21,667 research outputs found
Hierarchical Decomposition of Nonlinear Dynamics and Control for System Identification and Policy Distillation
The control of nonlinear dynamical systems remains a major challenge for
autonomous agents. Current trends in reinforcement learning (RL) focus on
complex representations of dynamics and policies, which have yielded impressive
results in solving a variety of hard control tasks. However, this new
sophistication and extremely over-parameterized models have come with the cost
of an overall reduction in our ability to interpret the resulting policies. In
this paper, we take inspiration from the control community and apply the
principles of hybrid switching systems in order to break down complex dynamics
into simpler components. We exploit the rich representational power of
probabilistic graphical models and derive an expectation-maximization (EM)
algorithm for learning a sequence model to capture the temporal structure of
the data and automatically decompose nonlinear dynamics into stochastic
switching linear dynamical systems. Moreover, we show how this framework of
switching models enables extracting hierarchies of Markovian and
auto-regressive locally linear controllers from nonlinear experts in an
imitation learning scenario.Comment: 2nd Annual Conference on Learning for Dynamics and Contro
Defending Elections Against Malicious Spread of Misinformation
The integrity of democratic elections depends on voters' access to accurate
information. However, modern media environments, which are dominated by social
media, provide malicious actors with unprecedented ability to manipulate
elections via misinformation, such as fake news. We study a zero-sum game
between an attacker, who attempts to subvert an election by propagating a fake
new story or other misinformation over a set of advertising channels, and a
defender who attempts to limit the attacker's impact. Computing an equilibrium
in this game is challenging as even the pure strategy sets of players are
exponential. Nevertheless, we give provable polynomial-time approximation
algorithms for computing the defender's minimax optimal strategy across a range
of settings, encompassing different population structures as well as models of
the information available to each player. Experimental results confirm that our
algorithms provide near-optimal defender strategies and showcase variations in
the difficulty of defending elections depending on the resources and knowledge
available to the defender.Comment: Full version of paper accepted to AAAI 201
A Flexible Modeling Approach for Robust Multi-Lane Road Estimation
A robust estimation of road course and traffic lanes is an essential part of
environment perception for next generations of Advanced Driver Assistance
Systems and development of self-driving vehicles. In this paper, a flexible
method for modeling multiple lanes in a vehicle in real time is presented.
Information about traffic lanes, derived by cameras and other environmental
sensors, that is represented as features, serves as input for an iterative
expectation-maximization method to estimate a lane model. The generic and
modular concept of the approach allows to freely choose the mathematical
functions for the geometrical description of lanes. In addition to the current
measurement data, the previously estimated result as well as additional
constraints to reflect parallelism and continuity of traffic lanes, are
considered in the optimization process. As evaluation of the lane estimation
method, its performance is showcased using cubic splines for the geometric
representation of lanes in simulated scenarios and measurements recorded using
a development vehicle. In a comparison to ground truth data, robustness and
precision of the lanes estimated up to a distance of 120 m are demonstrated. As
a part of the environmental modeling, the presented method can be utilized for
longitudinal and lateral control of autonomous vehicles
Equilibrium Computation and Robust Optimization in Zero Sum Games with Submodular Structure
We define a class of zero-sum games with combinatorial structure, where the
best response problem of one player is to maximize a submodular function. For
example, this class includes security games played on networks, as well as the
problem of robustly optimizing a submodular function over the worst case from a
set of scenarios. The challenge in computing equilibria is that both players'
strategy spaces can be exponentially large. Accordingly, previous algorithms
have worst-case exponential runtime and indeed fail to scale up on practical
instances. We provide a pseudopolynomial-time algorithm which obtains a
guaranteed -approximate mixed strategy for the maximizing player.
Our algorithm only requires access to a weakened version of a best response
oracle for the minimizing player which runs in polynomial time. Experimental
results for network security games and a robust budget allocation problem
confirm that our algorithm delivers near-optimal solutions and scales to much
larger instances than was previously possible.Comment: 20 pages, 8 figures. A shorter version of this paper appears at AAAI
201
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