22 research outputs found
DDD17: End-To-End DAVIS Driving Dataset
Event cameras, such as dynamic vision sensors (DVS), and dynamic and
active-pixel vision sensors (DAVIS) can supplement other autonomous driving
sensors by providing a concurrent stream of standard active pixel sensor (APS)
images and DVS temporal contrast events. The APS stream is a sequence of
standard grayscale global-shutter image sensor frames. The DVS events represent
brightness changes occurring at a particular moment, with a jitter of about a
millisecond under most lighting conditions. They have a dynamic range of >120
dB and effective frame rates >1 kHz at data rates comparable to 30 fps
(frames/second) image sensors. To overcome some of the limitations of current
image acquisition technology, we investigate in this work the use of the
combined DVS and APS streams in end-to-end driving applications. The dataset
DDD17 accompanying this paper is the first open dataset of annotated DAVIS
driving recordings. DDD17 has over 12 h of a 346x260 pixel DAVIS sensor
recording highway and city driving in daytime, evening, night, dry and wet
weather conditions, along with vehicle speed, GPS position, driver steering,
throttle, and brake captured from the car's on-board diagnostics interface. As
an example application, we performed a preliminary end-to-end learning study of
using a convolutional neural network that is trained to predict the
instantaneous steering angle from DVS and APS visual data.Comment: Presented at the ICML 2017 Workshop on Machine Learning for
Autonomous Vehicle
Synthesizing cognition in neuromorphic electronic systems
The quest to implement intelligent processing in electronic neuromorphic systems lacks methods for achieving reliable behavioral dynamics on substrates of inherently imprecise and noisy neurons. Here we report a solution to this problem that involves first mapping an unreliable hardware layer of spiking silicon neurons into an abstract computational layer composed of generic reliable subnetworks of model neurons and then composing the target behavioral dynamics as a “soft state machine” running on these reliable subnets. In the first step, the neural networks of the abstract layer are realized on the hardware substrate by mapping the neuron circuit bias voltages to the model parameters. This mapping is obtained by an automatic method in which the electronic circuit biases are calibrated against the model parameters by a series of population activity measurements. The abstract computational layer is formed by configuring neural networks as generic soft winner-take-all subnetworks that provide reliable processing by virtue of their active gain, signal restoration, and multistability. The necessary states and transitions of the desired high-level behavior are then easily embedded in the computational layer by introducing only sparse connections between some neurons of the various subnets. We demonstrate this synthesis method for a neuromorphic sensory agent that performs real-time context-dependent classification of motion patterns observed by a silicon retina
Sparse Attentive Backtracking: Temporal CreditAssignment Through Reminding
Learning long-term dependencies in extended temporal sequences requires
credit assignment to events far back in the past. The most common method for
training recurrent neural networks, back-propagation through time (BPTT),
requires credit information to be propagated backwards through every single
step of the forward computation, potentially over thousands or millions of time
steps. This becomes computationally expensive or even infeasible when used with
long sequences. Importantly, biological brains are unlikely to perform such
detailed reverse replay over very long sequences of internal states (consider
days, months, or years.) However, humans are often reminded of past memories or
mental states which are associated with the current mental state. We consider
the hypothesis that such memory associations between past and present could be
used for credit assignment through arbitrarily long sequences, propagating the
credit assigned to the current state to the associated past state. Based on
this principle, we study a novel algorithm which only back-propagates through a
few of these temporal skip connections, realized by a learned attention
mechanism that associates current states with relevant past states. We
demonstrate in experiments that our method matches or outperforms regular BPTT
and truncated BPTT in tasks involving particularly long-term dependencies, but
without requiring the biologically implausible backward replay through the
whole history of states. Additionally, we demonstrate that the proposed method
transfers to longer sequences significantly better than LSTMs trained with BPTT
and LSTMs trained with full self-attention.Comment: To appear as a Spotlight presentation at NIPS 201
Reinforcement Learning with Random Delays
Action and observation delays commonly occur in many Reinforcement Learning
applications, such as remote control scenarios. We study the anatomy of
randomly delayed environments, and show that partially resampling trajectory
fragments in hindsight allows for off-policy multi-step value estimation. We
apply this principle to derive Delay-Correcting Actor-Critic (DCAC), an
algorithm based on Soft Actor-Critic with significantly better performance in
environments with delays. This is shown theoretically and also demonstrated
practically on a delay-augmented version of the MuJoCo continuous control
benchmark