Active safety systems on vehicles often face problems with false alarms. Most active safety systems predict the driver's trajectory with the assumption that the driver is always in a normal emotion, and then infer risks. However, the driver's trajectory uncertainty increases under abnormal emotions. This paper proposes a new trajectory prediction model: CPSOR-GCN, which predicts vehicle trajectories under abnormal emotions. At the physical level, the interaction features between vehicles are extracted by the physical GCN module. At the cognitive level, SOR cognitive theory is used as prior knowledge to build a Dynamic Bayesian Network (DBN) structure. The conditional probability and state transition probability of nodes from the calibrated SOR-DBN quantify the causal relationship between cognitive factors, which is embedded into the cognitive GCN module to extract the characteristics of the influence mechanism of emotions on driving behavior. The CARLA-SUMO joint driving simulation platform was built to develop dangerous pre-crash scenarios. Methods of recreating traffic scenes were used to naturally induce abnormal emotions. The experiment collected data from 26 participants to verify the proposed model. Compared with the model that only considers physical motion features, the prediction accuracy of the proposed model is increased by 68.70%. Furthermore,considering the SOR-DBN reduces the prediction error of the trajectory by 15.93%. Compared with other advanced trajectory prediction models, the results of CPSOR-GCN also have lower errors. This model can be integrated into active safety systems to better adapt to the driver's emotions, which could effectively reduce false alarms.
LiDAR-camera fusion can enhance the performance of 3D object detection by utilizing complementary information between depth-aware LiDAR points and semantically rich images. Existing voxel-based methods face significant challenges when fusing sparse voxel features with dense image features in a one-to-one manner, resulting in the loss of the advantages of images, including semantic and continuity information, leading to sub-optimal detection performance, especially at long distances. In this paper, we present VoxelNextFusion, a multi-modal 3D object detection framework specifically designed for voxel-based methods, which effectively bridges the gap between sparse point clouds and dense images. In particular, we propose a voxel-based image pipeline that involves projecting point clouds onto images to obtain both pixel- and patch-level features. These features are then fused using a self-attention to obtain a combined representation. Moreover, to address the issue of background features present in patches, we propose a feature importance module that effectively distinguishes between foreground and background features, thus minimizing the impact of the background features. Extensive experiments were conducted on the widely used KITTI and nuScenes 3D object detection benchmarks. Notably, our VoxelNextFusion achieved around +3.20% in [email protected] improvement for car detection in hard level compared to the Voxel R-CNN baseline on the KITTI test dataset
In order to further advance the accuracy and robustness of the incremental parameter estimation-based rotation averaging methods, in this paper, a new member of the Incremental Rotation Averaging (IRA) family is introduced, which is termed as IRAv4. As the most significant feature of the IRAv4, a task-specific connected dominating set is extracted to serve as a more reliable and accurate reference for rotation global alignment. In addition, to further address the limitations of the existing rotation averaging benchmark of relying on the slightly outdated Bundler camera calibration results as ground truths and focusing solely on rotation estimation accuracy, this paper presents a new COLMAP-based rotation averaging benchmark that incorporates a cross check between COLMAP and Bundler, and employ the accuracy of both rotation and downstream location estimation as evaluation metrics, which is desired to provide a more reliable and comprehensive evaluation tool for the rotation averaging research. Comprehensive comparisons between the proposed IRAv4 and other mainstream rotation averaging methods on this new benchmark demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach.
Autonomous driving and intelligent transportation applications have dramatically increased the demand for high-accuracy and low-latency localization services. While cellular networks are potentially capable of target detection and localization, achieving accurate and reliable positioning faces critical challenges. Particularly, the relatively small radar cross sections (RCS) of moving targets and the high complexity for measurement association give rise to weak echo signals and discrepancies in the measurements. To tackle this issue, we propose a novel approach for multi-target localization by leveraging the controllable signal reflection capabilities of intelligent reflecting surfaces (IRSs). Specifically, IRSs are strategically mounted on the targets (e.g., vehicles and robots), enabling effective association of multiple measurements and facilitating the localization process. We aim to minimize the maximum Cram\'er-Rao lower bound (CRLB) of targets by jointly optimizing the target association, the IRS phase shifts, and the dwell time. However, solving this CRLB optimization problem is non-trivial due to the non-convex objective function and closely coupled variables. For single-target localization, a simplified closed-form expression is presented for the case where base stations (BSs) can be deployed flexibly, and the optimal BS location is derived to provide a lower performance bound of the original problem ...
Modern RISC-V platforms control and monitor security-critical systems such as industrial controllers and autonomous vehicles. While these platforms feature a Root-of-Trust (RoT) to store authentication secrets and enable secure boot technologies, they often lack Control-Flow Integrity (CFI) enforcement and are vulnerable to cyber-attacks which divert the control flow of an application to trigger malicious behaviours. Recent techniques to enforce CFI in RISC-V systems include ISA modifications or custom hardware IPs, all requiring ad-hoc binary toolchains or design of CFI primitives in hardware. This paper proposes TitanCFI, a novel approach to enforce CFI in the RoT. TitanCFI modifies the commit stage of the protected core to stream control flow instructions to the RoT and it integrates the CFI enforcement policy in the RoT firmware. Our approach enables maximum reuse of the hardware resource present in the System-on-Chip (SoC), and it avoids the design of custom IPs and the modification of the compilation toolchain, while exploiting the RoT tamper-proof storage and cryptographic accelerators to secure CFI metadata. We implemented the proposed architecture on a modern RISC-V SoC along with a return address protection policy in the RoT, and benchmarked area and runtime overhead. Experimental results show that TitanCFI achieves overhead comparable to SoA hardware CFI solutions for most benchmarks, with lower area overhead, resulting in 1% of additional area occupation.
Governance protocols define the means for amending or changing smart contracts without any centralized authority. They distribute the decision-making power to every user of the smart contract: Users vote on accepting or rejecting every change. In this work, we review and characterize decentralized governance in practice, using Compound and Uniswap -- two widely used governance protocols -- as a case study. We reveal a high concentration of voting power in both Compound and Uniswap: 10 voters hold together 57.86% and 44.72% of the voting power, respectively. Although proposals to change or amend the protocol receive, on average, a substantial number of votes (i.e., 89.39%) in favor within the Compound protocol, they require fewer than three voters to obtain 50% or more votes. We show that voting on Compound proposals can be unfairly expensive for small token holders, and we discover voting coalitions that can further marginalize these users.
Autonomous driving systems (ADSs) integrate sensing, perception, drive control, and several other critical tasks in autonomous vehicles, motivating research into techniques for assessing their safety. While there are several approaches for testing and analysing them in high-fidelity simulators, ADSs may still encounter additional critical scenarios beyond those covered once they are deployed on real roads. An additional level of confidence can be established by monitoring and enforcing critical properties when the ADS is running. Existing work, however, is only able to monitor simple safety properties (e.g., avoidance of collisions) and is limited to blunt enforcement mechanisms such as hitting the emergency brakes. In this work, we propose REDriver, a general and modular approach to runtime enforcement, in which users can specify a broad range of properties (e.g., national traffic laws) in a specification language based on signal temporal logic (STL). REDriver monitors the planned trajectory of the ADS based on a quantitative semantics of STL, and uses a gradient-driven algorithm to repair the trajectory when a violation of the specification is likely. We implemented REDriver for two versions of Apollo (i.e., a popular ADS), and subjected it to a benchmark of violations of Chinese traffic laws. The results show that REDriver significantly improves Apollo's conformance to the specification with minimal overhead.
End-to-end automatic speech recognition (ASR) models have seen revolutionary quality gains with the recent development of large-scale universal speech models (USM). However, deploying these massive USMs is extremely expensive due to the enormous memory usage and computational cost. Therefore, model compression is an important research topic to fit USM-based ASR under budget in real-world scenarios. In this study, we propose a USM fine-tuning approach for ASR, with a low-bit quantization and N:M structured sparsity aware paradigm on the model weights, reducing the model complexity from parameter precision and matrix topology perspectives. We conducted extensive experiments with a 2-billion parameter USM on a large-scale voice search dataset to evaluate our proposed method. A series of ablation studies validate the effectiveness of up to int4 quantization and 2:4 sparsity. However, a single compression technique fails to recover the performance well under extreme setups including int2 quantization and 1:4 sparsity. By contrast, our proposed method can compress the model to have 9.4% of the size, at the cost of only 7.3% relative word error rate (WER) regressions. We also provided in-depth analyses on the results and discussions on the limitations and potential solutions, which would be valuable for future studies.
Connected and automated vehicles (CAVs) have become a transformative technology that can change our daily life. Currently, millimeter-wave (mmWave) bands are identified as the promising CAV connectivity solution. While it can provide high data rate, their realization faces many challenges such as high attenuation during mmWave signal propagation and mobility management. Existing solution has to initiate pilot signal to measure channel information, then apply signal processing to calculate the best narrow beam towards the receiver end to guarantee sufficient signal power. This process takes significant overhead and time, hence not suitable for vehicles. In this study, we propose an autonomous and low-cost testbed to collect extensive co-located mmWave signal and other sensors data such as LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging), cameras, ultrasonic, etc, traditionally for ``automated'', to facilitate mmWave vehicular communications. Intuitively, these sensors can build a 3D map around the vehicle and signal propagation path can be estimated, eliminating iterative the process via pilot signals. This multimodal data fusion, together with AI, is expected to bring significant advances in ``connected'' research.
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.
We survey research on self-driving cars published in the literature focusing on autonomous cars developed since the DARPA challenges, which are equipped with an autonomy system that can be categorized as SAE level 3 or higher. The architecture of the autonomy system of self-driving cars is typically organized into the perception system and the decision-making system. The perception system is generally divided into many subsystems responsible for tasks such as self-driving-car localization, static obstacles mapping, moving obstacles detection and tracking, road mapping, traffic signalization detection and recognition, among others. The decision-making system is commonly partitioned as well into many subsystems responsible for tasks such as route planning, path planning, behavior selection, motion planning, and control. In this survey, we present the typical architecture of the autonomy system of self-driving cars. We also review research on relevant methods for perception and decision making. Furthermore, we present a detailed description of the architecture of the autonomy system of the UFES's car, IARA. Finally, we list prominent autonomous research cars developed by technology companies and reported in the media.