33,720 research outputs found
PinMe: Tracking a Smartphone User around the World
With the pervasive use of smartphones that sense, collect, and process
valuable information about the environment, ensuring location privacy has
become one of the most important concerns in the modern age. A few recent
research studies discuss the feasibility of processing data gathered by a
smartphone to locate the phone's owner, even when the user does not intend to
share his location information, e.g., when the Global Positioning System (GPS)
is off. Previous research efforts rely on at least one of the two following
fundamental requirements, which significantly limit the ability of the
adversary: (i) the attacker must accurately know either the user's initial
location or the set of routes through which the user travels and/or (ii) the
attacker must measure a set of features, e.g., the device's acceleration, for
potential routes in advance and construct a training dataset. In this paper, we
demonstrate that neither of the above-mentioned requirements is essential for
compromising the user's location privacy. We describe PinMe, a novel
user-location mechanism that exploits non-sensory/sensory data stored on the
smartphone, e.g., the environment's air pressure, along with publicly-available
auxiliary information, e.g., elevation maps, to estimate the user's location
when all location services, e.g., GPS, are turned off.Comment: This is the preprint version: the paper has been published in IEEE
Trans. Multi-Scale Computing Systems, DOI: 0.1109/TMSCS.2017.275146
Risk-sensitive Inverse Reinforcement Learning via Semi- and Non-Parametric Methods
The literature on Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) typically assumes that
humans take actions in order to minimize the expected value of a cost function,
i.e., that humans are risk neutral. Yet, in practice, humans are often far from
being risk neutral. To fill this gap, the objective of this paper is to devise
a framework for risk-sensitive IRL in order to explicitly account for a human's
risk sensitivity. To this end, we propose a flexible class of models based on
coherent risk measures, which allow us to capture an entire spectrum of risk
preferences from risk-neutral to worst-case. We propose efficient
non-parametric algorithms based on linear programming and semi-parametric
algorithms based on maximum likelihood for inferring a human's underlying risk
measure and cost function for a rich class of static and dynamic
decision-making settings. The resulting approach is demonstrated on a simulated
driving game with ten human participants. Our method is able to infer and mimic
a wide range of qualitatively different driving styles from highly risk-averse
to risk-neutral in a data-efficient manner. Moreover, comparisons of the
Risk-Sensitive (RS) IRL approach with a risk-neutral model show that the RS-IRL
framework more accurately captures observed participant behavior both
qualitatively and quantitatively, especially in scenarios where catastrophic
outcomes such as collisions can occur.Comment: Submitted to International Journal of Robotics Research; Revision 1:
(i) Clarified minor technical points; (ii) Revised proof for Theorem 3 to
hold under weaker assumptions; (iii) Added additional figures and expanded
discussions to improve readabilit
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