Christophe Bobda

Chan Kim, Jaekyung Cho, Christophe Bobda et al.

Robotic agents trained using reinforcement learning have the problem of taking unreliable actions in an out-of-distribution (OOD) state. Agents can easily become OOD in real-world environments because it is almost impossible for them to visit and learn the entire state space during training. Unfortunately, unreliable actions do not ensure that agents perform their original tasks successfully. Therefore, agents should be able to recognize whether they are in OOD states and learn how to return to the learned state distribution rather than continue to take unreliable actions. In this study, we propose a novel method for retraining agents to recover from OOD situations in a self-supervised manner when they fall into OOD states. Our in-depth experimental results demonstrate that our method substantially improves the agent's ability to recover from OOD situations in terms of sample efficiency and restoration of the performance for the original tasks. Moreover, we show that our method can retrain the agent to recover from OOD situations even when in-distribution states are difficult to visit through exploration.

Md Jubaer Hossain Pantho, Joel Mandebi Mbongue, Pankaj Bhowmik et al.

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in realizing methodologies to integrate more and more computation at the level of the image sensor. The rising trend has seen an increased research interest in developing novel event cameras that can facilitate CNN computation directly in the sensor. However, event-based cameras are not generally available in the market, limiting performance exploration on high-level models and algorithms. This paper presents an event camera simulator that can be a potent tool for hardware design prototyping, parameter optimization, attention-based innovative algorithm development, and benchmarking. The proposed simulator implements a distributed computation model to identify relevant regions in an image frame. Our simulator's relevance computation model is realized as a collection of modules and performs computations in parallel. The distributed computation model is configurable, making it highly useful for design space exploration. The Rendering engine of the simulator samples frame-regions only when there is a new event. The simulator closely emulates an image processing pipeline similar to that of physical cameras. Our experimental results show that the simulator can effectively emulate event vision with low overheads.