Active inference is a process theory of the brain that states that all living organisms infer actions in order to minimize their (expected) free energy. However, current experiments are limited to predefined, often discrete, state spaces. In this paper we use recent advances in deep learning to learn the state space and approximate the necessary probability distributions to engage in active inference.
Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL)（瑞士联邦理工学院（洛桑联邦理工学院））
To achieve autonomy in a priori unknown real-world scenarios, agents should be able to: i) act from high-dimensional sensory observations (e.g., images), ii) learn from past experience to adapt and improve, and iii) be capable of long horizon planning. Classical planning algorithms (e.g. PRM, RRT) are proficient at handling long-horizon planning. Deep learning based methods in turn can provide the necessary representations to address the others, by modeling statistical contingencies between observations. In this direction, we introduce a general-purpose planning algorithm called PALMER that co…
University of Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹大学）；University of Oxford（牛津大学）；University of Liverpool（利物浦大学）；Delft University of Technology（代尔夫特理工大学）
In active perception tasks, an agent aims to select sensory actions that reduce its uncertainty about one or more hidden variables. While partially observable Markov decision processes (POMDPs) provide a natural model for such problems, reward functions that directly penalize uncertainty in the agent's belief can remove the piecewise-linear and convex property of the value function required by most POMDP planners. Furthermore, as the number of sensors available to the agent grows, the computational cost of POMDP planning grows exponentially with it, making POMDP planning infeasible with tradit…
We present a motion planning algorithm for a class of uncertain control-affine nonlinear systems which guarantees runtime safety and goal reachability when using high-dimensional sensor measurements (e.g., RGB-D images) and a learned perception module in the feedback control loop. First, given a dataset of states and observations, we train a perception system that seeks to invert a subset of the state from an observation, and estimate an upper bound on the perception error which is valid with high probability in a trusted domain near the data. Next, we use contraction theory to design a stabil…
Uber ATG（Uber 先进技术集团）；University of Toronto（多伦多大学）
In this paper we propose a novel end-to-end learnable network that performs joint perception, prediction and motion planning for self-driving vehicles and produces interpretable intermediate representations. Unlike existing neural motion planners, our motion planning costs are consistent with our perception and prediction estimates. This is achieved by a novel differentiable semantic occupancy representation that is explicitly used as cost by the motion planning process. Our network is learned end-to-end from human demonstrations. The experiments in a large-scale manual-driving dataset and clo…
Multi-agent active perception is a task where a team of agents cooperatively gathers observations to compute a joint estimate of a hidden variable. The task is decentralized and the joint estimate can only be computed after the task ends by fusing observations of all agents. The objective is to maximize the accuracy of the estimate. The accuracy is quantified by a centralized prediction reward determined by a centralized decision-maker who perceives the observations gathered by all agents after the task ends. In this paper, we model multi-agent active perception as a decentralized partially ob…
Apple: Toward General Active Perception via Reinforcement Learning
Department of Computer Science, TU Darmstadt, Germany（德国图林根大学计算机科学系）；LIRIS, CNRS UMR5205, École Centrale de Lyon, France（法国里里萨大学LIRIS实验室）；LASR Lab & CeTI, TU Dresden, Germany（德国德累斯顿技术大学LASR实验室）；DFKI, Hessian.AI, RIG, and Centre for Cognitive Science, TU Darmstadt, Germany（德国图林根大学DFKI、海德堡人工智能、RIG及认知科学中心）
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour（唐德斯脑、认知与行为研究所）；Radboud University（拉德堡德大学）
We present a pixel-based deep active inference algorithm (PixelAI) inspired by human body perception and action. Our algorithm combines the free-energy principle from neuroscience, rooted in variational inference, with deep convolutional decoders to scale the algorithm to directly deal with raw visual input and provide online adaptive inference. Our approach is validated by studying body perception and action in a simulated and a real Nao robot. Results show that our approach allows the robot to perform 1) dynamical body estimation of its arm using only monocular camera images and 2) autonomou…
Unified Linear Parametric Map Modeling and Perception-aware Trajectory Planning for Mobile Robotics
School of Information Science and Engineering, Shenyang University of Technology（沈阳理工大学信息科学与工程学院）；State Key Laboratory of Synthetic Automation for Process Industries, Northeastern University（东北大学过程工业综合自动化重点实验室）；State Key Laboratory of Robotics, Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院沈阳自动化研究所机器人重点实验室）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Virginia Tech（弗吉尼亚理工大学）；University of Maryland at College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）
This work proposes the use of Bayesian approximations of uncertainty from deep learning in a robot planner, showing that this produces more cautious actions in safety-critical scenarios. The case study investigated is motivated by a setup where an aerial robot acts as a "scout" for a ground robot. This is useful when the below area is unknown or dangerous, with applications in space exploration, military, or search-and-rescue. Images taken from the aerial view are used to provide a less obstructed map to guide the navigation of the robot on the ground. Experiments are conducted using a deep le…
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Uber ATG（优步先进技术集团）；Brown University（布朗大学）
Self-driving vehicles must perceive and predict the future positions of nearby actors in order to avoid collisions and drive safely. A learned deep learning module is often responsible for this task, requiring large-scale, high-quality training datasets. As data collection is often significantly cheaper than labeling in this domain, the decision of which subset of examples to label can have a profound impact on model performance. Active learning techniques, which leverage the state of the current model to iteratively select examples for labeling, offer a promising solution to this problem. How…
The vast majority of visual animals actively control their eyes, heads, and/or bodies to direct their gaze toward different parts of their environment. In contrast, recent applications of reinforcement learning in robotic manipulation employ cameras as passive sensors. These are carefully placed to view a scene from a fixed pose. Active perception allows animals to gather the most relevant information about the world and focus their computational resources where needed. It also enables them to view objects from different distances and viewpoints, providing a rich visual experience from which t…
Most real-world 3D sensors such as LiDARs perform fixed scans of the entire environment, while being decoupled from the recognition system that processes the sensor data. In this work, we propose a method for 3D object recognition using light curtains, a resource-efficient controllable sensor that measures depth at user-specified locations in the environment. Crucially, we propose using prediction uncertainty of a deep learning based 3D point cloud detector to guide active perception. Given a neural network's uncertainty, we derive an optimization objective to place light curtains using the pr…
