Unsignalized intersections are typically considered as one of the most representative and challenging scenarios for self-driving vehicles. To tackle autonomous driving problems in such scenarios, this paper proposes a curriculum proximal policy optimization (CPPO) framework with stage-decaying clipping. By adjusting the clipping parameter during different stages of training through proximal policy optimization (PPO), the vehicle can first rapidly search for an approximate optimal policy or its neighborhood with a large parameter, and then converges to the optimal policy with a small one. Particularly, the stage-based curriculum learning technology is incorporated into the proposed framework to improve the generalization performance and further accelerate the training process. Moreover, the reward function is specially designed in view of different curriculum settings. A series of comparative experiments are conducted in intersection-crossing scenarios with bi-lane carriageways to verify the effectiveness of the proposed CPPO method. The results show that the proposed approach demonstrates better adaptiveness to different dynamic and complex environments, as well as faster training speed over baseline methods.
Recently, multi-agent collaborative (MAC) perception has been proposed and outperformed the traditional single-agent perception in many applications, such as autonomous driving. However, MAC perception is more vulnerable to adversarial attacks than single-agent perception due to the information exchange. The attacker can easily degrade the performance of a victim agent by sending harmful information from a malicious agent nearby. In this paper, we extend adversarial attacks to an important perception task -- MAC object detection, where generic defenses such as adversarial training are no longer effective against these attacks. More importantly, we propose Malicious Agent Detection (MADE), a reactive defense specific to MAC perception that can be deployed by each agent to accurately detect and then remove any potential malicious agent in its local collaboration network. In particular, MADE inspects each agent in the network independently using a semi-supervised anomaly detector based on a double-hypothesis test with the Benjamini-Hochberg procedure to control the false positive rate of the inference. For the two hypothesis tests, we propose a match loss statistic and a collaborative reconstruction loss statistic, respectively, both based on the consistency between the agent to be inspected and the ego agent where our detector is deployed. We conduct comprehensive evaluations on a benchmark 3D dataset V2X-sim and a real-road dataset DAIR-V2X and show that with the protection of MADE, the drops in the average precision compared with the best-case "oracle" defender against our attack are merely 1.28% and 0.34%, respectively, much lower than 8.92% and 10.00% for adversarial training, respectively.
Distributed algorithms, particularly Diffusion Least Mean Square, are widely favored for their reliability, robustness, and fast convergence in various industries. However, limited observability of the target can compromise the integrity of the algorithm. To address this issue, this paper proposes a framework for analyzing combination strategies by drawing inspiration from signal flow analysis. A thresholding-based algorithm is also presented to identify and utilize the support vector in scenarios with missing information about the target vector's support. The proposed approach is demonstrated in two combination scenarios, showcasing the effectiveness of the algorithm in situations characterized by sparse observations in the time and transform domains.
There is a wide availability of methods for testing normality under the assumption of independent and identically distributed data. When data are dependent in space and/or time, however, assessing and testing the marginal behavior is considerably more challenging, as the marginal behavior is impacted by the degree of dependence. We propose a new approach to assess normality for dependent data by non-linearly incorporating existing statistics from normality tests as well as sample moments such as skewness and kurtosis through a neural network. We calibrate (deep) neural networks by simulated normal and non-normal data with a wide range of dependence structures and we determine the probability of rejecting the null hypothesis. We compare several approaches for normality tests and demonstrate the superiority of our method in terms of statistical power through an extensive simulation study. A real world application to global temperature data further demonstrates how the degree of spatio-temporal aggregation affects the marginal normality in the data.
Despite considerable theoretical progress in the training of neural networks viewed as a multi-agent system of neurons, particularly concerning biological plausibility and decentralized training, their applicability to real-world problems remains limited due to scalability issues. In contrast, error-backpropagation has demonstrated its effectiveness for training deep networks in practice. In this study, we propose a local objective for neurons that, when pursued by neurons individually, align them to exhibit similarities to error-backpropagation in terms of efficiency and scalability during training. For this purpose, we examine a neural network comprising decentralized, self-interested neurons seeking to maximize their local objective -- attention from subsequent layer neurons -- and identify the optimal strategy for neurons. We also analyze the relationship between this strategy and backpropagation, establishing conditions under which the derived strategy is equivalent to error-backpropagation. Lastly, we demonstrate the learning capacity of these multi-agent neural networks through experiments on three datasets and showcase their superior performance relative to error-backpropagation in a catastrophic forgetting benchmark.
Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in the autonomous driving sector, particularly in generalization and interpretability. We introduce a unique object-level multimodal LLM architecture that merges vectorized numeric modalities with a pre-trained LLM to improve context understanding in driving situations. We also present a new dataset of 160k QA pairs derived from 10k driving scenarios, paired with high quality control commands collected with RL agent and question answer pairs generated by teacher LLM (GPT-3.5). A distinct pretraining strategy is devised to align numeric vector modalities with static LLM representations using vector captioning language data. We also introduce an evaluation metric for Driving QA and demonstrate our LLM-driver's proficiency in interpreting driving scenarios, answering questions, and decision-making. Our findings highlight the potential of LLM-based driving action generation in comparison to traditional behavioral cloning. We make our benchmark, datasets, and model available for further exploration.
Large Language models (LLMs) possess the capability to engage In-context Learning (ICL) by leveraging a few demonstrations pertaining to a new downstream task as conditions. However, this particular learning paradigm suffers from high instability stemming from substantial variances induced by factors such as the input distribution of selected examples, their ordering, and prompt formats. In this work, we demonstrate that even when all these factors are held constant, the random selection of examples still results in high variance. Consequently, we aim to explore the informative ability of data examples by quantifying the Information Gain (IG) obtained in prediction after observing a given example candidate. Then we propose to sample those with maximum IG. Additionally, we identify the presence of template bias, which can lead to unfair evaluations of IG during the sampling process. To mitigate this bias, we introduce Calibration Before Sampling strategy. The experimental results illustrate that our proposed method can yield an average relative improvement of 14.3% across six classification tasks using three LLMs.
A community reveals the features and connections of its members that are different from those in other communities in a network. Detecting communities is of great significance in network analysis. Despite the classical spectral clustering and statistical inference methods, we notice a significant development of deep learning techniques for community detection in recent years with their advantages in handling high dimensional network data. Hence, a comprehensive overview of community detection's latest progress through deep learning is timely to both academics and practitioners. This survey devises and proposes a new taxonomy covering different categories of the state-of-the-art methods, including deep learning-based models upon deep neural networks, deep nonnegative matrix factorization and deep sparse filtering. The main category, i.e., deep neural networks, is further divided into convolutional networks, graph attention networks, generative adversarial networks and autoencoders. The survey also summarizes the popular benchmark data sets, model evaluation metrics, and open-source implementations to address experimentation settings. We then discuss the practical applications of community detection in various domains and point to implementation scenarios. Finally, we outline future directions by suggesting challenging topics in this fast-growing deep learning field.
Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have recently become increasingly popular due to their ability to learn complex systems of relations or interactions arising in a broad spectrum of problems ranging from biology and particle physics to social networks and recommendation systems. Despite the plethora of different models for deep learning on graphs, few approaches have been proposed thus far for dealing with graphs that present some sort of dynamic nature (e.g. evolving features or connectivity over time). In this paper, we present Temporal Graph Networks (TGNs), a generic, efficient framework for deep learning on dynamic graphs represented as sequences of timed events. Thanks to a novel combination of memory modules and graph-based operators, TGNs are able to significantly outperform previous approaches being at the same time more computationally efficient. We furthermore show that several previous models for learning on dynamic graphs can be cast as specific instances of our framework. We perform a detailed ablation study of different components of our framework and devise the best configuration that achieves state-of-the-art performance on several transductive and inductive prediction tasks for dynamic graphs.
Multi-relation Question Answering is a challenging task, due to the requirement of elaborated analysis on questions and reasoning over multiple fact triples in knowledge base. In this paper, we present a novel model called Interpretable Reasoning Network that employs an interpretable, hop-by-hop reasoning process for question answering. The model dynamically decides which part of an input question should be analyzed at each hop; predicts a relation that corresponds to the current parsed results; utilizes the predicted relation to update the question representation and the state of the reasoning process; and then drives the next-hop reasoning. Experiments show that our model yields state-of-the-art results on two datasets. More interestingly, the model can offer traceable and observable intermediate predictions for reasoning analysis and failure diagnosis, thereby allowing manual manipulation in predicting the final answer.
Detecting carried objects is one of the requirements for developing systems to reason about activities involving people and objects. We present an approach to detect carried objects from a single video frame with a novel method that incorporates features from multiple scales. Initially, a foreground mask in a video frame is segmented into multi-scale superpixels. Then the human-like regions in the segmented area are identified by matching a set of extracted features from superpixels against learned features in a codebook. A carried object probability map is generated using the complement of the matching probabilities of superpixels to human-like regions and background information. A group of superpixels with high carried object probability and strong edge support is then merged to obtain the shape of the carried object. We applied our method to two challenging datasets, and results show that our method is competitive with or better than the state-of-the-art.