Arguing Machines: Human Supervision of Black Box AI Systems That Make Life-Critical Decisions

We consider the paradigm of a black box AI system that makes life-critical decisions. We propose an "arguing machines" framework that pairs the primary AI system with a secondary one that is independently trained to perform the same task. We show that disagreement between the two systems, without any knowledge of underlying system design or operation, is sufficient to arbitrarily improve the accuracy of the overall decision pipeline given human supervision over disagreements. We demonstrate this system in two applications: (1) an illustrative example of image classification and (2) on large-scale real-world semi-autonomous driving data. For the first application, we apply this framework to image classification achieving a reduction from 8.0% to 2.8% top-5 error on ImageNet. For the second application, we apply this framework to Tesla Autopilot and demonstrate the ability to predict 90.4% of system disengagements that were labeled by human annotators as challenging and needing human supervision

Agile Autonomous Driving using End-to-End Deep Imitation Learning

We present an end-to-end imitation learning system for agile, off-road autonomous driving using only low-cost sensors. By imitating a model predictive controller equipped with advanced sensors, we train a deep neural network control policy to map raw, high-dimensional observations to continuous steering and throttle commands. Compared with recent approaches to similar tasks, our method requires neither state estimation nor on-the-fly planning to navigate the vehicle. Our approach relies on, and experimentally validates, recent imitation learning theory. Empirically, we show that policies trained with online imitation learning overcome well-known challenges related to covariate shift and generalize better than policies trained with batch imitation learning. Built on these insights, our autonomous driving system demonstrates successful high-speed off-road driving, matching the state-of-the-art performance.Comment: 13 pages, Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 201