433 research outputs found
Deep Decision Trees for Discriminative Dictionary Learning with Adversarial Multi-Agent Trajectories
With the explosion in the availability of spatio-temporal tracking data in
modern sports, there is an enormous opportunity to better analyse, learn and
predict important events in adversarial group environments. In this paper, we
propose a deep decision tree architecture for discriminative dictionary
learning from adversarial multi-agent trajectories. We first build up a
hierarchy for the tree structure by adding each layer and performing feature
weight based clustering in the forward pass. We then fine tune the player role
weights using back propagation. The hierarchical architecture ensures the
interpretability and the integrity of the group representation. The resulting
architecture is a decision tree, with leaf-nodes capturing a dictionary of
multi-agent group interactions. Due to the ample volume of data available, we
focus on soccer tracking data, although our approach can be used in any
adversarial multi-agent domain. We present applications of proposed method for
simulating soccer games as well as evaluating and quantifying team strategies.Comment: To appear in 4th International Workshop on Computer Vision in Sports
(CVsports) at CVPR 201
Deep Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Agent Interaction
The development of autonomous agents which can interact with other agents to
accomplish a given task is a core area of research in artificial intelligence
and machine learning. Towards this goal, the Autonomous Agents Research Group
develops novel machine learning algorithms for autonomous systems control, with
a specific focus on deep reinforcement learning and multi-agent reinforcement
learning. Research problems include scalable learning of coordinated agent
policies and inter-agent communication; reasoning about the behaviours, goals,
and composition of other agents from limited observations; and sample-efficient
learning based on intrinsic motivation, curriculum learning, causal inference,
and representation learning. This article provides a broad overview of the
ongoing research portfolio of the group and discusses open problems for future
directions.Comment: Published in AI Communications Special Issue on Multi-Agent Systems
Research in the U
Coupling camera-tracked humans with a simulated virtual crowd
Our objective with this paper is to show how we can couple a group of real people and a simulated crowd of virtual humans. We attach group behaviors to the simulated humans to get a plausible reaction to real people. We use a two stage system: in the first stage, a group of people are segmented from a live video, then a human detector algorithm extracts the positions of the people in the video, which are finally used to feed the second stage, the simulation system. The positions obtained by this process allow the second module to render the real humans as avatars in the scene, while the behavior of additional virtual humans is determined by using a simulation based on a social forces model. Developing the method required three specific contributions: a GPU implementation of the codebook algorithm that includes an auxiliary codebook to improve the background subtraction against illumination changes; the use of semantic local binary patterns as a human descriptor; the parallelization of a social forces model, in which we solve a case of agents merging with each other. The experimental results show how a large virtual crowd reacts to over a dozen humans in a real environment.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft
Multi Agent Systems
Research on multi-agent systems is enlarging our future technical capabilities as humans and as an intelligent society. During recent years many effective applications have been implemented and are part of our daily life. These applications have agent-based models and methods as an important ingredient. Markets, finance world, robotics, medical technology, social negotiation, video games, big-data science, etc. are some of the branches where the knowledge gained through multi-agent simulations is necessary and where new software engineering tools are continuously created and tested in order to reach an effective technology transfer to impact our lives. This book brings together researchers working in several fields that cover the techniques, the challenges and the applications of multi-agent systems in a wide variety of aspects related to learning algorithms for different devices such as vehicles, robots and drones, computational optimization to reach a more efficient energy distribution in power grids and the use of social networks and decision strategies applied to the smart learning and education environments in emergent countries. We hope that this book can be useful and become a guide or reference to an audience interested in the developments and applications of multi-agent systems
Efficient resource allocation for automotive active vision systems
Individual mobility on roads has a noticeable impact upon peoples' lives, including
traffic accidents resulting in severe, or even lethal injuries. Therefore the main goal when
operating a vehicle is to safely participate in road-traffic while minimising the adverse
effects on our environment. This goal is pursued by road safety measures ranging from
safety-oriented road design to driver assistance systems. The latter require exteroceptive
sensors to acquire information about the vehicle's current environment.
In this thesis an efficient resource allocation for automotive vision systems is proposed.
The notion of allocating resources implies the presence of processes that observe the whole
environment and that are able to effeciently direct attentive processes. Directing attention
constitutes a decision making process dependent upon the environment it operates in, the
goal it pursues, and the sensor resources and computational resources it allocates. The
sensor resources considered in this thesis are a subset of the multi-modal sensor system on
a test vehicle provided by Audi AG, which is also used to evaluate our proposed resource
allocation system.
This thesis presents an original contribution in three respects. First, a system architecture
designed to efficiently allocate both high-resolution sensor resources and computational
expensive processes based upon low-resolution sensor data is proposed. Second,
a novel method to estimate 3-D range motion, e cient scan-patterns for spin image based
classifiers, and an evaluation of track-to-track fusion algorithms present contributions in
the field of data processing methods. Third, a Pareto efficient multi-objective resource
allocation method is formalised, implemented, and evaluated using road traffic test sequences
Recognizing Teamwork Activity In Observations Of Embodied Agents
This thesis presents contributions to the theory and practice of team activity recognition. A particular focus of our work was to improve our ability to collect and label representative samples, thus making the team activity recognition more efficient. A second focus of our work is improving the robustness of the recognition process in the presence of noisy and distorted data. The main contributions of this thesis are as follows: We developed a software tool, the Teamwork Scenario Editor (TSE), for the acquisition, segmentation and labeling of teamwork data. Using the TSE we acquired a corpus of labeled team actions both from synthetic and real world sources. We developed an approach through which representations of idealized team actions can be acquired in form of Hidden Markov Models which are trained using a small set of representative examples segmented and labeled with the TSE. We developed set of team-oriented feature functions, which extract discrete features from the high-dimensional continuous data. The features were chosen such that they mimic the features used by humans when recognizing teamwork actions. We developed a technique to recognize the likely roles played by agents in teams even before the team action was recognized. Through experimental studies we show that the feature functions and role recognition module significantly increase the recognition accuracy, while allowing arbitrary shuffled inputs and noisy data
Modular Design Patterns for Hybrid Learning and Reasoning Systems: a taxonomy, patterns and use cases
The unification of statistical (data-driven) and symbolic (knowledge-driven)
methods is widely recognised as one of the key challenges of modern AI. Recent
years have seen large number of publications on such hybrid neuro-symbolic AI
systems. That rapidly growing literature is highly diverse and mostly
empirical, and is lacking a unifying view of the large variety of these hybrid
systems. In this paper we analyse a large body of recent literature and we
propose a set of modular design patterns for such hybrid, neuro-symbolic
systems. We are able to describe the architecture of a very large number of
hybrid systems by composing only a small set of elementary patterns as building
blocks.
The main contributions of this paper are: 1) a taxonomically organised
vocabulary to describe both processes and data structures used in hybrid
systems; 2) a set of 15+ design patterns for hybrid AI systems, organised in a
set of elementary patterns and a set of compositional patterns; 3) an
application of these design patterns in two realistic use-cases for hybrid AI
systems. Our patterns reveal similarities between systems that were not
recognised until now. Finally, our design patterns extend and refine Kautz'
earlier attempt at categorising neuro-symbolic architectures.Comment: 20 pages, 22 figures, accepted for publication in the International
Journal of Applied Intelligenc
Human-robot Interaction For Multi-robot Systems
Designing an effective human-robot interaction paradigm is particularly important for complex tasks such as multi-robot manipulation that require the human and robot to work together in a tightly coupled fashion. Although increasing the number of robots can expand the area that the robots can cover within a bounded period of time, a poor human-robot interface will ultimately compromise the performance of the team of robots. However, introducing a human operator to the team of robots, does not automatically improve performance due to the difficulty of teleoperating mobile robots with manipulators. The human operator’s concentration is divided not only among multiple robots but also between controlling each robot’s base and arm. This complexity substantially increases the potential neglect time, since the operator’s inability to effectively attend to each robot during a critical phase of the task leads to a significant degradation in task performance. There are several proven paradigms for increasing the efficacy of human-robot interaction: 1) multimodal interfaces in which the user controls the robots using voice and gesture; 2) configurable interfaces which allow the user to create new commands by demonstrating them; 3) adaptive interfaces which reduce the operator’s workload as necessary through increasing robot autonomy. This dissertation presents an evaluation of the relative benefits of different types of user interfaces for multi-robot systems composed of robots with wheeled bases and three degree of freedom arms. It describes a design for constructing low-cost multi-robot manipulation systems from off the shelf parts. User expertise was measured along three axes (navigation, manipulation, and coordination), and participants who performed above threshold on two out of three dimensions on a calibration task were rated as expert. Our experiments reveal that the relative expertise of the user was the key determinant of the best performing interface paradigm for that user, indicating that good user modiii eling is essential for designing a human-robot interaction system that will be used for an extended period of time. The contributions of the dissertation include: 1) a model for detecting operator distraction from robot motion trajectories; 2) adjustable autonomy paradigms for reducing operator workload; 3) a method for creating coordinated multi-robot behaviors from demonstrations with a single robot; 4) a user modeling approach for identifying expert-novice differences from short teleoperation traces
- …