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- Genre: Academic theses
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
To date, there is not a standardized method for consistently quantifying the performance of an automated driving system (ADS)-equipped vehicle (AV). The purpose of this dissertation is to contribute to a framework for such an approach referred to throughout as the operational safety assessment (OSA) methodology. Through this research, safety metrics are identified, researched, and analyzed to capture aspects of the operational safety of AVs, interacting with other salient objects. This dissertation outlines the approach for developing this methodology through a series of key steps including: (1) comprehensive literature review; (2) research and refinement of OSA metrics; (3) generation of MATLAB script for metric calculations; (4) generation of simulated events for analysis; (5) collection of real-world data for analysis; (6) review of OSA methodology results; and (7) discussion of future work to expand complexity, fidelity, and relevance aspects of the OSA methodology. The detailed literature review includes the identification of metrics historically used in both traditional and more recent evaluations of vehicle performance. Subsequently, the metric formulations are refined, and robust severity evaluations are proposed. A MATLAB script is then presented which was generated to calculate the metrics from any given source assuming proper formatting of the data. To further refine the formulations and the MATLAB script, a variety of simulated scenarios are discussed including car-following, intersection, and lane change situations. Additionally, a data collection activity is presented, leveraging the SMARTDRIVE testbed operated by Maricopa County Department of Transportation in Anthem, AZ to collect real-world data from an active intersection. Lastly, the efficacy of the OSA methodology with respect to the evaluation of vehicle performance for a set of scenarios is evaluated utilizing both simulated and real-world data. This assessment provides a demonstration of the ability and robustness of this methodology to evaluate vehicle performance for a given scenario. At the conclusion of this dissertation, additional factors including fidelity, complexity, and relevance are explored to contribute to a more comprehensive evaluation.
ContributorsComo, Steven Gerard (Author) / Wishart, Jeffrey (Thesis advisor) / Yang, Yezhou (Thesis advisor) / Chen, Yan (Committee member) / Favaro, Francesca (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
Machine learning has demonstrated great potential across a wide range of applications such as computer vision, robotics, speech recognition, drug discovery, material science, and physics simulation. Despite its current success, however, there are still two major challenges for machine learning algorithms: limited robustness and generalizability.
The robustness of a neural network is defined as the stability of the network output under small input perturbations. It has been shown that neural networks are very sensitive to input perturbations, and the prediction from convolutional neural networks can be totally different for input images that are visually indistinguishable to human eyes. Based on such property, hackers can reversely engineer the input to trick machine learning systems in targeted ways. These adversarial attacks have shown to be surprisingly effective, which has raised serious concerns over safety-critical applications like autonomous driving. In the meantime, many established defense mechanisms have shown to be vulnerable under more advanced attacks proposed later, and how to improve the robustness of neural networks is still an open question.
The generalizability of neural networks refers to the ability of networks to perform well on unseen data rather than just the data that they were trained on. Neural networks often fail to carry out reliable generalizations when the testing data is of different distribution compared with the training one, which will make autonomous driving systems risky under new environment. The generalizability of neural networks can also be limited whenever there is a scarcity of training data, while it can be expensive to acquire large datasets either experimentally or numerically for engineering applications, such as material and chemical design.
In this dissertation, we are thus motivated to improve the robustness and generalizability of neural networks. Firstly, unlike traditional bottom-up classifiers, we use a pre-trained generative model to perform top-down reasoning and infer the label information. The proposed generative classifier has shown to be promising in handling input distribution shifts. Secondly, we focus on improving the network robustness and propose an extension to adversarial training by considering the transformation invariance. Proposed method improves the robustness over state-of-the-art methods by 2.5% on MNIST and 3.7% on CIFAR-10. Thirdly, we focus on designing networks that generalize well at predicting physics response. Our physics prior knowledge is used to guide the designing of the network architecture, which enables efficient learning and inference. Proposed network is able to generalize well even when it is trained with a single image pair.
The robustness of a neural network is defined as the stability of the network output under small input perturbations. It has been shown that neural networks are very sensitive to input perturbations, and the prediction from convolutional neural networks can be totally different for input images that are visually indistinguishable to human eyes. Based on such property, hackers can reversely engineer the input to trick machine learning systems in targeted ways. These adversarial attacks have shown to be surprisingly effective, which has raised serious concerns over safety-critical applications like autonomous driving. In the meantime, many established defense mechanisms have shown to be vulnerable under more advanced attacks proposed later, and how to improve the robustness of neural networks is still an open question.
The generalizability of neural networks refers to the ability of networks to perform well on unseen data rather than just the data that they were trained on. Neural networks often fail to carry out reliable generalizations when the testing data is of different distribution compared with the training one, which will make autonomous driving systems risky under new environment. The generalizability of neural networks can also be limited whenever there is a scarcity of training data, while it can be expensive to acquire large datasets either experimentally or numerically for engineering applications, such as material and chemical design.
In this dissertation, we are thus motivated to improve the robustness and generalizability of neural networks. Firstly, unlike traditional bottom-up classifiers, we use a pre-trained generative model to perform top-down reasoning and infer the label information. The proposed generative classifier has shown to be promising in handling input distribution shifts. Secondly, we focus on improving the network robustness and propose an extension to adversarial training by considering the transformation invariance. Proposed method improves the robustness over state-of-the-art methods by 2.5% on MNIST and 3.7% on CIFAR-10. Thirdly, we focus on designing networks that generalize well at predicting physics response. Our physics prior knowledge is used to guide the designing of the network architecture, which enables efficient learning and inference. Proposed network is able to generalize well even when it is trained with a single image pair.
ContributorsYao, Houpu (Author) / Ren, Yi (Thesis advisor) / Liu, Yongming (Committee member) / Li, Baoxin (Committee member) / Yang, Yezhou (Committee member) / Marvi, Hamidreza (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019