lead to difficulty in estimating parameters and quantifying uncertainty around model outputs. To overcome this limitation, we propose to treat the entire system as a Hidden Markov Model and develop the ABM for infectious disease transmission within the Bayesian framework. The hidden states in the model are represented by individual agent's states over time. We estimate the hidden states and the parameters associated with the model by applying particle Markov Chain Monte Carlo algorithm. Performance of the approach for parameter recovery and prediction along with sensitivity to prior assumptions are evaluated under various simulation conditions. Finally, we apply the proposed approach to the study of COVID-19 outbreak on Diamond Princess cruise ship and examine the differences in transmission by key demographic characteristics, while considering different network structures and the limitations of COVID-19 testing in the cruise.
This paper focuses on a stochastic system identification problem: given time series observations of a stochastic differential equation (SDE) driven by L\'{e}vy $\alpha$-stable noise, estimate the SDE's drift field. For $\alpha$ in the interval $[1,2)$, the noise is heavy-tailed, leading to computational difficulties for methods that compute transition densities and/or likelihoods in physical space. We propose a Fourier space approach that centers on computing time-dependent characteristic functions, i.e., Fourier transforms of time-dependent densities. Parameterizing the unknown drift field using Fourier series, we formulate a loss consisting of the squared error between predicted and empirical characteristic functions. We minimize this loss with gradients computed via the adjoint method. For a variety of one- and two-dimensional problems, we demonstrate that this method is capable of learning drift fields in qualitative and/or quantitative agreement with ground truth fields.
Learning on big data brings success for artificial intelligence (AI), but the annotation and training costs are expensive. In future, learning on small data is one of the ultimate purposes of AI, which requires machines to recognize objectives and scenarios relying on small data as humans. A series of machine learning models is going on this way such as active learning, few-shot learning, deep clustering. However, there are few theoretical guarantees for their generalization performance. Moreover, most of their settings are passive, that is, the label distribution is explicitly controlled by one specified sampling scenario. This survey follows the agnostic active sampling under a PAC (Probably Approximately Correct) framework to analyze the generalization error and label complexity of learning on small data using a supervised and unsupervised fashion. With these theoretical analyses, we categorize the small data learning models from two geometric perspectives: the Euclidean and non-Euclidean (hyperbolic) mean representation, where their optimization solutions are also presented and discussed. Later, some potential learning scenarios that may benefit from small data learning are then summarized, and their potential learning scenarios are also analyzed. Finally, some challenging applications such as computer vision, natural language processing that may benefit from learning on small data are also surveyed.
The existence of representative datasets is a prerequisite of many successful artificial intelligence and machine learning models. However, the subsequent application of these models often involves scenarios that are inadequately represented in the data used for training. The reasons for this are manifold and range from time and cost constraints to ethical considerations. As a consequence, the reliable use of these models, especially in safety-critical applications, is a huge challenge. Leveraging additional, already existing sources of knowledge is key to overcome the limitations of purely data-driven approaches, and eventually to increase the generalization capability of these models. Furthermore, predictions that conform with knowledge are crucial for making trustworthy and safe decisions even in underrepresented scenarios. This work provides an overview of existing techniques and methods in the literature that combine data-based models with existing knowledge. The identified approaches are structured according to the categories integration, extraction and conformity. Special attention is given to applications in the field of autonomous driving.
Autonomous driving has achieved a significant milestone in research and development over the last decade. There is increasing interest in the field as the deployment of self-operating vehicles on roads promises safer and more ecologically friendly transportation systems. With the rise of computationally powerful artificial intelligence (AI) techniques, autonomous vehicles can sense their environment with high precision, make safe real-time decisions, and operate more reliably without human interventions. However, intelligent decision-making in autonomous cars is not generally understandable by humans in the current state of the art, and such deficiency hinders this technology from being socially acceptable. Hence, aside from making safe real-time decisions, the AI systems of autonomous vehicles also need to explain how these decisions are constructed in order to be regulatory compliant across many jurisdictions. Our study sheds a comprehensive light on developing explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) approaches for autonomous vehicles. In particular, we make the following contributions. First, we provide a thorough overview of the present gaps with respect to explanations in the state-of-the-art autonomous vehicle industry. We then show the taxonomy of explanations and explanation receivers in this field. Thirdly, we propose a framework for an architecture of end-to-end autonomous driving systems and justify the role of XAI in both debugging and regulating such systems. Finally, as future research directions, we provide a field guide on XAI approaches for autonomous driving that can improve operational safety and transparency towards achieving public approval by regulators, manufacturers, and all engaged stakeholders.
Properly handling missing data is a fundamental challenge in recommendation. Most present works perform negative sampling from unobserved data to supply the training of recommender models with negative signals. Nevertheless, existing negative sampling strategies, either static or adaptive ones, are insufficient to yield high-quality negative samples --- both informative to model training and reflective of user real needs. In this work, we hypothesize that item knowledge graph (KG), which provides rich relations among items and KG entities, could be useful to infer informative and factual negative samples. Towards this end, we develop a new negative sampling model, Knowledge Graph Policy Network (KGPolicy), which works as a reinforcement learning agent to explore high-quality negatives. Specifically, by conducting our designed exploration operations, it navigates from the target positive interaction, adaptively receives knowledge-aware negative signals, and ultimately yields a potential negative item to train the recommender. We tested on a matrix factorization (MF) model equipped with KGPolicy, and it achieves significant improvements over both state-of-the-art sampling methods like DNS and IRGAN, and KG-enhanced recommender models like KGAT. Further analyses from different angles provide insights of knowledge-aware sampling. We release the codes and datasets at //github.com/xiangwang1223/kgpolicy.
Human knowledge provides a formal understanding of the world. Knowledge graphs that represent structural relations between entities have become an increasingly popular research direction towards cognition and human-level intelligence. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive review on knowledge graph covering overall research topics about 1) knowledge graph representation learning, 2) knowledge acquisition and completion, 3) temporal knowledge graph, and 4) knowledge-aware applications, and summarize recent breakthroughs and perspective directions to facilitate future research. We propose a full-view categorization and new taxonomies on these topics. Knowledge graph embedding is organized from four aspects of representation space, scoring function, encoding models and auxiliary information. For knowledge acquisition, especially knowledge graph completion, embedding methods, path inference and logical rule reasoning are reviewed. We further explore several emerging topics including meta relational learning, commonsense reasoning, and temporal knowledge graphs. To facilitate future research on knowledge graphs, we also provide a curated collection of datasets and open-source libraries on different tasks. In the end, we have a thorough outlook on several promising research directions.
How can we estimate the importance of nodes in a knowledge graph (KG)? A KG is a multi-relational graph that has proven valuable for many tasks including question answering and semantic search. In this paper, we present GENI, a method for tackling the problem of estimating node importance in KGs, which enables several downstream applications such as item recommendation and resource allocation. While a number of approaches have been developed to address this problem for general graphs, they do not fully utilize information available in KGs, or lack flexibility needed to model complex relationship between entities and their importance. To address these limitations, we explore supervised machine learning algorithms. In particular, building upon recent advancement of graph neural networks (GNNs), we develop GENI, a GNN-based method designed to deal with distinctive challenges involved with predicting node importance in KGs. Our method performs an aggregation of importance scores instead of aggregating node embeddings via predicate-aware attention mechanism and flexible centrality adjustment. In our evaluation of GENI and existing methods on predicting node importance in real-world KGs with different characteristics, GENI achieves 5-17% higher NDCG@100 than the state of the art.