Matching Items (17)
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- All Subjects: artificial intelligence
- All Subjects: Robot Policies
- Creators: Srivastava, Siddharth
- Member of: ASU Electronic Theses and Dissertations
- Member of: Barrett, The Honors College Thesis/Creative Project Collection
- Resource Type: Text
Description
While there are many existing systems which take natural language descriptions and use them to generate images or text, few systems exist to generate 3d renderings or environments based on natural language. Most of those systems are very limited in scope and require precise, predefined language to work, or large well tagged datasets for their models. In this project I attempt to apply concepts in NLP and procedural generation to a system which can generate a rough scene estimation of a natural language description in a 3d environment from a free use database of models. The primary objective of this system, rather than a completely accurate representation, is to generate a useful or interesting result. The use of such a system comes in assisting designers who utilize 3d scenes or environments for their work.
ContributorsHann, Jacob R. (Author) / Kobayashi, Yoshihiro (Thesis director) / Srivastava, Siddharth (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / Computing and Informatics Program (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
Classical planning is a field of Artificial Intelligence concerned with allowing autonomous agents to make reasonable decisions in complex environments. This work investigates
the application of deep learning and planning techniques, with the aim of constructing generalized plans capable of solving multiple problem instances. We construct a Deep Neural Network that, given an abstract problem state, predicts both (i) the best action to be taken from that state and (ii) the generalized “role” of the object being manipulated. The neural network was tested on two classical planning domains: the blocks world domain and the logistic domain. Results indicate that neural networks are capable of making such
predictions with high accuracy, indicating a promising new framework for approaching generalized planning problems.
the application of deep learning and planning techniques, with the aim of constructing generalized plans capable of solving multiple problem instances. We construct a Deep Neural Network that, given an abstract problem state, predicts both (i) the best action to be taken from that state and (ii) the generalized “role” of the object being manipulated. The neural network was tested on two classical planning domains: the blocks world domain and the logistic domain. Results indicate that neural networks are capable of making such
predictions with high accuracy, indicating a promising new framework for approaching generalized planning problems.
ContributorsNakhleh, Julia Blair (Author) / Srivastava, Siddharth (Thesis director) / Fainekos, Georgios (Committee member) / Computer Science and Engineering Program (Contributor) / School of International Letters and Cultures (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2019-05
Description
Recent breakthroughs in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have brought the dream of developing and deploying complex AI systems that can potentially transform everyday life closer to reality than ever before. However, the growing realization that there might soon be people from all walks of life using and working with these systems has also spurred a lot of interest in ensuring that AI systems can efficiently and effectively work and collaborate with their intended users. Chief among the efforts in this direction has been the pursuit of imbuing these agents with the ability to provide intuitive and useful explanations regarding their decisions and actions to end-users. In this dissertation, I will describe various works that I have done in the area of explaining sequential decision-making problems. Furthermore, I will frame the discussions of my work within a broader framework for understanding and analyzing explainable AI (XAI). My works herein tackle many of the core challenges related to explaining automated decisions to users including (1) techniques to address asymmetry in knowledge between the user and the system, (2) techniques to address asymmetry in inferential capabilities, and (3) techniques to address vocabulary mismatch.The dissertation will also describe the works I have done in generating interpretable behavior and policy summarization. I will conclude this dissertation, by using the framework of human-aware explanation as a lens to analyze and understand the current landscape of explainable planning.
ContributorsSreedharan, Sarath (Author) / Kambhampati, Subbarao (Thesis advisor) / Kim, Been (Committee member) / Smith, David E (Committee member) / Srivastava, Siddharth (Committee member) / Zhang, Yu (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
While the growing prevalence of robots in industry and daily life necessitatesknowing how to operate them safely and effectively, the steep learning curve of
programming languages and formal AI education is a barrier for most beginner users.
This thesis presents an interactive platform which leverages a block based programming
interface with natural language instructions to teach robotics programming to novice
users. An integrated robot simulator allows users to view the execution of their
high-level plan, with the hierarchical low level planning abstracted away from them.
Users are provided human-understandable explanations of their planning failures and
hints using LLMs to enhance the learning process. The results obtained from a user
study conducted with students having minimal programming experience show that
JEDAI-Ed is successful in teaching robotic planning to users, as well as increasing
their curiosity about AI in general.
ContributorsDobhal, Daksh (Author) / Srivastava, Siddharth (Thesis advisor) / Gopalan, Nakul (Committee member) / Seifi, Hasti (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2024
Description
Robot motion and control remains a complex problem both in general and inthe field of machine learning (ML). Without ML approaches, robot controllers are
typically designed manually, which can take considerable time, generally requiring
accounting for a range of edge cases and often producing models highly constrained
to specific tasks. ML can decrease the time it takes to create a model while simultaneously allowing it to operate on a broader range of tasks. The utilization of neural
networks to learn from demonstration is, in particular, an approach with growing
popularity due to its potential to quickly fit the parameters of a model to mimic
training data.
Many such neural networks, especially in the realm of transformer-based architectures, act more as planners, taking in an initial context and then generating a
sequence from that context one step at a time. Others hybridize the approach, predicting a latent plan and conditioning immediate actions on that plan. Such approaches may limit a model’s ability to interact with a dynamic environment, needing to replan to fully update its understanding of the environmental context. In this
thesis, Language-commanded Scene-aware Action Response (LanSAR) is proposed as
a reactive transformer-based neural network that makes immediate decisions based
on previous actions and environmental changes. Its actions are further conditioned
on a language command, serving as a control mechanism while also narrowing the
distribution of possible actions around this command. It is shown that LanSAR successfully learns a strong representation of multimodal visual and spatial input, and
learns reasonable motions in relation to most language commands. It is also shown
that LanSAR can struggle with both the accuracy of motions and understanding the
specific semantics of language commands
ContributorsHardy, Adam (Author) / Ben Amor, Heni (Thesis advisor) / Srivastava, Siddharth (Committee member) / Pavlic, Theodore (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2024
Description
Reinforcement Learning (RL) presents a diverse and expansive collection of approaches that enable systems to learn and adapt through interaction with their environments. However, the widespread deployment of RL in real-world applications is hindered by challenges related to sample efficiency and the interpretability of decision-making processes. This thesis addresses the critical challenges of sample efficiency and interpretability in reinforcement learning (RL), which are pivotal for advancing RL applications in complex, real-world scenarios.This work first presents a novel approach for learning dynamic abstract representations for continuous or parameterized state and action spaces. Empirical evaluations show that the proposed approach achieves a higher sample efficiency and beat state- of-the-art Deep-RL methods. Second, it presents a new approach HOPL for Transfer Reinforcement Learning (RL) for Stochastic Shortest Path (SSP) problems in factored domains with unknown transition functions. This approach continually learns transferable, generalizable knowledge in the form of symbolically represented options and integrates search techniques with RL to solve new problems by efficiently composing the learned options. The empirical results show that the approach achieves superior sample efficiency as compared to SOTA methods for transfering learned knowledge.
ContributorsVerma, Shivanshu (Author) / Srivastava, Siddharth (Thesis advisor) / Gopalan, Nakul (Committee member) / Choi, YooJung (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2024
Description
Recent advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have brought AI closer to laypeople than ever before. This leads to a pervasive problem: how would a user ascertain whether an AI system will be safe, reliable, or useful in a given situation? This problem becomes particularly challenging when it is considered that most autonomous systems are not designed by their users; the internal software of these systems may be unavailable or difficult to understand; and the functionality of these systems may even change from initial specifications as a result of learning. To overcome these challenges, this dissertation proposes a paradigm for third-party autonomous assessment of black-box taskable AI systems. The four main desiderata of such assessment systems are: (i) interpretability: generating a description of the AI system's functionality in a language that the target user can understand; (ii) correctness: ensuring that the description of AI system's working is accurate; (iii) generalizability creating a solution approach that works well for different types of AI systems; and (iv) minimal requirements: creating an assessment system that does not place complex requirements on AI systems to support the third-party assessment, otherwise the manufacturers of AI system's might not support such an assessment. To satisfy these properties, this dissertation presents algorithms and requirements that would enable user-aligned autonomous assessment that helps the user understand the limits of a black-box AI system's safe operability. This dissertation proposes a personalized AI assessment module that discovers the high-level ``capabilities'' of an AI system with arbitrary internal planning algorithms/policies and learns an accurate symbolic description of these capabilities in terms of concepts that a user understands. Furthermore, the dissertation includes the associated theoretical results and the empirical evaluations. The results show that (i) a primitive query-response interface can enable the development of autonomous assessment modules that can derive a causally accurate user-interpretable model of the system's capabilities efficiently, and (ii) such descriptions are easier to understand and reason with for the users than the agent's primitive actions.
ContributorsVerma, Pulkit (Author) / Srivastava, Siddharth (Thesis advisor) / Cooke, Nancy (Committee member) / Fainekos, Georgios (Committee member) / Zhang, Yu (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2024
Description
In today's world, robotic technology has become increasingly prevalent across various fields such as manufacturing, warehouses, delivery, and household applications. Planning is crucial for robots to solve various tasks in such difficult domains. However, most robots rely heavily on humans for world models that enable planning. Consequently, it is not only expensive to create such world models, as it requires human experts who understand the domain as well as robot limitations, these models may also be biased by human embodiment, which can be limiting for robots whose kinematics are not human-like.
This thesis answers the fundamental question: Can we learn such world models automatically? This research shows that we can learn complex world models directly from unannotated and unlabeled demonstrations containing only the configurations of the robot and the objects in the environment. The core contributions of this thesis are the first known approaches for i) task and motion planning that explicitly handle stochasticity, ii) automatically inventing neuro-symbolic state and action abstractions for deterministic and stochastic motion planning, and iii) automatically inventing relational and interpretable world models in the form of symbolic predicates and actions. This thesis also presents a thorough and rigorous empirical experimentation. With experiments in both simulated and real-world settings, this thesis has demonstrated the efficacy and robustness of automatically learned world models in overcoming challenges, generalizing beyond situations encountered during training.
ContributorsShah, Naman (Author) / Srivastava, Siddharth (Thesis advisor) / Kambhampati, Subbarao (Committee member) / Konidaris, George (Committee member) / Speranzon, Alberto (Committee member) / Zhang, Yu (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2024
Description
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a powerful methodology for teaching autonomous agents complex behaviors and skills. A critical component in most RL algorithms is the reward function -- a mathematical function that provides numerical estimates for desirable and undesirable states. Typically, the reward function must be hand-designed by a human expert and, as a result, the scope of a robot's autonomy and ability to safely explore and learn in new and unforeseen environments is constrained by the specifics of the designed reward function. In this thesis, I design and implement a stateful collision anticipation model with powerful predictive capability based upon my research of sequential data modeling and modern recurrent neural networks. I also develop deep reinforcement learning methods whose rewards are generated by self-supervised training and intrinsic signals. The main objective is to work towards the development of resilient robots that can learn to anticipate and avoid damaging interactions by combining visual and proprioceptive cues from internal sensors. The introduced solutions are inspired by pain pathways in humans and animals, because such pathways are known to guide decision-making processes and promote self-preservation. A new "robot dodge ball' benchmark is introduced in order to test the validity of the developed algorithms in dynamic environments.
ContributorsRichardson, Trevor W (Author) / Ben Amor, Heni (Thesis advisor) / Yang, Yezhou (Committee member) / Srivastava, Siddharth (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
Description
In this thesis, a new approach to learning-based planning is presented where critical regions of an environment with low probability measure are learned from a given set of motion plans. Critical regions are learned using convolutional neural networks (CNN) to improve sampling processes for motion planning (MP).
In addition to an identification network, a new sampling-based motion planner, Learn and Link, is introduced. This planner leverages critical regions to overcome the limitations of uniform sampling while still maintaining guarantees of correctness inherent to sampling-based algorithms. Learn and Link is evaluated against planners from the Open Motion Planning Library (OMPL) on an extensive suite of challenging navigation planning problems. This work shows that critical areas of an environment are learnable, and can be used by Learn and Link to solve MP problems with far less planning time than existing sampling-based planners.
In addition to an identification network, a new sampling-based motion planner, Learn and Link, is introduced. This planner leverages critical regions to overcome the limitations of uniform sampling while still maintaining guarantees of correctness inherent to sampling-based algorithms. Learn and Link is evaluated against planners from the Open Motion Planning Library (OMPL) on an extensive suite of challenging navigation planning problems. This work shows that critical areas of an environment are learnable, and can be used by Learn and Link to solve MP problems with far less planning time than existing sampling-based planners.
ContributorsMolina, Daniel, M.S (Author) / Srivastava, Siddharth (Thesis advisor) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Zhang, Yu (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019