Role Playing Learning for Socially Concomitant Mobile Robot Navigation

In this paper, we present the Role Playing Learning (RPL) scheme for a mobile robot to navigate socially with its human companion in populated environments. Neural networks (NN) are constructed to parameterize a stochastic policy that directly maps sensory data collected by the robot to its velocity outputs, while respecting a set of social norms. An efficient simulative learning environment is built with maps and pedestrians trajectories collected from a number of real-world crowd data sets. In each learning iteration, a robot equipped with the NN policy is created virtually in the learning environment to play itself as a companied pedestrian and navigate towards a goal in a socially concomitant manner. Thus, we call this process Role Playing Learning, which is formulated under a reinforcement learning (RL) framework. The NN policy is optimized end-to-end using Trust Region Policy Optimization (TRPO), with consideration of the imperfectness of robot's sensor measurements. Simulative and experimental results are provided to demonstrate the efficacy and superiority of our method

An investigation into adaptive power reduction techniques for neural hardware

In light of the growing applicability of Artificial Neural Network (ANN) in the signal processing field [1] and the present thrust of the semiconductor industry towards lowpower SOCs for mobile devices [2], the power consumption of ANN hardware has become a very important implementation issue. Adaptability is a powerful and useful feature of neural networks. All current approaches for low-power ANN hardware techniques are ‘non-adaptive’ with respect to the power consumption of the network (i.e. power-reduction is not an objective of the adaptation/learning process). In the research work presented in this thesis, investigations on possible adaptive power reduction techniques have been carried out, which attempt to exploit the adaptability of neural networks in order to reduce the power consumption. Three separate approaches for such adaptive power reduction are proposed: adaptation of size, adaptation of network weights and adaptation of calculation precision. Initial case studies exhibit promising results with significantpower reduction

Sparsity in deep learning: Pruning and growth for efficient inference and training in neural networks

The growing energy and performance costs of deep learning have driven the community to reduce the size of neural networks by selectively pruning components. Similarly to their biological counterparts, sparse networks generalize just as well, sometimes even better than, the original dense networks. Sparsity promises to reduce the memory footprint of regular networks to fit mobile devices, as well as shorten training time for ever growing networks. In this paper, we survey prior work on sparsity in deep learning and provide an extensive tutorial of sparsification for both inference and training. We describe approaches to remove and add elements of neural networks, different training strategies to achieve model sparsity, and mechanisms to exploit sparsity in practice. Our work distills ideas from more than 300 research papers and provides guidance to practitioners who wish to utilize sparsity today, as well as to researchers whose goal is to push the frontier forward. We include the necessary background on mathematical methods in sparsification, describe phenomena such as early structure adaptation, the intricate relations between sparsity and the training process, and show techniques for achieving acceleration on real hardware. We also define a metric of pruned parameter efficiency that could serve as a baseline for comparison of different sparse networks. We close by speculating on how sparsity can improve future workloads and outline major open problems in the field

An optimal nephelometric model design method for particle characterisation

Scattering nephelometry is a particle characterisation method applicable to fluid suspensions containing impurities. Solutions derived by the method feature particle classification by size (diameter), volume or texture as well as continuous on-line and in-situ monitoring, The replacement of turbidimeters with nephelometers in many existing turbidity applications could result in suppression of side effects caused by limitations and uncontrolled parameter drifts and satisfaction of problem-defined constraints at virtually no change in implementation cost. A major issue of nephelometric model design is the selection of a mathematical tool suitable for the modelling of the data analysis system. [Continues.

Automated Architecture Design for Deep Neural Networks

Machine learning has made tremendous progress in recent years and received large amounts of public attention. Though we are still far from designing a full artificially intelligent agent, machine learning has brought us many applications in which computers solve human learning tasks remarkably well. Much of this progress comes from a recent trend within machine learning, called deep learning. Deep learning models are responsible for many state-of-the-art applications of machine learning. Despite their success, deep learning models are hard to train, very difficult to understand, and often times so complex that training is only possible on very large GPU clusters. Lots of work has been done on enabling neural networks to learn efficiently. However, the design and architecture of such neural networks is often done manually through trial and error and expert knowledge. This thesis inspects different approaches, existing and novel, to automate the design of deep feedforward neural networks in an attempt to create less complex models with good performance that take away the burden of deciding on an architecture and make it more efficient to design and train such deep networks.Comment: Undergraduate Thesi