ML is being deployed in complex, real-world scenarios where errors have impactful consequences. In these systems, thorough testing of the ML pipelines is critical. A key component in ML deployment pipelines is the curation of labeled training data. Common practice in the ML literature assumes that labels are the ground truth. However, in our experience in a large autonomous vehicle development center, we have found that vendors can often provide erroneous labels, which can lead to downstream safety risks in trained models. To address these issues, we propose a new abstraction, learned observation assertions, and implement it in a system called Fixy. Fixy leverages existing organizational resources, such as existing (possibly noisy) labeled datasets or previously trained ML models, to learn a probabilistic model for finding errors in human- or model-generated labels. Given user-provided features and these existing resources, Fixy learns feature distributions that specify likely and unlikely values (e.g., that a speed of 30mph is likely but 300mph is unlikely). It then uses these feature distributions to score labels for potential errors. We show that FIxy can automatically rank potential errors in real datasets with up to 2$\times$ higher precision compared to recent work on model assertions and standard techniques such as uncertainty sampling.
Bayesian policy reuse (BPR) is a general policy transfer framework for selecting a source policy from an offline library by inferring the task belief based on some observation signals and a trained observation model. In this paper, we propose an improved BPR method to achieve more efficient policy transfer in deep reinforcement learning (DRL). First, most BPR algorithms use the episodic return as the observation signal that contains limited information and cannot be obtained until the end of an episode. Instead, we employ the state transition sample, which is informative and instantaneous, as the observation signal for faster and more accurate task inference. Second, BPR algorithms usually require numerous samples to estimate the probability distribution of the tabular-based observation model, which may be expensive and even infeasible to learn and maintain, especially when using the state transition sample as the signal. Hence, we propose a scalable observation model based on fitting state transition functions of source tasks from only a small number of samples, which can generalize to any signals observed in the target task. Moreover, we extend the offline-mode BPR to the continual learning setting by expanding the scalable observation model in a plug-and-play fashion, which can avoid negative transfer when faced with new unknown tasks. Experimental results show that our method can consistently facilitate faster and more efficient policy transfer.
Models can fail in unpredictable ways during deployment due to task ambiguity, when multiple behaviors are consistent with the provided training data. An example is an object classifier trained on red squares and blue circles: when encountering blue squares, the intended behavior is undefined. We investigate whether pretrained models are better active learners, capable of disambiguating between the possible tasks a user may be trying to specify. Intriguingly, we find that better active learning is an emergent property of the pretraining process: pretrained models require up to 5 times fewer labels when using uncertainty-based active learning, while non-pretrained models see no or even negative benefit. We find these gains come from an ability to select examples with attributes that disambiguate the intended behavior, such as rare product categories or atypical backgrounds. These attributes are far more linearly separable in pretrained model's representation spaces vs non-pretrained models, suggesting a possible mechanism for this behavior.
We study the performance of a phase-noise impaired double reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS)-aided multiuser (MU) multiple-input single-output (MISO) system under spatial correlation at both RISs and base-station (BS). The downlink achievable rate is derived in closed-form under maximum ratio transmission (MRT) precoding. In addition, we obtain the optimal phase-shift design at both RISs in closed-form for the considered channel and phase-noise models. Numerical results validate the analytical expressions, and highlight the effects of different system parameters on the achievable rate. Our analysis shows that phase-noise can severely degrade the performance when users do not have direct links to both RISs, and can only be served via the double-reflection link. Also, we show that high spatial correlation at RISs is essential for high achievable rates.
Imitation learning is a promising approach to help robots acquire dexterous manipulation capabilities without the need for a carefully-designed reward or a significant computational effort. However, existing imitation learning approaches require sophisticated data collection infrastructure and struggle to generalize beyond the training distribution. One way to address this limitation is to gather additional data that better represents the full operating conditions. In this work, we investigate characteristics of such additional demonstrations and their impact on performance. Specifically, we study the effects of corrective and randomly-sampled additional demonstrations on learning a policy that guides a five-fingered robot hand through a pick-and-place task. Our results suggest that corrective demonstrations considerably outperform randomly-sampled demonstrations, when the proportion of additional demonstrations sampled from the full task distribution is larger than the number of original demonstrations sampled from a restrictive training distribution. Conversely, when the number of original demonstrations are higher than that of additional demonstrations, we find no significant differences between corrective and randomly-sampled additional demonstrations. These results provide insights into the inherent trade-off between the effort required to collect corrective demonstrations and their relative benefits over randomly-sampled demonstrations. Additionally, we show that inexpensive vision-based sensors, such as LeapMotion, can be used to dramatically reduce the cost of providing demonstrations for dexterous manipulation tasks. Our code is available at //github.com/GT-STAR-Lab/corrective-demos-dexterous-manipulation.
Adversarial training (i.e., training on adversarially perturbed input data) is a well-studied method for making neural networks robust to potential adversarial attacks during inference. However, the improved robustness does not come for free but rather is accompanied by a decrease in overall model accuracy and performance. Recent work has shown that, in practical robot learning applications, the effects of adversarial training do not pose a fair trade-off but inflict a net loss when measured in holistic robot performance. This work revisits the robustness-accuracy trade-off in robot learning by systematically analyzing if recent advances in robust training methods and theory in conjunction with adversarial robot learning can make adversarial training suitable for real-world robot applications. We evaluate a wide variety of robot learning tasks ranging from autonomous driving in a high-fidelity environment amenable to sim-to-real deployment, to mobile robot gesture recognition. Our results demonstrate that, while these techniques make incremental improvements on the trade-off on a relative scale, the negative side-effects caused by adversarial training still outweigh the improvements by an order of magnitude. We conclude that more substantial advances in robust learning methods are necessary before they can benefit robot learning tasks in practice.
It is shown, with two sets of indicators that separately load on two distinct factors, independent of one another conditional on the past, that if it is the case that at least one of the factors causally affects the other, then, in many settings, the process will converge to a factor model in which a single factor will suffice to capture the covariance structure among the indicators. Factor analysis with one wave of data can then not distinguish between factor models with a single factor versus those with two factors that are causally related. Therefore, unless causal relations between factors can be ruled out a priori, alleged empirical evidence from one-wave factor analysis for a single factor still leaves open the possibilities of a single factor or of two factors that causally affect one another. The implications for interpreting the factor structure of psychological scales, such as self-report scales for anxiety and depression, or for happiness and purpose, are discussed. The results are further illustrated through simulations to gain insight into the practical implications of the results in more realistic settings prior to the convergence of the processes. Some further generalizations to an arbitrary number of underlying factors are noted.
Deep learning depends on large amounts of labeled training data. Manual labeling is expensive and represents a bottleneck, especially for tasks such as segmentation, where labels must be assigned down to the level of individual points. That challenge is even more daunting for 3D data: 3D point clouds contain millions of points per scene, and their accurate annotation is markedly more time-consuming. The situation is further aggravated by the added complexity of user interfaces for 3D point clouds, which slows down annotation even more. For the case of 2D image segmentation, interactive techniques have become common, where user feedback in the form of a few clicks guides a segmentation algorithm -- nowadays usually a neural network -- to achieve an accurate labeling with minimal effort. Surprisingly, interactive segmentation of 3D scenes has not been explored much. Previous work has attempted to obtain accurate 3D segmentation masks using human feedback from the 2D domain, which is only possible if correctly aligned images are available together with the 3D point cloud, and it involves switching between the 2D and 3D domains. Here, we present an interactive 3D object segmentation method in which the user interacts directly with the 3D point cloud. Importantly, our model does not require training data from the target domain: when trained on ScanNet, it performs well on several other datasets with different data characteristics as well as different object classes. Moreover, our method is orthogonal to supervised (instance) segmentation methods and can be combined with them to refine automatic segmentations with minimal human effort.
Proactive dialogue system is able to lead the conversation to a goal topic and has advantaged potential in bargain, persuasion and negotiation. Current corpus-based learning manner limits its practical application in real-world scenarios. To this end, we contribute to advance the study of the proactive dialogue policy to a more natural and challenging setting, i.e., interacting dynamically with users. Further, we call attention to the non-cooperative user behavior -- the user talks about off-path topics when he/she is not satisfied with the previous topics introduced by the agent. We argue that the targets of reaching the goal topic quickly and maintaining a high user satisfaction are not always converge, because the topics close to the goal and the topics user preferred may not be the same. Towards this issue, we propose a new solution named I-Pro that can learn Proactive policy in the Interactive setting. Specifically, we learn the trade-off via a learned goal weight, which consists of four factors (dialogue turn, goal completion difficulty, user satisfaction estimation, and cooperative degree). The experimental results demonstrate I-Pro significantly outperforms baselines in terms of effectiveness and interpretability.
Detection and recognition of text in natural images are two main problems in the field of computer vision that have a wide variety of applications in analysis of sports videos, autonomous driving, industrial automation, to name a few. They face common challenging problems that are factors in how text is represented and affected by several environmental conditions. The current state-of-the-art scene text detection and/or recognition methods have exploited the witnessed advancement in deep learning architectures and reported a superior accuracy on benchmark datasets when tackling multi-resolution and multi-oriented text. However, there are still several remaining challenges affecting text in the wild images that cause existing methods to underperform due to there models are not able to generalize to unseen data and the insufficient labeled data. Thus, unlike previous surveys in this field, the objectives of this survey are as follows: first, offering the reader not only a review on the recent advancement in scene text detection and recognition, but also presenting the results of conducting extensive experiments using a unified evaluation framework that assesses pre-trained models of the selected methods on challenging cases, and applies the same evaluation criteria on these techniques. Second, identifying several existing challenges for detecting or recognizing text in the wild images, namely, in-plane-rotation, multi-oriented and multi-resolution text, perspective distortion, illumination reflection, partial occlusion, complex fonts, and special characters. Finally, the paper also presents insight into the potential research directions in this field to address some of the mentioned challenges that are still encountering scene text detection and recognition techniques.
While it is nearly effortless for humans to quickly assess the perceptual similarity between two images, the underlying processes are thought to be quite complex. Despite this, the most widely used perceptual metrics today, such as PSNR and SSIM, are simple, shallow functions, and fail to account for many nuances of human perception. Recently, the deep learning community has found that features of the VGG network trained on the ImageNet classification task has been remarkably useful as a training loss for image synthesis. But how perceptual are these so-called "perceptual losses"? What elements are critical for their success? To answer these questions, we introduce a new Full Reference Image Quality Assessment (FR-IQA) dataset of perceptual human judgments, orders of magnitude larger than previous datasets. We systematically evaluate deep features across different architectures and tasks and compare them with classic metrics. We find that deep features outperform all previous metrics by huge margins. More surprisingly, this result is not restricted to ImageNet-trained VGG features, but holds across different deep architectures and levels of supervision (supervised, self-supervised, or even unsupervised). Our results suggest that perceptual similarity is an emergent property shared across deep visual representations.