Driver Attention based on Deep Learning for a Smart Vehicle to Driver (V2D) Interaction

La atención del conductor es un tópico interesante dentro del mundo de los vehículos inteligentes para la consecución de tareas que van desde la monitorización del conductor hasta la conducción autónoma. Esta tesis aborda este tópico basándose en algoritmos de aprendizaje profundo para conseguir una interacción inteligente entre el vehículo y el conductor. La monitorización del conductor requiere una estimación precisa de su mirada en un entorno 3D para conocer el estado de su atención. En esta tesis se aborda este problema usando una única cámara, para que pueda ser utilizada en aplicaciones reales, sin un alto coste y sin molestar al conductor. La herramienta desarrollada ha sido evaluada en una base de datos pública (DADA2000), obteniendo unos resultados similares a los obtenidos mediante un seguidor de ojos caro que no puede ser usado en un vehículo real. Además, ha sido usada en una aplicación que evalúa la atención del conductor en la transición de modo autónomo a manual de forma simulada, proponiendo el uso de una métrica novedosa para conocer el estado de la situación del conductor en base a su atención sobre los diferentes objetos de la escena. Por otro lado, se ha propuesto un algoritmo de estimación de atención del conductor, utilizando las últimas técnicas de aprendizaje profundo como son las conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (cGANs) y el Multi-Head Self-Attention. Esto permite enfatizar ciertas zonas de la escena al igual que lo haría un humano. El modelo ha sido entrenado y validado en dos bases de datos públicas (BDD-A y DADA2000) superando a otras propuestas del estado del arte y consiguiendo unos tiempos de inferencia que permiten su uso en aplicaciones reales. Por último, se ha desarrollado un modelo que aprovecha nuestro algoritmo de atención del conductor para comprender una escena de tráfico obteniendo la decisión tomada por el vehículo y su explicación, en base a las imágenes tomadas por una cámara situada en la parte frontal del vehículo. Ha sido entrenado en una base de datos pública (BDD-OIA) proponiendo un modelo que entiende la secuencia temporal de los eventos usando un Transformer Encoder, consiguiendo superar a otras propuestas del estado del arte. Además de su validación en la base de datos, ha sido implementado en una aplicación que interacciona con el conductor aconsejando sobre las decisiones a tomar y sus explicaciones ante diferentes casos de uso en un entorno simulado. Esta tesis explora y demuestra los beneficios de la atención del conductor para el mundo de los vehículos inteligentes, logrando una interacción vehículo conductor a través de las últimas técnicas de aprendizaje profundo

Explaining Autonomous Driving Actions with Visual Question Answering

The end-to-end learning ability of self-driving vehicles has achieved significant milestones over the last decade owing to rapid advances in deep learning and computer vision algorithms. However, as autonomous driving technology is a safety-critical application of artificial intelligence (AI), road accidents and established regulatory principles necessitate the need for the explainability of intelligent action choices for self-driving vehicles. To facilitate interpretability of decision-making in autonomous driving, we present a Visual Question Answering (VQA) framework, which explains driving actions with question-answering-based causal reasoning. To do so, we first collect driving videos in a simulation environment using reinforcement learning (RL) and extract consecutive frames from this log data uniformly for five selected action categories. Further, we manually annotate the extracted frames using question-answer pairs as justifications for the actions chosen in each scenario. Finally, we evaluate the correctness of the VQA-predicted answers for actions on unseen driving scenes. The empirical results suggest that the VQA mechanism can provide support to interpret real-time decisions of autonomous vehicles and help enhance overall driving safety.Comment: Accepted to the 2023 IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (IEEE ITSC-2023

Explaining autonomous driving with visual attention and end-to-end trainable region proposals

Autonomous driving is advancing at a fast pace, with driving algorithms becoming more and more accurate and reliable. Despite this, it is of utter importance to develop models that can ofer a certain degree of explainability in order to be trusted, understood and accepted by researchers and, especially, society. In this work we present a conditional imitation learning agent based on a visual attention mechanism in order to provide visually explainable decisions by design. We propose different variations of the method, relying on end-to-end trainable regions proposal functions, generating regions of interest to be weighed by an attention module. We show that visual attention can improve driving capabilities and provide at the same time explainable decisions

Artificial intelligence and UK national security: Policy considerations

RUSI was commissioned by GCHQ to conduct an independent research study into the use of artificial intelligence (AI) for national security purposes. The aim of this project is to establish an independent evidence base to inform future policy development regarding national security uses of AI. The findings are based on in-depth consultation with stakeholders from across the UK national security community, law enforcement agencies, private sector companies, academic and legal experts, and civil society representatives. This was complemented by a targeted review of existing literature on the topic of AI and national security. The research has found that AI offers numerous opportunities for the UK national security community to improve efficiency and effectiveness of existing processes. AI methods can rapidly derive insights from large, disparate datasets and identify connections that would otherwise go unnoticed by human operators. However, in the context of national security and the powers given to UK intelligence agencies, use of AI could give rise to additional privacy and human rights considerations which would need to be assessed within the existing legal and regulatory framework. For this reason, enhanced policy and guidance is needed to ensure the privacy and human rights implications of national security uses of AI are reviewed on an ongoing basis as new analysis methods are applied to data

How to Certify Machine Learning Based Safety-critical Systems? A Systematic Literature Review

Context: Machine Learning (ML) has been at the heart of many innovations over the past years. However, including it in so-called 'safety-critical' systems such as automotive or aeronautic has proven to be very challenging, since the shift in paradigm that ML brings completely changes traditional certification approaches. Objective: This paper aims to elucidate challenges related to the certification of ML-based safety-critical systems, as well as the solutions that are proposed in the literature to tackle them, answering the question 'How to Certify Machine Learning Based Safety-critical Systems?'. Method: We conduct a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) of research papers published between 2015 to 2020, covering topics related to the certification of ML systems. In total, we identified 217 papers covering topics considered to be the main pillars of ML certification: Robustness, Uncertainty, Explainability, Verification, Safe Reinforcement Learning, and Direct Certification. We analyzed the main trends and problems of each sub-field and provided summaries of the papers extracted. Results: The SLR results highlighted the enthusiasm of the community for this subject, as well as the lack of diversity in terms of datasets and type of models. It also emphasized the need to further develop connections between academia and industries to deepen the domain study. Finally, it also illustrated the necessity to build connections between the above mention main pillars that are for now mainly studied separately. Conclusion: We highlighted current efforts deployed to enable the certification of ML based software systems, and discuss some future research directions.Comment: 60 pages (92 pages with references and complements), submitted to a journal (Automated Software Engineering). Changes: Emphasizing difference traditional software engineering / ML approach. Adding Related Works, Threats to Validity and Complementary Materials. Adding a table listing papers reference for each section/subsection

Security Considerations in AI-Robotics: A Survey of Current Methods, Challenges, and Opportunities

Robotics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have been inextricably intertwined since their inception. Today, AI-Robotics systems have become an integral part of our daily lives, from robotic vacuum cleaners to semi-autonomous cars. These systems are built upon three fundamental architectural elements: perception, navigation and planning, and control. However, while the integration of AI-Robotics systems has enhanced the quality our lives, it has also presented a serious problem - these systems are vulnerable to security attacks. The physical components, algorithms, and data that make up AI-Robotics systems can be exploited by malicious actors, potentially leading to dire consequences. Motivated by the need to address the security concerns in AI-Robotics systems, this paper presents a comprehensive survey and taxonomy across three dimensions: attack surfaces, ethical and legal concerns, and Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) security. Our goal is to provide users, developers and other stakeholders with a holistic understanding of these areas to enhance the overall AI-Robotics system security. We begin by surveying potential attack surfaces and provide mitigating defensive strategies. We then delve into ethical issues, such as dependency and psychological impact, as well as the legal concerns regarding accountability for these systems. Besides, emerging trends such as HRI are discussed, considering privacy, integrity, safety, trustworthiness, and explainability concerns. Finally, we present our vision for future research directions in this dynamic and promising field