With increasing automation, drivers' role progressively transitions from active operators to passive system supervisors, affecting their behaviour and cognitive processes. This study aims to understand better attention allocation and perceived cognitive load in manual, L2, and L3 driving in a realistic environment. We conducted a test-track experiment with 30 participants. While driving a prototype automated vehicle, participants were exposed to a passive auditory oddball task and their EEG was recorded. We studied the P3a ERP component elicited by novel environmental cues, an index of attention resources used to process the stimuli. The self-reported cognitive load was assessed using the NASA-TLX. Our findings revealed no significant difference in perceived cognitive load between manual and L2 driving, with L3 driving demonstrating a lower self-reported cognitive load. Despite this, P3a mean amplitude was highest during manual driving, indicating greater attention allocation towards processing environmental sounds compared to L2 and L3 driving. We argue that the need to integrate environmental information might be attenuated in L2 and L3 driving. Further empirical evidence is necessary to understand whether the decreased processing of environmental stimuli is due to top-down attention control leading to attention withdrawal or a lack of available resources due to high cognitive load. To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first attempt to use the passive oddball paradigm outside the laboratory. The insights of this study have significant implications for automation safety and user interface design.
Weakly-supervised temporal action localization (WTAL) is a practical yet challenging task. Due to large-scale datasets, most existing methods use a network pretrained in other datasets to extract features, which are not suitable enough for WTAL. To address this problem, researchers design several modules for feature enhancement, which improve the performance of the localization module, especially modeling the temporal relationship between snippets. However, all of them neglect the adverse effects of ambiguous information, which would reduce the discriminability of others. Considering this phenomenon, we propose Discriminability-Driven Graph Network (DDG-Net), which explicitly models ambiguous snippets and discriminative snippets with well-designed connections, preventing the transmission of ambiguous information and enhancing the discriminability of snippet-level representations. Additionally, we propose feature consistency loss to prevent the assimilation of features and drive the graph convolution network to generate more discriminative representations. Extensive experiments on THUMOS14 and ActivityNet1.2 benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of DDG-Net, establishing new state-of-the-art results on both datasets. Source code is available at \url{//github.com/XiaojunTang22/ICCV2023-DDGNet}.
Shared automated mobility-on-demand promises efficient, sustainable, and flexible transportation. Nevertheless, security concerns, resilience, and their mutual influence - especially at night - will likely be the most critical barriers to public adoption since passengers have to share rides with strangers without a human driver on board. As related work points out that information about fellow travelers might mitigate passengers' concerns, we designed two user interface variants to investigate the role of this information in an exploratory within-subjects user study (N = 24). Participants experienced four automated day and night rides with varying personal information about co-passengers in a simulated environment. The results of the mixed-method study indicate that having information about other passengers (e.g., photo, gender, and name) positively affects user experience at night. In contrast, it is less necessary during the day. Considering participants' simultaneously raised privacy demands poses a substantial challenge for resilient system design.
Wireless short-packet communications pose challenges to the security and reliability of the transmission. Besides, the proactive warder compounds these challenges, who detects and interferes with the potential transmission. An extra jamming channel is introduced by the proactive warder compared with the passive one, resulting in the inapplicability of analytical methods and results in exsiting works. Thus, effective system design schemes are required for short-packet communications against the proactive warder. To address this issue, we consider the analysis and design of covert and reliable transmissions for above systems. Specifically, to investigate the reliable and covert performance of the system, detection error probability at the warder and decoding error probability at the receiver are derived, which is affected by both the transmit power and the jamming power. Furthermore, to maximize the effective throughput, an optimization framework is proposed under reliability and covertness constraints. Numerical results verify the accuracy of analytical results and the feasibility of the optimization framework. It is shown that the tradeoff between transmission reliability and covertness is changed by the proactive warder compared with the passive one. Besides, it is shown that longer blocklength is always beneficial to improve the throughput for systems with optimized transmission rates. But when transmission rates are fixed, the blocklength should be carefully designed since the maximum one is not optimal in this case.
Despite the significant research efforts on trajectory prediction for automated driving, limited work exists on assessing the prediction reliability. To address this limitation we propose an approach that covers two sources of error, namely novel situations with out-of-distribution (OOD) detection and the complexity in in-distribution (ID) situations with uncertainty estimation. We introduce two modules next to an encoder-decoder network for trajectory prediction. Firstly, a Gaussian mixture model learns the probability density function of the ID encoder features during training, and then it is used to detect the OOD samples in regions of the feature space with low likelihood. Secondly, an error regression network is applied to the encoder, which learns to estimate the trajectory prediction error in supervised training. During inference, the estimated prediction error is used as the uncertainty. In our experiments, the combination of both modules outperforms the prior work in OOD detection and uncertainty estimation, on the Shifts robust trajectory prediction dataset by $2.8 \%$ and $10.1 \%$, respectively. The code is publicly available.
Foundation models could eventually introduce several pathways for undermining state security: accidents, inadvertent escalation, unintentional conflict, the proliferation of weapons, and the interference with human diplomacy are just a few on a long list. The Confidence-Building Measures for Artificial Intelligence workshop hosted by the Geopolitics Team at OpenAI and the Berkeley Risk and Security Lab at the University of California brought together a multistakeholder group to think through the tools and strategies to mitigate the potential risks introduced by foundation models to international security. Originating in the Cold War, confidence-building measures (CBMs) are actions that reduce hostility, prevent conflict escalation, and improve trust between parties. The flexibility of CBMs make them a key instrument for navigating the rapid changes in the foundation model landscape. Participants identified the following CBMs that directly apply to foundation models and which are further explained in this conference proceedings: 1. crisis hotlines 2. incident sharing 3. model, transparency, and system cards 4. content provenance and watermarks 5. collaborative red teaming and table-top exercises and 6. dataset and evaluation sharing. Because most foundation model developers are non-government entities, many CBMs will need to involve a wider stakeholder community. These measures can be implemented either by AI labs or by relevant government actors.
As a crucial infrastructure of intelligent mobile robots, LiDAR-Inertial odometry (LIO) provides the basic capability of state estimation by tracking LiDAR scans. The high-accuracy tracking generally involves the kNN search, which is used with minimizing the point-to-plane distance. The cost for this, however, is maintaining a large local map and performing kNN plane fit for each point. In this work, we reduce both time and space complexity of LIO by saving these unnecessary costs. Technically, we design a plane pre-fitting (PPF) pipeline to track the basic skeleton of the 3D scene. In PPF, planes are not fitted individually for each scan, let alone for each point, but are updated incrementally as the scene 'flows'. Unlike kNN, the PPF is more robust to noisy and non-strict planes with our iterative Principal Component Analyse (iPCA) refinement. Moreover, a simple yet effective sandwich layer is introduced to eliminate false point-to-plane matches. Our method was extensively tested on a total number of 22 sequences across 5 open datasets, and evaluated in 3 existing state-of-the-art LIO systems. By contrast, LIO-PPF can consume only 36% of the original local map size to achieve up to 4x faster residual computing and 1.92x overall FPS, while maintaining the same level of accuracy. We fully open source our implementation at //github.com/xingyuuchen/LIO-PPF.
Despite the significant research efforts on trajectory prediction for automated driving, limited work exists on assessing the prediction reliability. To address this limitation we propose an approach that covers two sources of error, namely novel situations with out-of-distribution (OOD) detection and the complexity in in-distribution (ID) situations with uncertainty estimation. We introduce two modules next to an encoder-decoder network for trajectory prediction. Firstly, a Gaussian mixture model learns the probability density function of the ID encoder features during training, and then it is used to detect the OOD samples in regions of the feature space with low likelihood. Secondly, an error regression network is applied to the encoder, which learns to estimate the trajectory prediction error in supervised training. During inference, the estimated prediction error is used as the uncertainty. In our experiments, the combination of both modules outperforms the prior work in OOD detection and uncertainty estimation, on the Shifts robust trajectory prediction dataset by $2.8 \%$ and $10.1 \%$, respectively. The code is publicly available.
For Industry 4.0 Revolution, cooperative autonomous mobility systems are widely used based on multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL). However, the MARL-based algorithms suffer from huge parameter utilization and convergence difficulties with many agents. To tackle these problems, a quantum MARL (QMARL) algorithm based on the concept of actor-critic network is proposed, which is beneficial in terms of scalability, to deal with the limitations in the noisy intermediate-scale quantum (NISQ) era. Additionally, our QMARL is also beneficial in terms of efficient parameter utilization and fast convergence due to quantum supremacy. Note that the reward in our QMARL is defined as task precision over computation time in multiple agents, thus, multi-agent cooperation can be realized. For further improvement, an additional technique for scalability is proposed, which is called projection value measure (PVM). Based on PVM, our proposed QMARL can achieve the highest reward, by reducing the action dimension into a logarithmic-scale. Finally, we can conclude that our proposed QMARL with PVM outperforms the other algorithms in terms of efficient parameter utilization, fast convergence, and scalability.
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.