A challenge in using robots in human-inhabited environments is to design behavior that is engaging, yet robust to the perturbations induced by human interaction. Our idea is to imbue the robot with intrinsic motivation (IM) so that it can handle new situations and appears as a genuine social other to humans and thus be of more interest to a human interaction partner. Human-robot interaction (HRI) experiments mainly focus on scripted or teleoperated robots, that mimic characteristics such as IM to control isolated behavior factors. This article presents a "robotologist" study design that allows comparing autonomously generated behaviors with each other, and, for the first time, evaluates the human perception of IM-based generated behavior in robots. We conducted a within-subjects user study (N=24) where participants interacted with a fully autonomous Sphero BB8 robot with different behavioral regimes: one realizing an adaptive, intrinsically motivated behavior and the other being reactive, but not adaptive. The robot and its behaviors are intentionally kept minimal to concentrate on the effect induced by IM. A quantitative analysis of post-interaction questionnaires showed a significantly higher perception of the dimension "Warmth" compared to the reactive baseline behavior. Warmth is considered a primary dimension for social attitude formation in human social cognition. A human perceived as warm (friendly, trustworthy) experiences more positive social interactions.
The target of reducing travel time only is insufficient to support the development of future smart transportation systems. To align with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (UN-SDG), a further reduction of fuel and emissions, improvements of traffic safety, and the ease of infrastructure deployment and maintenance should also be considered. Different from existing work focusing on the optimization of the control in either traffic light signal (to improve the intersection throughput), or vehicle speed (to stabilize the traffic), this paper presents a multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (DRL) system called CoTV, which Cooperatively controls both Traffic light signals and connected autonomous Vehicles (CAV). Therefore, our CoTV can well balance the achievement of the reduction of travel time, fuel, and emission. In the meantime, CoTV can also be easy to deploy by cooperating with only one CAV that is the nearest to the traffic light controller on each incoming road. This enables more efficient coordination between traffic light controllers and CAV, thus leading to the convergence of training CoTV under the large-scale multi-agent scenario that is traditionally difficult to converge. We give the detailed system design of CoTV, and demonstrate its effectiveness in a simulation study using SUMO under various grid maps and realistic urban scenarios with mixed-autonomy traffic.
We investigate the potential of fusing human examiner decisions for the task of digital face manipulation detection. To this end, various decision fusion methods are proposed incorporating the examiners' decision confidence, experience level, and their time to take a decision. Conducted experiments are based on a psychophysical evaluation of digital face image manipulation detection capabilities of humans in which different manipulation techniques were applied, i.e. face morphing, face swapping and retouching. The decisions of 223 participants were fused to simulate crowds of up to seven human examiners. Experimental results reveal that (1) despite the moderate detection performance achieved by single human examiners, a high accuracy can be obtained through decision fusion and (2) a weighted fusion which takes the examiners' decision confidence into account yields the most competitive detection performance.
This study presents the design of a six-wheeled outdoor autonomous mobile robot. The main design goal of our robot is to increase its adaptability and flexibility when moving outdoors. This six-wheeled robot platform was equipped with some sensors, such as a global positioning system (GPS), high definition (HD) webcam, light detection and ranging (LiDAR), and rotary encoders. A personal mobile computer and 86Duino ONE microcontroller were used as the algorithm computing platform. In terms of control, the lateral offset and head angle offset of the robot were calculated using a differential GPS or a camera to detect structured and unstructured road boundaries. The lateral offset and head angle offset were fed to a fuzzy controller. The control input was designed by Q-learning of the differential speed between the left and right wheels. This made the robot track a reference route so that it could stay in its own lane. 2D LiDAR was also used to measure the relative distance from the front obstacle. The robot would immediately stop to avoid a collision when the distance between the robot and obstacle was less than a specific safety distance. A custom-designed rocker arm gave the robot the ability to climb a low step. Body balance could be maintained by controlling the angle of the rocker arm when the robot changed its pose. The autonomous mobile robot has been used for delivery service on our campus road by integrating the above system functionality.
In recent years, increasing deployment of face recognition technology in security-critical settings, such as border control or law enforcement, has led to considerable interest in the vulnerability of face recognition systems to attacks utilising legitimate documents, which are issued on the basis of digitally manipulated face images. As automated manipulation and attack detection remains a challenging task, conventional processes with human inspectors performing identity verification remain indispensable. These circumstances merit a closer investigation of human capabilities in detecting manipulated face images, as previous work in this field is sparse and often concentrated only on specific scenarios and biometric characteristics. This work introduces a web-based, remote visual discrimination experiment on the basis of principles adopted from the field of psychophysics and subsequently discusses interdisciplinary opportunities with the aim of examining human proficiency in detecting different types of digitally manipulated face images, specifically face swapping, morphing, and retouching. In addition to analysing appropriate performance measures, a possible metric of detectability is explored. Experimental data of 306 probands indicate that detection performance is widely distributed across the population and detection of certain types of face image manipulations is much more challenging than others.
Interacting physically with robots and sharing environment with them leads to situations where humans and robots have to cross each other in narrow corridors. In these cases, the robot has to make space for the human to pass. From observation of human-human crossing behaviours, we isolated two main factors in this avoiding behaviour: body rotation and sliding motion. We implemented a robot controller able to vary these factors and explored how this variation impacted on people's perception. Results from a within-participants study involving 23 participants show that people prefer a robot rotating its body when crossing them. Additionally, a sliding motion is rated as being warmer. These results show the importance of social avoidance when interacting with humans.
From denial-of-service attacks to spreading of ransomware or other malware across an organization's network, it is possible that manually operated defenses are not able to respond in real time at the scale required, and when a breach is detected and remediated the damage is already made. Autonomous cyber defenses therefore become essential to mitigate the risk of successful attacks and their damage, especially when the response time, effort and accuracy required in those defenses is impractical or impossible through defenses operated exclusively by humans. Autonomous agents have the potential to use ML with large amounts of data about known cyberattacks as input, in order to learn patterns and predict characteristics of future attacks. Moreover, learning from past and present attacks enable defenses to adapt to new threats that share characteristics with previous attacks. On the other hand, autonomous cyber defenses introduce risks of unintended harm. Actions arising from autonomous defense agents may have harmful consequences of functional, safety, security, ethical, or moral nature. Here we focus on machine learning training, algorithmic feedback, and algorithmic constraints, with the aim of motivating a discussion on achieving trust in autonomous cyber defenses.
Federated learning (FL) is a machine learning setting where many clients (e.g. mobile devices or whole organizations) collaboratively train a model under the orchestration of a central server (e.g. service provider), while keeping the training data decentralized. FL embodies the principles of focused data collection and minimization, and can mitigate many of the systemic privacy risks and costs resulting from traditional, centralized machine learning and data science approaches. Motivated by the explosive growth in FL research, this paper discusses recent advances and presents an extensive collection of open problems and challenges.
We present SkelNetOn 2019 Challenge and Deep Learning for Geometric Shape Understanding workshop to utilize existing and develop novel deep learning architectures for shape understanding. We observed that unlike traditional segmentation and detection tasks, geometry understanding is still a new area for investigation using deep learning techniques. SkelNetOn aims to bring together researchers from different domains to foster learning methods on global shape understanding tasks. We aim to improve and evaluate the state-of-the-art shape understanding approaches, and to serve as reference benchmarks for future research. Similar to other challenges in computer vision domain, SkelNetOn tracks propose three datasets and corresponding evaluation methodologies; all coherently bundled in three competitions with a dedicated workshop co-located with CVPR 2019 conference. In this paper, we describe and analyze characteristics of each dataset, define the evaluation criteria of the public competitions, and provide baselines for each task.
Autonomous urban driving navigation with complex multi-agent dynamics is under-explored due to the difficulty of learning an optimal driving policy. The traditional modular pipeline heavily relies on hand-designed rules and the pre-processing perception system while the supervised learning-based models are limited by the accessibility of extensive human experience. We present a general and principled Controllable Imitative Reinforcement Learning (CIRL) approach which successfully makes the driving agent achieve higher success rates based on only vision inputs in a high-fidelity car simulator. To alleviate the low exploration efficiency for large continuous action space that often prohibits the use of classical RL on challenging real tasks, our CIRL explores over a reasonably constrained action space guided by encoded experiences that imitate human demonstrations, building upon Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG). Moreover, we propose to specialize adaptive policies and steering-angle reward designs for different control signals (i.e. follow, straight, turn right, turn left) based on the shared representations to improve the model capability in tackling with diverse cases. Extensive experiments on CARLA driving benchmark demonstrate that CIRL substantially outperforms all previous methods in terms of the percentage of successfully completed episodes on a variety of goal-directed driving tasks. We also show its superior generalization capability in unseen environments. To our knowledge, this is the first successful case of the learned driving policy through reinforcement learning in the high-fidelity simulator, which performs better-than supervised imitation learning.
This paper introduces a novel neural network-based reinforcement learning approach for robot gaze control. Our approach enables a robot to learn and to adapt its gaze control strategy for human-robot interaction neither with the use of external sensors nor with human supervision. The robot learns to focus its attention onto groups of people from its own audio-visual experiences, independently of the number of people, of their positions and of their physical appearances. In particular, we use a recurrent neural network architecture in combination with Q-learning to find an optimal action-selection policy; we pre-train the network using a simulated environment that mimics realistic scenarios that involve speaking/silent participants, thus avoiding the need of tedious sessions of a robot interacting with people. Our experimental evaluation suggests that the proposed method is robust against parameter estimation, i.e. the parameter values yielded by the method do not have a decisive impact on the performance. The best results are obtained when both audio and visual information is jointly used. Experiments with the Nao robot indicate that our framework is a step forward towards the autonomous learning of socially acceptable gaze behavior.