United States

Human-robot shared autonomy techniques for vehicle navigation hold promise for reducing a human driverâ€™s workload, ensuring safety, and improving navigation efficiency. However, because typical techniques achieve these improvements by effectively removing human control at critical moments, these approaches often exhibit poor responsiveness to human commandsâ€”especially in cluttered environments. In this paper, we propose a novel goal-blending shared autonomy (GBSA) system, which aims to improve responsiveness in shared autonomy systems by blending human and robot input during the selection of local navigation goals as opposed to low-level motor (servo-level) commands. We validate the proposed approach by performing a human study involving an intelligent wheelchair and compare GBSA to a representative servo-level shared control system that uses a policy-blending approach. The results of both quantitative performance analysis and a subjective survey show that GBSA exhibits significantly better system responsiveness and induces higher user satisfaction than the existing approach.

AAAI 2021

Goal Blending for Responsive Shared Autonomy in a Navigating Vehicle

**About**
 The PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments (PETRA) conference is a highly interdisciplinary conference that focuses on computational and engineering approaches to improve the quality of life and enhance human performance in a wide range of settings, in the workplace, at home, in public spaces, urban environments, and other. Outcomes of this conference have a broad impact in application areas that include, manufacturing, transportation, healthcare, energy systems, security and safety, robotics, biomedicine, environment and conservation, and many others. PETRA brings together very different types of technologies to also address important social and healthcare issues for sensitive populations, such as the elderly, persons suffering from chronic conditions such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Cerebral Palsy, and other disabilities or traumas.

 PETRA (which means “stone” in Greek) addresses important human living needs. From a technological perspective, PETRA motivates and inspires new scientific thrusts, innovations and discoveries to improve living environments, a particularly important issue, in an increasingly crowded and complex world where the need for inclusiveness and connectivity with the rest of the world is key. For the elderly in particular, PETRA addresses the fact that, as people grow older; they will increasingly rely on technology to be able to prolong staying in their homes and enjoy an independent life.

 The PETRA 2021 proceedings will be published in the ACM Digital Library as part of the ACM ICPS program. The ISBN number assigned to PETRA '21 is 978-1-4503-8792-7

PETRA 2021

The PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments (PETRA) conference is a highly interdisciplinary conference that focuses on computational and engineering approaches to improve the quality of life and enhance human performance in a wide range of settings, in the workplace, at home, in public spaces, urban environments, and other. Outcomes of this conference have a broad impact in application areas that include, manufacturing, transportation, healthcare, energy systems, security and safety, robotics, biomedicine, environment and conservation, and many others. PETRA brings together very different types of technologies to also address important social and healthcare issues for sensitive populations, such as the elderly, persons suffering from chronic conditions such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Cerebral Palsy, and other disabilities or traumas.

technical paper

The purpose of the AAAI conference is to promote research in artificial intelligence (AI) and scientific exchange among AI researchers, practitioners, scientists, and engineers in affiliated disciplines. 

Learning invariant representations is a critical first step in a number of machine learning tasks. A common approach is given by the so-called information bottleneck principle in which an application dependent function of mutual information is carefully chosen and optimized. Unfortunately, in practice, these functions are not suitable for optimization purposes since these losses are agnostic of the metric structure of the parameters of the model. In our paper, we introduce a class of losses for learning representations that are invariant to some extraneous variable of interest by inverting the class of contrastive losses, i.e., inverse contrastive loss (ICL). We show that if the extraneous variable is binary, then optimizing ICL is equivalent to optimizing a regularized MMD divergence. More generally, we also show that if we are provided a metric on the sample space, our formulation of ICL can be decomposed into a sum of convex functions of the given distance metric. Our experimental results indicate that models obtained by optimizing ICL achieve significantly better invariance to the extraneous variable for a fixed desired level of accuracy. In a variety of experimental settings, we show applicability of ICL for learning invariant representations for both continuous and discrete protected/extraneous variables. The project page with code is available at https://github.com/adityakumarakash/ICL

Learning Invariant Representations Using Inverse Contrastive Loss

Real-life applications, heavily relying on machine learning, such as dialog systems, demand for out-of-domain detection methods. Intent classification models should be equipped with a mechanism to distinguish seen intents from unseen ones so that the dialog agent is capable of rejecting the latter and avoiding undesired behavior. However, despite increasing attention paid to the task, the best practices for out-of-domain intent detection have not yet been fully established. 

This paper conducts a thorough comparison of out-of-domain intent detection methods. We prioritize the methods, not requiring access to out-of-domain data during training, gathering of which is extremely time- and labor-consuming due to lexical and stylistic variation of user utterances. We evaluate multiple contextual encoders and methods, proven to be efficient, on three common datasets for intent classification, expanded with out-of-domain utterances. Our main findings show that fine-tuning Transformer-based encoders on in-domain data leads to superior results. Mahalanobis distance, together with utterance representations, derived from Transformer-based encoders, outperform other methods by a wide margin(1-5% in
terms of AUROC) and establish new state-of-the-art results for all datasets. 

The broader analysis shows that the reason for success lies in the fact that the fine-tuned Transformer is capable of constructing homogeneous representations of in-domain utterances, revealing geometrical disparity to out of domain utterances. In turn, the Mahalanobis distance captures this disparity easily.

Revisiting Mahalanobis Distance for Transformer-Based Out-of-Domain Detection

Gaussian Process regression is a popular nonparametric regression method based on Bayesian principles that provides uncertainty estimates for its predictions. However, these estimates are of a Bayesian nature, whereas for some important applications, like learning-based control with safety guarantees, frequentist uncertainty bounds are required. Although such rigorous bounds are available for Gaussian Processes, they are too conservative to be useful in applications. This often leads practitioners to replacing these bounds by heuristics, thus breaking all theoretical guarantees. To address this problem, we introduce new uncertainty bounds that are rigorous, yet practically useful at the same time. In particular, the bounds can be explicitly evaluated and are much less conservative than state of the art results. Furthermore, we show that certain model misspecifications lead to only graceful degradation. We demonstrate these advantages and the usefulness of our results for learning-based control with numerical examples.

Practical and Rigorous Uncertainty Bounds for Gaussian Process Regression

Biomedical entity linking aims to map biomedical mentions,
such as diseases and drugs, to standard entities in a given
knowledge base. The specific challenge in this context is
that the same biomedical entity can have a wide range of
names, including synonyms, morphological variations, and
names with different word orderings. Recently, BERT-based
methods have advanced the state-of-the-art by allowing for
rich representations of word sequences. However, they often have hundreds of millions of parameters and require
heavy computing resources, which limits their applications
in resource-limited scenarios. Here, we propose a lightweight
neural method for biomedical entity linking, which needs just
a fraction of the parameters of a BERT model and much less
computing resources. Our method uses a simple alignment
layer with attention mechanisms to capture the variations
between mention and entity names. Yet, we show that our
model is competitive with previous work on standard evaluation benchmarks.

A Lightweight Neural Model for Biomedical Entity Linking

Much research effort in HRI has focused on how to enable robots to learn new skills from observations, demonstrations, and instructions. Less work, however, has focused on how skills can be corrected if they were learned incorrectly, adapted to changing circumstances, or generalized/specialized to different contexts. In this paper, a skill modification framework is introduced that allows users to modify a robotâ€™s stored skills quickly through instructions to (1) reduce inefficiencies, (2) fix errors, and (3) enable generalizations, all in a way for modified skills to be immediately available for task performance. A thorough evaluation of the implemented framework shows the operation of the algorithms integrated in a cognitive robotic architecture on different fully autonomous robots in various HRI case studies. An additional online HRI user study verifies that subjects prefer to quickly modify robot knowledge in the way we proposed in the framework.

Enabling Fast Instruction-Based Modification of Learned Robot Skills

Neural Architecture Search (NAS) is an open and challenging problem in machine learning. While NAS offers great promise, the prohibitive computational demand of most of the existing NAS methods makes it difficult to directly search the architectures on large-scale tasks. The typical way of conducting large scale NAS is to search for an architectural building block on a small dataset (either using a proxy set from the large dataset or a completely different small scale dataset) and then transfer the block to a larger dataset. Despite a number of recent results that show the promise of transfer from proxy datasets, a comprehensive evaluation of different NAS methods studying the impact of different source datasets has not yet been addressed. In this work, we propose to analyze the architecture transferability of different NAS methods by performing a series of experiments on large scale benchmarks such as ImageNet1K and ImageNet22K. We find that: (i) The size and domain of the  proxy set  does not seem to influence architecture performance on the target dataset. On average, transfer performance of architectures searched using completely different small datasets (e.g., CIFAR10) perform similarly to the architectures searched directly on proxy target datasets. However, design of proxy sets has considerable impact on rankings of different NAS methods. (ii) While different NAS methods show similar performance on a source dataset (e.g., CIFAR10), they significantly differ on the transfer performance to a large dataset (e.g., ImageNet1K). (iii) Even on large datasets, random sampling baseline is very competitive, but the choice of the appropriate combination of proxy set and search strategy can provide significant improvement over it. We believe that our extensive empirical analysis will prove useful for future design of NAS algorithms.

NASTransfer: Analyzing Architecture Transferability in Large Scale Neural Architecture Search

In this paper, we propose a Chinese multi-turn topic-driven conversation dataset, NaturalConv, which allows the participants to chat anything they want as long as any element from the topic is mentioned and the topic shift is smooth. Our corpus contains 19.9K conversations from six domains, and 400K utterances with an average turn number of 20.1. These conversations contain in-depth discussions on related topics or widely natural transition between multiple topics. We believe either way is normal for human conversation. To facilitate the research on this corpus, we provide results of several benchmark models. Comparative results show that for this dataset, our current models are not able to provide significant improvement by introducing background knowledge/topic. Therefore, the proposed dataset should be a good benchmark for further research to evaluate the validity and naturalness of multi-turn conversation systems. Our dataset is available at https://ai.tencent.com/ailab/nlp/dialogue/#datasets.

NaturalConv: A Chinese Dialogue Dataset Towards Multi-Turn Topic-Driven Conversation

We introduce the use of reinforcement learning for indirect mechanisms, working with the existing class of sequential price mechanisms, which generalizes both serial dictatorship and posted price mechanisms and essentially characterizes all strongly obviously strategyproof mechanisms. Learning an optimal mechanism within this class forms a partially-observable Markov decision process. We provide rigorous conditions for when this class of mechanisms is more powerful than simpler static mechanisms, for sufficiency or insufficiency of observation statistics for learning, and for the necessity of complex (deep) policies. We show that our approach can learn optimal or near-optimal mechanisms in several experimental settings.

Reinforcement Learning of Sequential Price Mechanisms

Uncertain partially observable Markov decision processes (uPOMDPs) allow the probabilistic transition and observation functions of standard POMDPs to belong to a so-called uncertainty set.
Such uncertainty, referred to as epistemic uncertainty, captures uncountable sets of probability distributions caused by, for instance, a lack of data available.
We develop an algorithm to compute finite-memory policies for uPOMDPs that robustly satisfy specifications against any admissible distribution.
In general, computing such policies is theoretically and practically intractable.	
We provide an efficient solution to this problem in four steps.
(1) We state the underlying problem as a nonconvex optimization problem with infinitely many constraints. 
(2) A dedicated dualization scheme yields a dual problem that is still nonconvex but has finitely many constraints. 
(3) We linearize this dual problem and (4) solve the resulting finite linear program to obtain locally optimal solutions to the original problem.
The resulting problem formulation is exponentially smaller than those resulting from existing methods.
We demonstrate the applicability of our algorithm using large instances of an aircraft collision-avoidance scenario and a novel spacecraft motion planning case study.

Robust Finite-State Controllers for Uncertain POMDPs

AI systems are often used to make or contribute to important decisions in a growing range of applications, including criminal justice, hiring, and medicine. Since these decisions impact human lives, it is important that the AI systems act in ways which align with human values. Techniques for preference modeling and social choice help researchers learn and aggregate peoples' preferences, which are used to guide AI behavior; thus, it is imperative that these learned preferences are accurate. These techniques often assume that people are willing to express strict preferences over alternatives; which is not true in practice. People are often indecisive, and especially so when their decision has moral implications. The philosophy and psychology literature shows that indecision is a measurable and nuanced behavior---and that there are several different reasons people are indecisive. This complicates the task of both learning and aggregating preferences, since most of the relevant literature makes restrictive assumptions on the meaning of indecision. We begin to close this gap by formalizing several mathematical indecision models based on theories from philosophy, psychology, and economics; these models can be used to describe (indecisive) agent decisions, both when they are allowed to express indecision and when they are not. We test these models using data collected from an online survey where participants choose how to (hypothetically) allocate organs to patients waiting for a transplant.

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