Before autonomous systems can be deployed in safety-critical applications, we must be able to understand and verify the safety of these systems. For cases where the risk or cost of real-world testing is prohibitive, we propose a simulation-based framework for a) predicting ways in which an autonomous system is likely to fail and b) automatically adjusting the system's design and control policy to preemptively mitigate those failures. Existing tools for failure prediction struggle to search over high-dimensional environmental parameters, cannot efficiently handle end-to-end testing for systems with vision in the loop, and provide little guidance on how to mitigate failures once they are discovered. We approach this problem through the lens of approximate Bayesian inference and use differentiable simulation and rendering for efficient failure case prediction and repair. For cases where a differentiable simulator is not available, we provide a gradient-free version of our algorithm, and we include a theoretical and empirical evaluation of the trade-offs between gradient-based and gradient-free methods. We apply our approach on a range of robotics and control problems, including optimizing search patterns for robot swarms, UAV formation control, and robust network control. Compared to optimization-based falsification methods, our method predicts a more diverse, representative set of failure modes, and we find that our use of differentiable simulation yields solutions that have up to 10x lower cost and requires up to 2x fewer iterations to converge relative to gradient-free techniques. In hardware experiments, we find that repairing control policies using our method leads to a 5x robustness improvement. Accompanying code and video can be found at //mit-realm.github.io/radium/
相關內容
As an emerging task that integrates perception and reasoning, topology reasoning in autonomous driving scenes has recently garnered widespread attention. However, existing work often emphasizes "perception over reasoning": they typically boost reasoning performance by enhancing the perception of lanes and directly adopt MLP to learn lane topology from lane query. This paradigm overlooks the geometric features intrinsic to the lanes themselves and are prone to being influenced by inherent endpoint shifts in lane detection. To tackle this issue, we propose an interpretable method for lane topology reasoning based on lane geometric distance and lane query similarity, named TopoLogic. This method mitigates the impact of endpoint shifts in geometric space, and introduces explicit similarity calculation in semantic space as a complement. By integrating results from both spaces, our methods provides more comprehensive information for lane topology. Ultimately, our approach significantly outperforms the existing state-of-the-art methods on the mainstream benchmark OpenLane-V2 (23.9 v.s. 10.9 in TOP$_{ll}$ and 44.1 v.s. 39.8 in OLS on subset_A. Additionally, our proposed geometric distance topology reasoning method can be incorporated into well-trained models without re-training, significantly boost the performance of lane topology reasoning. The code is released at //github.com/Franpin/TopoLogic.
Formal representations of traffic scenarios can be used to generate test cases for the safety verification of autonomous driving. However, most existing methods are limited in highway or highly simplified intersection scenarios due to the intricacy and diversity of traffic scenarios. In response, we propose Traffic Scenario Logic (TSL), which is a spatial-temporal logic designed for modeling and reasoning of urban pedestrian-free traffic scenarios. TSL provides a formal representation of the urban road network that can be derived from OpenDRIVE, i.e., the de facto industry standard of high-definition maps for autonomous driving, enabling the representation of a broad range of traffic scenarios. We implemented the reasoning of TSL using Telingo, i.e., a solver for temporal programs based on the Answer Set Programming, and tested it on different urban road layouts. Demonstrations show the effectiveness of TSL in test scenario generation and its potential value in areas like decision-making and control verification of autonomous driving.
Fast and reliable obstacle avoidance is an important task for mobile robots. In this work, we propose an efficient reactive system that provides high-quality obstacle avoidance while running at hundreds of hertz with minimal resource usage. Our approach combines wavemap, a hierarchical volumetric map representation, with a novel hierarchical and parallelizable obstacle avoidance algorithm formulated through Riemannian Motion Policies (RMP). Leveraging multi-resolution obstacle avoidance policies, the proposed navigation system facilitates precise, low-latency (36ms), and extremely efficient obstacle avoidance with a very large perceptive radius (30m). We perform extensive statistical evaluations on indoor and outdoor maps, verifying that the proposed system compares favorably to fixed-resolution RMP variants and CHOMP. Finally, the RMP formulation allows the seamless fusion of obstacle avoidance with additional objectives, such as goal-seeking, to obtain a fully-fledged navigation system that is versatile and robust. We deploy the system on a Micro Aerial Vehicle and show how it navigates through an indoor obstacle course. Our complete implementation, called waverider, is made available as open source.
Cloud native solutions are widely applied in various fields, placing higher demands on the efficient management and utilization of resource platforms. To achieve the efficiency, load forecasting and elastic scaling have become crucial technologies for dynamically adjusting cloud resources to meet user demands and minimizing resource waste. However, existing prediction-based methods lack comprehensive analysis and integration of load characteristics across different time scales. For instance, long-term trend analysis helps reveal long-term changes in load and resource demand, thereby supporting proactive resource allocation over longer periods, while short-term volatility analysis can examine short-term fluctuations in load and resource demand, providing support for real-time scheduling and rapid response. In response to this, our research introduces TempoScale, which aims to enhance the comprehensive understanding of temporal variations in cloud workloads, enabling more intelligent and adaptive decision-making for elastic scaling. TempoScale utilizes the Complete Ensemble Empirical Mode Decomposition with Adaptive Noise algorithm to decompose time-series load data into multiple Intrinsic Mode Functions (IMF) and a Residual Component (RC). First, we integrate the IMF, which represents both long-term trends and short-term fluctuations, into the time series prediction model to obtain intermediate results. Then, these intermediate results, along with the RC, are transferred into a fully connected layer to obtain the final result. Finally, this result is fed into the resource management system based on Kubernetes for resource scaling. Our proposed approach can reduce the Mean Square Error by 5.80% to 30.43% compared to the baselines, and reduce the average response time by 5.58% to 31.15%.
3D object detection at long range is crucial for ensuring the safety and efficiency of self driving vehicles, allowing them to accurately perceive and react to objects, obstacles, and potential hazards from a distance. But most current state of the art LiDAR based methods are range limited due to sparsity at long range, which generates a form of domain gap between points closer to and farther away from the ego vehicle. Another related problem is the label imbalance for faraway objects, which inhibits the performance of Deep Neural Networks at long range. To address the above limitations, we investigate two ways to improve long range performance of current LiDAR based 3D detectors. First, we combine two 3D detection networks, referred to as range experts, one specializing at near to mid range objects, and one at long range 3D detection. To train a detector at long range under a scarce label regime, we further weigh the loss according to the labelled point's distance from ego vehicle. Second, we augment LiDAR scans with virtual points generated using Multimodal Virtual Points (MVP), a readily available image-based depth completion algorithm. Our experiments on the long range Argoverse2 (AV2) dataset indicate that MVP is more effective in improving long range performance, while maintaining a straightforward implementation. On the other hand, the range experts offer a computationally efficient and simpler alternative, avoiding dependency on image-based segmentation networks and perfect camera-LiDAR calibration.
Multi-modal 3D scene understanding has gained considerable attention due to its wide applications in many areas, such as autonomous driving and human-computer interaction. Compared to conventional single-modal 3D understanding, introducing an additional modality not only elevates the richness and precision of scene interpretation but also ensures a more robust and resilient understanding. This becomes especially crucial in varied and challenging environments where solely relying on 3D data might be inadequate. While there has been a surge in the development of multi-modal 3D methods over past three years, especially those integrating multi-camera images (3D+2D) and textual descriptions (3D+language), a comprehensive and in-depth review is notably absent. In this article, we present a systematic survey of recent progress to bridge this gap. We begin by briefly introducing a background that formally defines various 3D multi-modal tasks and summarizes their inherent challenges. After that, we present a novel taxonomy that delivers a thorough categorization of existing methods according to modalities and tasks, exploring their respective strengths and limitations. Furthermore, comparative results of recent approaches on several benchmark datasets, together with insightful analysis, are offered. Finally, we discuss the unresolved issues and provide several potential avenues for future research.
Face recognition technology has advanced significantly in recent years due largely to the availability of large and increasingly complex training datasets for use in deep learning models. These datasets, however, typically comprise images scraped from news sites or social media platforms and, therefore, have limited utility in more advanced security, forensics, and military applications. These applications require lower resolution, longer ranges, and elevated viewpoints. To meet these critical needs, we collected and curated the first and second subsets of a large multi-modal biometric dataset designed for use in the research and development (R&D) of biometric recognition technologies under extremely challenging conditions. Thus far, the dataset includes more than 350,000 still images and over 1,300 hours of video footage of approximately 1,000 subjects. To collect this data, we used Nikon DSLR cameras, a variety of commercial surveillance cameras, specialized long-rage R&D cameras, and Group 1 and Group 2 UAV platforms. The goal is to support the development of algorithms capable of accurately recognizing people at ranges up to 1,000 m and from high angles of elevation. These advances will include improvements to the state of the art in face recognition and will support new research in the area of whole-body recognition using methods based on gait and anthropometry. This paper describes methods used to collect and curate the dataset, and the dataset's characteristics at the current stage.
Autonomic computing investigates how systems can achieve (user) specified control outcomes on their own, without the intervention of a human operator. Autonomic computing fundamentals have been substantially influenced by those of control theory for closed and open-loop systems. In practice, complex systems may exhibit a number of concurrent and inter-dependent control loops. Despite research into autonomic models for managing computer resources, ranging from individual resources (e.g., web servers) to a resource ensemble (e.g., multiple resources within a data center), research into integrating Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to improve resource autonomy and performance at scale continues to be a fundamental challenge. The integration of AI/ML to achieve such autonomic and self-management of systems can be achieved at different levels of granularity, from full to human-in-the-loop automation. In this article, leading academics, researchers, practitioners, engineers, and scientists in the fields of cloud computing, AI/ML, and quantum computing join to discuss current research and potential future directions for these fields. Further, we discuss challenges and opportunities for leveraging AI and ML in next generation computing for emerging computing paradigms, including cloud, fog, edge, serverless and quantum computing environments.
Causality knowledge is vital to building robust AI systems. Deep learning models often perform poorly on tasks that require causal reasoning, which is often derived using some form of commonsense knowledge not immediately available in the input but implicitly inferred by humans. Prior work has unraveled spurious observational biases that models fall prey to in the absence of causality. While language representation models preserve contextual knowledge within learned embeddings, they do not factor in causal relationships during training. By blending causal relationships with the input features to an existing model that performs visual cognition tasks (such as scene understanding, video captioning, video question-answering, etc.), better performance can be achieved owing to the insight causal relationships bring about. Recently, several models have been proposed that have tackled the task of mining causal data from either the visual or textual modality. However, there does not exist widespread research that mines causal relationships by juxtaposing the visual and language modalities. While images offer a rich and easy-to-process resource for us to mine causality knowledge from, videos are denser and consist of naturally time-ordered events. Also, textual information offers details that could be implicit in videos. We propose iReason, a framework that infers visual-semantic commonsense knowledge using both videos and natural language captions. Furthermore, iReason's architecture integrates a causal rationalization module to aid the process of interpretability, error analysis and bias detection. We demonstrate the effectiveness of iReason using a two-pronged comparative analysis with language representation learning models (BERT, GPT-2) as well as current state-of-the-art multimodal causality models.
Dialogue systems have attracted more and more attention. Recent advances on dialogue systems are overwhelmingly contributed by deep learning techniques, which have been employed to enhance a wide range of big data applications such as computer vision, natural language processing, and recommender systems. For dialogue systems, deep learning can leverage a massive amount of data to learn meaningful feature representations and response generation strategies, while requiring a minimum amount of hand-crafting. In this article, we give an overview to these recent advances on dialogue systems from various perspectives and discuss some possible research directions. In particular, we generally divide existing dialogue systems into task-oriented and non-task-oriented models, then detail how deep learning techniques help them with representative algorithms and finally discuss some appealing research directions that can bring the dialogue system research into a new frontier.
注冊地址： 北京市海淀區羊坊店路18號2幢3層301-191