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With automobiles becoming increasingly reliant on sensors to perform various driving tasks, it is important to encode the relevant CAN bus sensor data in a way that captures the general state of the vehicle in a compact form. In this paper, we develop a deep learning-based method, called Drive2Vec, for embedding such sensor data in a low-dimensional yet actionable form. Our method is based on stacked gated recurrent units (GRUs). It accepts a short interval of automobile sensor data as input and computes a low-dimensional representation of that data, which can then be used to accurately solve a range of tasks. With this representation, we (1) predict the exact values of the sensors in the short term (up to three seconds in the future), (2) forecast the long-term average values of these same sensors, (3) infer additional contextual information that is not encoded in the data, including the identity of the driver behind the wheel, and (4) build a knowledge base that can be used to auto-label data and identify risky states. We evaluate our approach on a dataset collected by Audi, which equipped a fleet of test vehicles with data loggers to store all sensor readings on 2,098 hours of driving on real roads. We show in several experiments that our method outperforms other baselines by up to 90%, and we further demonstrate how these embeddings of sensor data can be used to solve a variety of real-world automotive applications.
A Budgeted Markov Decision Process (BMDP) is an extension of a Markov Decision Process to critical applications requiring safety constraints. It relies on a notion of risk implemented in the shape of a cost signal constrained to lie below an - adjustable - threshold. So far, BMDPs could only be solved in the case of finite state spaces with known dynamics. This work extends the state-of-the-art to continuous spaces environments and unknown dynamics. We show that the solution to a BMDP is a fixed point of a novel Budgeted Bellman Optimality operator. This observation allows us to introduce natural extensions of Deep Reinforcement Learning algorithms to address large-scale BMDPs. We validate our approach on two simulated applications: spoken dialogue and autonomous driving.
We investigate active learning in Gaussian Process state-space models (GPSSM). Our problem is to actively steer the system through latent states by determining its inputs such that the underlying dynamics can be optimally learned by a GPSSM. In order that the most informative inputs are selected, we employ mutual information as our active learning criterion. In particular, we present two approaches for the approximation of mutual information for the GPSSM given latent states. The proposed approaches are evaluated in several physical systems where we actively learn the underlying non-linear dynamics represented by the state-space model.
spectral-based subspace learning is a common data preprocessing step in many machine learning pipelines. The main aim is to learn a meaningful low dimensional embedding of the data. However, most subspace learning methods do not take into consideration possible measurement inaccuracies or artifacts that can lead to data with high uncertainty. Thus, learning directly from raw data can be misleading and can negatively impact the accuracy. In this paper, we propose to model artifacts in training data using probability distributions; each data point is represented by a Gaussian distribution centered at the original data point and having a variance modeling its uncertainty. We reformulate the Graph Embedding framework to make it suitable for learning from distributions and we study as special cases the Linear Discriminant Analysis and the Marginal Fisher Analysis techniques. Furthermore, we propose two schemes for modeling data uncertainty based on pair-wise distances in an unsupervised and a supervised contexts.
To rapidly learn a new task, it is often essential for agents to explore efficiently -- especially when performance matters from the first timestep. One way to learn such behaviour is via meta-learning. Many existing methods however rely on dense rewards for meta-training, and can fail catastrophically if the rewards are sparse. Without a suitable reward signal, the need for exploration during meta-training is exacerbated. To address this, we propose HyperX, which uses novel reward bonuses for meta-training to explore in approximate hyper-state space (where hyper-states represent the environment state and the agents task belief). We show empirically that HyperX meta-learns better task-exploration and adapts more successfully to new tasks than existing methods.
We present a novel method for inferring ground-truth signal from multiple degraded signals, affected by different amounts of sensor exposure. The algorithm learns a multiplicative degradation effect by performing iterative corrections of two signals solely from the ratio between them. The degradation function d should be continuous, satisfy monotonicity, and d(0) = 1. We use smoothed monotonic regression method, where we easily incorporate the aforementioned criteria to the fitting part. We include theoretical analysis and prove convergence to the ground-truth signal for the noiseless measurement model. Lastly, we present an approach to fuse the noisy corrected signals using Gaussian processes. We use sparse Gaussian processes that can be utilized for a large number of measurements together with a specialized kernel that enables the estimation of noise values of all sensors. The data fusion framework naturally handles data gaps and provides a simple and powerful method for observing the signal trends on multiple timescales(long-term and short-term signal properties). The viability of correction method is evaluated on a synthetic dataset with known ground-truth signal.