Mapping the surrounding environment is essential for the successful operation of autonomous robots. While extensive research has focused on mapping geometric structures and static objects, the environment is also influenced by the movement of dynamic objects. Incorporating information about spatial motion patterns can allow mobile robots to navigate and operate successfully in populated areas. In this paper, we propose a deep state-space model that learns the map representations of spatial motion patterns and how they change over time at a certain place. To evaluate our methods, we use two different datasets: one generated dataset with specific motion patterns and another with real-world pedestrian data. We test the performance of our model by evaluating its learning ability, mapping quality, and application to downstream tasks. The results demonstrate that our model can effectively learn the corresponding motion pattern, and has the potential to be applied to robotic application tasks.
As the current detection solutions of distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS) need additional infrastructures to handle high aggregate data rates, they are not suitable for sensor networks or the Internet of Things. Besides, the security architecture of software-defined sensor networks needs to pay attention to the vulnerabilities of both software-defined networks and sensor networks. In this paper, we propose a network-aware automated machine learning (AutoML) framework which detects DDoS attacks in software-defined sensor networks. Our framework selects an ideal machine learning algorithm to detect DDoS attacks in network-constrained environments, using metrics such as variable traffic load, heterogeneous traffic rate, and detection time while preventing over-fitting. Our contributions are two-fold: (i) we first investigate the trade-off between the efficiency of ML algorithms and network/traffic state in the scope of DDoS detection. (ii) we design and implement a software architecture containing open-source network tools, with the deployment of multiple ML algorithms. Lastly, we show that under the denial of service attacks, our framework ensures the traffic packets are still delivered within the network with additional delays.
A robot providing mealtime assistance must perform specialized maneuvers with various utensils in order to pick up and feed a range of food items. Beyond these dexterous low-level skills, an assistive robot must also plan these strategies in sequence over a long horizon to clear a plate and complete a meal. Previous methods in robot-assisted feeding introduce highly specialized primitives for food handling without a means to compose them together. Meanwhile, existing approaches to long-horizon manipulation lack the flexibility to embed highly specialized primitives into their frameworks. We propose Visual Action Planning OveR Sequences (VAPORS), a framework for long-horizon food acquisition. VAPORS learns a policy for high-level action selection by leveraging learned latent plate dynamics in simulation. To carry out sequential plans in the real world, VAPORS delegates action execution to visually parameterized primitives. We validate our approach on complex real-world acquisition trials involving noodle acquisition and bimanual scooping of jelly beans. Across 38 plates, VAPORS acquires much more efficiently than baselines, generalizes across realistic plate variations such as toppings and sauces, and qualitatively appeals to user feeding preferences in a survey conducted across 49 individuals. Code, datasets, videos, and supplementary materials can be found on our website: //sites.google.com/view/vaporsbot.
The ability to handle objects in cluttered environment has been long anticipated by robotic community. However, most of works merely focus on manipulation instead of rendering hidden semantic information in cluttered objects. In this work, we introduce the scene graph for embodied exploration in cluttered scenarios to solve this problem. To validate our method in cluttered scenario, we adopt the Manipulation Question Answering (MQA) tasks as our test benchmark, which requires an embodied robot to have the active exploration ability and semantic understanding ability of vision and language.As a general solution framework to the task, we propose an imitation learning method to generate manipulations for exploration. Meanwhile, a VQA model based on dynamic scene graph is adopted to comprehend a series of RGB frames from wrist camera of manipulator along with every step of manipulation is conducted to answer questions in our framework.The experiments on of MQA dataset with different interaction requirements demonstrate that our proposed framework is effective for MQA task a representative of tasks in cluttered scenario.
Interacting with the actual environment to acquire data is often costly and time-consuming in robotic tasks. Model-based offline reinforcement learning (RL) provides a feasible solution. On the one hand, it eliminates the requirements of interaction with the actual environment. On the other hand, it learns the transition dynamics and reward function from the offline datasets and generates simulated rollouts to accelerate training. Previous model-based offline RL methods adopt probabilistic ensemble neural networks (NN) to model aleatoric uncertainty and epistemic uncertainty. However, this results in an exponential increase in training time and computing resource requirements. Furthermore, these methods are easily disturbed by the accumulative errors of the environment dynamics models when simulating long-term rollouts. To solve the above problems, we propose an uncertainty-aware sequence modeling architecture called Environment Transformer. It models the probability distribution of the environment dynamics and reward function to capture aleatoric uncertainty and treats epistemic uncertainty as a learnable noise parameter. Benefiting from the accurate modeling of the transition dynamics and reward function, Environment Transformer can be combined with arbitrary planning, dynamics programming, or policy optimization algorithms for offline RL. In this case, we perform Conservative Q-Learning (CQL) to learn a conservative Q-function. Through simulation experiments, we demonstrate that our method achieves or exceeds state-of-the-art performance in widely studied offline RL benchmarks. Moreover, we show that Environment Transformer's simulated rollout quality, sample efficiency, and long-term rollout simulation capability are superior to those of previous model-based offline RL methods.
Synthesizing inductive loop invariants is fundamental to automating program verification. In this work, we observe that Large Language Models (such as gpt-3.5 or gpt-4) are capable of synthesizing loop invariants for a class of programs in a 0-shot setting, yet require several samples to generate the correct invariants. This can lead to a large number of calls to a program verifier to establish an invariant. To address this issue, we propose a {\it re-ranking} approach for the generated results of LLMs. We have designed a ranker that can distinguish between correct inductive invariants and incorrect attempts based on the problem definition. The ranker is optimized as a contrastive ranker. Experimental results demonstrate that this re-ranking mechanism significantly improves the ranking of correct invariants among the generated candidates, leading to a notable reduction in the number of calls to a verifier.
The application of artificial intelligence to simulate air-to-air combat scenarios is attracting increasing attention. To date the high-dimensional state and action spaces, the high complexity of situation information (such as imperfect and filtered information, stochasticity, incomplete knowledge about mission targets) and the nonlinear flight dynamics pose significant challenges for accurate air combat decision-making. These challenges are exacerbated when multiple heterogeneous agents are involved. We propose a hierarchical multi-agent reinforcement learning framework for air-to-air combat with multiple heterogeneous agents. In our framework, the decision-making process is divided into two stages of abstraction, where heterogeneous low-level policies control the action of individual units, and a high-level commander policy issues macro commands given the overall mission targets. Low-level policies are trained for accurate unit combat control. Their training is organized in a learning curriculum with increasingly complex training scenarios and league-based self-play. The commander policy is trained on mission targets given pre-trained low-level policies. The empirical validation advocates the advantages of our design choices.
When is heterogeneity in the composition of an autonomous robotic team beneficial and when is it detrimental? We investigate and answer this question in the context of a minimally viable model that examines the role of heterogeneous speeds in perimeter defense problems, where defenders share a total allocated speed budget. We consider two distinct problem settings and develop strategies based on dynamic programming and on local interaction rules. We present a theoretical analysis of both approaches and our results are extensively validated using simulations. Interestingly, our results demonstrate that the viability of heterogeneous teams depends on the amount of information available to the defenders. Moreover, our results suggest a universality property: across a wide range of problem parameters the optimal ratio of the speeds of the defenders remains nearly constant.
We present a large-scale study on unsupervised spatiotemporal representation learning from videos. With a unified perspective on four recent image-based frameworks, we study a simple objective that can easily generalize all these methods to space-time. Our objective encourages temporally-persistent features in the same video, and in spite of its simplicity, it works surprisingly well across: (i) different unsupervised frameworks, (ii) pre-training datasets, (iii) downstream datasets, and (iv) backbone architectures. We draw a series of intriguing observations from this study, e.g., we discover that encouraging long-spanned persistency can be effective even if the timespan is 60 seconds. In addition to state-of-the-art results in multiple benchmarks, we report a few promising cases in which unsupervised pre-training can outperform its supervised counterpart. Code is made available at //github.com/facebookresearch/SlowFast
Seamlessly interacting with humans or robots is hard because these agents are non-stationary. They update their policy in response to the ego agent's behavior, and the ego agent must anticipate these changes to co-adapt. Inspired by humans, we recognize that robots do not need to explicitly model every low-level action another agent will make; instead, we can capture the latent strategy of other agents through high-level representations. We propose a reinforcement learning-based framework for learning latent representations of an agent's policy, where the ego agent identifies the relationship between its behavior and the other agent's future strategy. The ego agent then leverages these latent dynamics to influence the other agent, purposely guiding them towards policies suitable for co-adaptation. Across several simulated domains and a real-world air hockey game, our approach outperforms the alternatives and learns to influence the other agent.
Knowledge graph embedding, which aims to represent entities and relations as low dimensional vectors (or matrices, tensors, etc.), has been shown to be a powerful technique for predicting missing links in knowledge graphs. Existing knowledge graph embedding models mainly focus on modeling relation patterns such as symmetry/antisymmetry, inversion, and composition. However, many existing approaches fail to model semantic hierarchies, which are common in real-world applications. To address this challenge, we propose a novel knowledge graph embedding model---namely, Hierarchy-Aware Knowledge Graph Embedding (HAKE)---which maps entities into the polar coordinate system. HAKE is inspired by the fact that concentric circles in the polar coordinate system can naturally reflect the hierarchy. Specifically, the radial coordinate aims to model entities at different levels of the hierarchy, and entities with smaller radii are expected to be at higher levels; the angular coordinate aims to distinguish entities at the same level of the hierarchy, and these entities are expected to have roughly the same radii but different angles. Experiments demonstrate that HAKE can effectively model the semantic hierarchies in knowledge graphs, and significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets for the link prediction task.