Generic dialogue modeling for multi-application dialogue systems

We present a novel approach to developing interfaces for multi-application dialogue systems. The targeted interfaces allow transparent switching between a large number of applications within one system. The approach, based on the Rapid Dialogue Prototyping Methodology (RDPM) and the Vector Space model techniques from Information Retrieval, is composed of three main steps: (1) producing finalized dia logue models for applications using the RDPM, (2) designing an application interaction hierarchy, and (3) navigating between the applications based on the user's application of interest

Vehicle recognition and tracking using a generic multi-sensor and multi-algorithm fusion approach

International audienceThis paper tackles the problem of improving the robustness of vehicle detection for Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) applications. Our approach is based on a multisensor and a multialgorithms data fusion for vehicle detection and recognition. Our architecture combines two sensors: a frontal camera and a laser scanner. The improvement of the robustness stems from two aspects. First, we addressed the vision-based detection by developing an original approach based on fine gradient analysis, enhanced with a genetic AdaBoost-based algorithm for vehicle recognition. Then, we use the theory of evidence as a fusion framework to combine confidence levels delivered by the algorithms in order to improve the classification 'vehicle versus non-vehicle'. The final architecture of the system is very modular, generic and flexible in that it could be used for other detection applications or using other sensors or algorithms providing the same outputs. The system was successfully implemented on a prototype vehicle and was evaluated under real conditions and over various multisensor databases and various test scenarios, illustrating very good performances

Trajectory planning for autonomous vehicle in uncertain environment using evidential grid

International audienc

Parallelized Interactive Machine Learning on Autonomous Vehicles

Deep reinforcement learning (deep RL) has achieved superior performance in complex sequential tasks by learning directly from image input. A deep neural network is used as a function approximator and requires no specific state information. However, one drawback of using only images as input is that this approach requires a prohibitively large amount of training time and data for the model to learn the state feature representation and approach reasonable performance. This is not feasible in real-world applications, especially when the data are expansive and training phase could introduce disasters that affect human safety. In this work, we use a human demonstration approach to speed up training for learning features and use the resulting pre-trained model to replace the neural network in the deep RL Deep Q-Network (DQN), followed by human interaction to further refine the model. We empirically evaluate our approach by using only a human demonstration model and modified DQN with human demonstration model included in the Microsoft AirSim car simulator. Our results show that (1) pre-training with human demonstration in a supervised learning approach is better and much faster at discovering features than DQN alone, (2) initializing the DQN with a pre-trained model provides a significant improvement in training time and performance even with limited human demonstration, and (3) providing the ability for humans to supply suggestions during DQN training can speed up the network's convergence on an optimal policy, as well as allow it to learn more complex policies that are harder to discover by random exploration.Comment: 6 pages, NAECON 2018 - IEEE National Aerospace and Electronics Conferenc

Human Motion Trajectory Prediction: A Survey

With growing numbers of intelligent autonomous systems in human environments, the ability of such systems to perceive, understand and anticipate human behavior becomes increasingly important. Specifically, predicting future positions of dynamic agents and planning considering such predictions are key tasks for self-driving vehicles, service robots and advanced surveillance systems. This paper provides a survey of human motion trajectory prediction. We review, analyze and structure a large selection of work from different communities and propose a taxonomy that categorizes existing methods based on the motion modeling approach and level of contextual information used. We provide an overview of the existing datasets and performance metrics. We discuss limitations of the state of the art and outline directions for further research.Comment: Submitted to the International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR), 37 page

Learning scalable and transferable multi-robot/machine sequential assignment planning via graph embedding

Can the success of reinforcement learning methods for simple combinatorial optimization problems be extended to multi-robot sequential assignment planning? In addition to the challenge of achieving near-optimal performance in large problems, transferability to an unseen number of robots and tasks is another key challenge for real-world applications. In this paper, we suggest a method that achieves the first success in both challenges for robot/machine scheduling problems. Our method comprises of three components. First, we show a robot scheduling problem can be expressed as a random probabilistic graphical model (PGM). We develop a mean-field inference method for random PGM and use it for Q-function inference. Second, we show that transferability can be achieved by carefully designing two-step sequential encoding of problem state. Third, we resolve the computational scalability issue of fitted Q-iteration by suggesting a heuristic auction-based Q-iteration fitting method enabled by transferability we achieved. We apply our method to discrete-time, discrete space problems (Multi-Robot Reward Collection (MRRC)) and scalably achieve 97% optimality with transferability. This optimality is maintained under stochastic contexts. By extending our method to continuous time, continuous space formulation, we claim to be the first learning-based method with scalable performance among multi-machine scheduling problems; our method scalability achieves comparable performance to popular metaheuristics in Identical parallel machine scheduling (IPMS) problems