Jonathan Montaño

Akkamahadevi Hanni, Jonathan Montaño, Yu Zhang

When users work with AI agents, they form conscious or subconscious expectations of them. Meeting user expectations is crucial for such agents to engage in successful interactions and teaming. However, users may form expectations of an agent that differ from the agent's planned behaviors. These differences lead to the consideration of two separate decision models in the planning process to generate explicable behaviors. However, little has been done to incorporate safety considerations, especially in a learning setting. We present Safe Explicable Policy Search (SEPS), which aims to provide a learning approach to explicable behavior generation while minimizing the safety risk, both during and after learning. We formulate SEPS as a constrained optimization problem where the agent aims to maximize an explicability score subject to constraints on safety and a suboptimality criterion based on the agent's model. SEPS innovatively combines the capabilities of Constrained Policy Optimization and Explicable Policy Search to introduce the capability of generating safe explicable behaviors to domains with continuous state and action spaces, which is critical for robotic applications. We evaluate SEPS in safety-gym environments and with a physical robot experiment to show its efficacy and relevance in human-AI teaming.

Omid Jafari, Parth Nagarkar, Jonathan Montaño

Similarity search in high-dimensional spaces is an important task for many multimedia applications. Due to the notorious curse of dimensionality, approximate nearest neighbor techniques are preferred over exact searching techniques since they can return good enough results at a much better speed. Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH) is a very popular random hashing technique for finding approximate nearest neighbors. Existing state-of-the-art Locality Sensitive Hashing techniques that focus on improving performance of the overall process, mainly focus on minimizing the total number of IOs while sacrificing the overall processing time. The main time-consuming process in LSH techniques is the process of finding neighboring points in projected spaces. We present a novel index structure called radius-optimized Locality Sensitive Hashing (roLSH). With the help of sampling techniques and Neural Networks, we present two techniques to find neighboring points in projected spaces efficiently, without sacrificing the accuracy of the results. Our extensive experimental analysis on real datasets shows the performance benefit of roLSH over existing state-of-the-art LSH techniques.

Omid Jafari, Parth Nagarkar, Jonathan Montaño

Finding similar images is a necessary operation in many multimedia applications. Images are often represented and stored as a set of high-dimensional features, which are extracted using localized feature extraction algorithms. Locality Sensitive Hashing is one of the most popular approximate processing techniques for finding similar points in high-dimensional spaces. Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH) and its variants are designed to find similar points, but they are not designed to find objects (such as images, which are made up of a collection of points) efficiently. In this paper, we propose an index structure, Bitmap-Image LSH (bImageLSH), for efficient processing of high-dimensional images. Using a real dataset, we experimentally show the performance benefit of our novel design while keeping the accuracy of the image results high.