Donsuk Lee

Donsuk Lee, Denizhan Pak, Justin N. Wood

In recent years, the brain and cognitive sciences have made great strides developing a mechanistic understanding of object recognition in mature brains. Despite this progress, fundamental questions remain about the origins and computational foundations of object recognition. What learning algorithms underlie object recognition in newborn brains? Since newborn animals learn largely through unsupervised learning, we explored whether unsupervised learning algorithms can be used to predict the view-invariant object recognition behavior of newborn chicks. Specifically, we used feature representations derived from unsupervised deep neural networks (DNNs) as inputs to cognitive models of categorization. We show that features derived from unsupervised DNNs make competitive predictions about chick behavior compared to supervised features. More generally, we argue that linking controlled-rearing studies to image-computable DNN models opens new experimental avenues for studying the origins and computational basis of object recognition in newborn animals.

Donsuk Lee, Yiming Gu, Jerrick Hoang et al.

In this work, we aim to predict the future motion of vehicles in a traffic scene by explicitly modeling their pairwise interactions. Specifically, we propose a graph neural network that jointly predicts the discrete interaction modes and 5-second future trajectories for all agents in the scene. Our model infers an interaction graph whose nodes are agents and whose edges capture the long-term interaction intents among the agents. In order to train the model to recognize known modes of interaction, we introduce an auto-labeling function to generate ground truth interaction labels. Using a large-scale real-world driving dataset, we demonstrate that jointly predicting the trajectories along with the explicit interaction types leads to significantly lower trajectory error than baseline methods. Finally, we show through simulation studies that the learned interaction modes are semantically meaningful.