Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Publication
    Potential-based Credit Assignment for Cooperative RL-based Testing of Autonomous Vehicles
    ( 2023)
    Ayvaz, Utku
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    Hao, Shen
    While autonomous vehicles (AVs) may perform remarkably well in generic real-life cases, their irrational action in some unforeseen cases leads to critical safety concerns. This paper introduces the concept of collaborative reinforcement learning (RL) to generate challenging test cases for AV planning and decision-making module. One of the critical challenges for collaborative RL is the credit assignment problem, where a proper assignment of rewards to multiple agents interacting in the traffic scenario, considering all parameters and timing, turns out to be non-trivial. In order to address this challenge, we propose a novel potential-based reward-shaping approach inspired by counterfactual analysis for solving the credit-assignment problem. The evaluation in a simulated environment demonstrates the superiority of our proposed approach against other methods using local and global rewards.
  • Publication
    Selected Challenges in ML Safety for Railway
    Neural networks (NN) have been introduced in safety-critical applications from autonomous driving to train inspection. I argue that to close the demo-to-product gap, we need scientifically-rooted engineering methods that can efficiently improve the quality of NN. In particular, I consider a structural approach (via GSN) to argue the quality of neural networks with NN-specific dependability metrics. A systematic analysis considering the quality of data collection, training, testing, and operation allows us to identify many unsolved research questions: (1) Solve the denominator/edge case problem with synthetic data, with quantifiable argumentation (2) Reach the performance target by combining classical methods and data-based methods in vision (3) Decide the threshold (for OoD or any kind) based on the risk appetite (societally accepted risk).