10,234 research outputs found
Online Discrimination of Nonlinear Dynamics with Switching Differential Equations
How to recognise whether an observed person walks or runs? We consider a
dynamic environment where observations (e.g. the posture of a person) are
caused by different dynamic processes (walking or running) which are active one
at a time and which may transition from one to another at any time. For this
setup, switching dynamic models have been suggested previously, mostly, for
linear and nonlinear dynamics in discrete time. Motivated by basic principles
of computations in the brain (dynamic, internal models) we suggest a model for
switching nonlinear differential equations. The switching process in the model
is implemented by a Hopfield network and we use parametric dynamic movement
primitives to represent arbitrary rhythmic motions. The model generates
observed dynamics by linearly interpolating the primitives weighted by the
switching variables and it is constructed such that standard filtering
algorithms can be applied. In two experiments with synthetic planar motion and
a human motion capture data set we show that inference with the unscented
Kalman filter can successfully discriminate several dynamic processes online
Learning action-oriented models through active inference
Converging theories suggest that organisms learn and exploit probabilistic models of their environment. However, it remains unclear how such models can be learned in practice. The open-ended complexity of natural environments means that it is generally infeasible for organisms to model their environment comprehensively. Alternatively, action-oriented models attempt to encode a parsimonious representation of adaptive agent-environment interactions. One approach to learning action-oriented models is to learn online in the presence of goal-directed behaviours. This constrains an agent to behaviourally relevant trajectories, reducing the diversity of the data a model need account for. Unfortunately, this approach can cause models to prematurely converge to sub-optimal solutions, through a process we refer to as a bad-bootstrap. Here, we exploit the normative framework of active inference to show that efficient action-oriented models can be learned by balancing goal-oriented and epistemic (information-seeking) behaviours in a principled manner. We illustrate our approach using a simple agent-based model of bacterial chemotaxis. We first demonstrate that learning via goal-directed behaviour indeed constrains models to behaviorally relevant aspects of the environment, but that this approach is prone to sub-optimal convergence. We then demonstrate that epistemic behaviours facilitate the construction of accurate and comprehensive models, but that these models are not tailored to any specific behavioural niche and are therefore less efficient in their use of data. Finally, we show that active inference agents learn models that are parsimonious, tailored to action, and which avoid bad bootstraps and sub-optimal convergence. Critically, our results indicate that models learned through active inference can support adaptive behaviour in spite of, and indeed because of, their departure from veridical representations of the environment. Our approach provides a principled method for learning adaptive models from limited interactions with an environment, highlighting a route to sample efficient learning algorithms
On human motion prediction using recurrent neural networks
Human motion modelling is a classical problem at the intersection of graphics
and computer vision, with applications spanning human-computer interaction,
motion synthesis, and motion prediction for virtual and augmented reality.
Following the success of deep learning methods in several computer vision
tasks, recent work has focused on using deep recurrent neural networks (RNNs)
to model human motion, with the goal of learning time-dependent representations
that perform tasks such as short-term motion prediction and long-term human
motion synthesis. We examine recent work, with a focus on the evaluation
methodologies commonly used in the literature, and show that, surprisingly,
state-of-the-art performance can be achieved by a simple baseline that does not
attempt to model motion at all. We investigate this result, and analyze recent
RNN methods by looking at the architectures, loss functions, and training
procedures used in state-of-the-art approaches. We propose three changes to the
standard RNN models typically used for human motion, which result in a simple
and scalable RNN architecture that obtains state-of-the-art performance on
human motion prediction.Comment: Accepted at CVPR 1
Learning to Race through Coordinate Descent Bayesian Optimisation
In the automation of many kinds of processes, the observable outcome can
often be described as the combined effect of an entire sequence of actions, or
controls, applied throughout its execution. In these cases, strategies to
optimise control policies for individual stages of the process might not be
applicable, and instead the whole policy might have to be optimised at once. On
the other hand, the cost to evaluate the policy's performance might also be
high, being desirable that a solution can be found with as few interactions as
possible with the real system. We consider the problem of optimising control
policies to allow a robot to complete a given race track within a minimum
amount of time. We assume that the robot has no prior information about the
track or its own dynamical model, just an initial valid driving example.
Localisation is only applied to monitor the robot and to provide an indication
of its position along the track's centre axis. We propose a method for finding
a policy that minimises the time per lap while keeping the vehicle on the track
using a Bayesian optimisation (BO) approach over a reproducing kernel Hilbert
space. We apply an algorithm to search more efficiently over high-dimensional
policy-parameter spaces with BO, by iterating over each dimension individually,
in a sequential coordinate descent-like scheme. Experiments demonstrate the
performance of the algorithm against other methods in a simulated car racing
environment.Comment: Accepted as conference paper for the 2018 IEEE International
Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA
Challenges of Big Data Analysis
Big Data bring new opportunities to modern society and challenges to data
scientists. On one hand, Big Data hold great promises for discovering subtle
population patterns and heterogeneities that are not possible with small-scale
data. On the other hand, the massive sample size and high dimensionality of Big
Data introduce unique computational and statistical challenges, including
scalability and storage bottleneck, noise accumulation, spurious correlation,
incidental endogeneity, and measurement errors. These challenges are
distinguished and require new computational and statistical paradigm. This
article give overviews on the salient features of Big Data and how these
features impact on paradigm change on statistical and computational methods as
well as computing architectures. We also provide various new perspectives on
the Big Data analysis and computation. In particular, we emphasis on the
viability of the sparsest solution in high-confidence set and point out that
exogeneous assumptions in most statistical methods for Big Data can not be
validated due to incidental endogeneity. They can lead to wrong statistical
inferences and consequently wrong scientific conclusions
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