Lingheng Meng

Mingjie Li, Ben Beck, Tharindu Rathnayake et al.

Cycling is a healthy and sustainable mode of transport. However, interactions with motor vehicles remain a key barrier to increased cycling participation. The ability to detect potentially dangerous interactions from on-bike sensing could provide important information to riders and policymakers. A key influence on rider comfort and safety is close passes, i.e., when a vehicle narrowly passes a cyclist. In this paper, we introduce a novel benchmark, called Cyc-CP, towards close pass (CP) event detection from video streams. The task is formulated into two problem categories: scene-level and instance-level. Scene-level detection ascertains the presence of a CP event within the provided video clip. Instance-level detection identifies the specific vehicle within the scene that precipitates a CP event. To address these challenges, we introduce four benchmark models, each underpinned by advanced deep-learning methodologies. For training and evaluating those models, we have developed a synthetic dataset alongside the acquisition of a real-world dataset. The benchmark evaluations reveal that the models achieve an accuracy of 88.13\% for scene-level detection and 84.60\% for instance-level detection on the real-world dataset. We envision this benchmark as a test-bed to accelerate CP detection and facilitate interaction between the fields of road safety, intelligent transportation systems and artificial intelligence. Both the benchmark datasets and detection models will be available at https://github.com/SustainableMobility/cyc-cp to facilitate experimental reproducibility and encourage more in-depth research in the field.

Lingheng Meng, Rob Gorbet, Michael Burke et al.

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has made tremendous advances in both simulated and real-world robot control tasks in recent years. This is particularly the case for tasks that can be carefully engineered with a full state representation, and which can then be formulated as a Markov Decision Process (MDP). However, applying DRL strategies designed for MDPs to novel robot control tasks can be challenging, because the available observations may be a partial representation of the state, resulting in a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP). This paper considers three popular DRL algorithms, namely Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (TD3), and Soft Actor-Critic (SAC), invented for MDPs, and studies their performance in POMDP scenarios. While prior work has found that SAC and TD3 typically outperform PPO across a broad range of tasks that can be represented as MDPs, we show that this is not always the case, using three representative POMDP environments. Empirical studies show that this is related to multi-step bootstrapping, where multi-step immediate rewards, instead of one-step immediate reward, are used to calculate the target value estimation of an observation and action pair. We identify this by observing that the inclusion of multi-step bootstrapping in TD3 (MTD3) and SAC (MSAC) results in improved robustness in POMDP settings.

Emmanuel Fashae, Michael Burke, Leimin Tian et al.

Robotic systems for household object rearrangement often rely on latent preference models inferred from human demonstrations. While effective at prediction, these models offer limited insight into the interpretable factors that guide human decisions. We introduce an explicit formulation of object arrangement preferences along four interpretable constructs: spatial practicality (putting items where they naturally fit best in the space), habitual convenience (making frequently used items easy to reach), semantic coherence (placing items together if they are used for the same task or are contextually related), and commonsense appropriateness (putting things where people would usually expect to find them). To capture these constructs, we designed and validated a self-report questionnaire through a 63-participant online study. Results confirm the psychological distinctiveness of these constructs and their explanatory power across two scenarios (kitchen and living room). We demonstrate the utility of these constructs by integrating them into a Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) planner and show that when guided by participant-derived preferences, our planner can generate reasonable arrangements that closely align with those generated by participants. This work contributes a compact, interpretable formulation of object arrangement preferences and a demonstration of how it can be operationalized for robot planning.

Lingheng Meng, Rob Gorbet, Dana Kulić

A promising characteristic of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is its capability to learn optimal policy in an end-to-end manner without relying on feature engineering. However, most approaches assume a fully observable state space, i.e. fully observable Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). In real-world robotics, this assumption is unpractical, because of issues such as sensor sensitivity limitations and sensor noise, and the lack of knowledge about whether the observation design is complete or not. These scenarios lead to Partially Observable MDPs (POMDPs). In this paper, we propose Long-Short-Term-Memory-based Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (LSTM-TD3) by introducing a memory component to TD3, and compare its performance with other DRL algorithms in both MDPs and POMDPs. Our results demonstrate the significant advantages of the memory component in addressing POMDPs, including the ability to handle missing and noisy observation data.

Lingheng Meng, Rob Gorbet, Dana Kulić

Multi-step (also called n-step) methods in reinforcement learning (RL) have been shown to be more efficient than the 1-step method due to faster propagation of the reward signal, both theoretically and empirically, in tasks exploiting tabular representation of the value-function. Recently, research in Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) also shows that multi-step methods improve learning speed and final performance in applications where the value-function and policy are represented with deep neural networks. However, there is a lack of understanding about what is actually contributing to the boost of performance. In this work, we analyze the effect of multi-step methods on alleviating the overestimation problem in DRL, where multi-step experiences are sampled from a replay buffer. Specifically building on top of Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (DDPG), we propose Multi-step DDPG (MDDPG), where different step sizes are manually set, and its variant called Mixed Multi-step DDPG (MMDDPG) where an average over different multi-step backups is used as update target of Q-value function. Empirically, we show that both MDDPG and MMDDPG are significantly less affected by the overestimation problem than DDPG with 1-step backup, which consequently results in better final performance and learning speed. We also discuss the advantages and disadvantages of different ways to do multi-step expansion in order to reduce approximation error, and expose the tradeoff between overestimation and underestimation that underlies offline multi-step methods. Finally, we compare the computational resource needs of Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic Policy Gradient (TD3), a state-of-art algorithm proposed to address overestimation in actor-critic methods, and our proposed methods, since they show comparable final performance and learning speed.

Lingheng Meng, Daiwei Lin, Adam Francey et al.

Physical agents that can autonomously generate engaging, life-like behaviour will lead to more responsive and interesting robots and other autonomous systems. Although many advances have been made for one-to-one interactions in well controlled settings, future physical agents should be capable of interacting with humans in natural settings, including group interaction. In order to generate engaging behaviours, the autonomous system must first be able to estimate its human partners' engagement level. In this paper, we propose an approach for estimating engagement during group interaction by simultaneously taking into account active and passive interaction, i.e. occupancy, and use the measure as the reward signal within a reinforcement learning framework to learn engaging interactive behaviours. The proposed approach is implemented in an interactive sculptural system in a museum setting. We compare the learning system to a baseline using pre-scripted interactive behaviours. Analysis based on sensory data and survey data shows that adaptable behaviours within an expert-designed action space can achieve higher engagement and likeability.