Chengjie Lu

Chengjie Lu, Shaukat Ali, Tao Yue

Testing autonomous vehicles (AVs) under various environmental scenarios that lead the vehicles to unsafe situations is known to be challenging. Given the infinite possible environmental scenarios, it is essential to find critical scenarios efficiently. To this end, we propose a novel testing method, named EpiTESTER, by taking inspiration from epigenetics, which enables species to adapt to sudden environmental changes. In particular, EpiTESTER adopts gene silencing as its epigenetic mechanism, which regulates gene expression to prevent the expression of a certain gene, and the probability of gene expression is dynamically computed as the environment changes. Given different data modalities (e.g., images, lidar point clouds) in the context of AV, EpiTESTER benefits from a multi-model fusion transformer to extract high-level feature representations from environmental factors and then calculates probabilities based on these features with the attention mechanism. To assess the cost-effectiveness of EpiTESTER, we compare it with a classical genetic algorithm (GA) (i.e., without any epigenetic mechanism implemented) and EpiTESTER with equal probability for each gene. We evaluate EpiTESTER with four initial environments from CARLA, an open-source simulator for autonomous driving research, and an end-to-end AV controller, Interfuser. Our results show that EpiTESTER achieved a promising performance in identifying critical scenarios compared to the baselines, showing that applying epigenetic mechanisms is a good option for solving practical problems.

Chengjie Lu, Qinghua Xu, Tao Yue et al.

The Cancer Registry of Norway (CRN) collects information on cancer patients by receiving cancer messages from different medical entities (e.g., medical labs, and hospitals) in Norway. Such messages are validated by an automated cancer registry system: GURI. Its correct operation is crucial since it lays the foundation for cancer research and provides critical cancer-related statistics to its stakeholders. Constructing a cyber-cyber digital twin (CCDT) for GURI can facilitate various experiments and advanced analyses of the operational state of GURI without requiring intensive interactions with the real system. However, GURI constantly evolves due to novel medical diagnostics and treatment, technological advances, etc. Accordingly, CCDT should evolve as well to synchronize with GURI. A key challenge of achieving such synchronization is that evolving CCDT needs abundant data labelled by the new GURI. To tackle this challenge, we propose EvoCLINICAL, which considers the CCDT developed for the previous version of GURI as the pretrained model and fine-tunes it with the dataset labelled by querying a new GURI version. EvoCLINICAL employs a genetic algorithm to select an optimal subset of cancer messages from a candidate dataset and query GURI with it. We evaluate EvoCLINICAL on three evolution processes. The precision, recall, and F1 score are all greater than 91%, demonstrating the effectiveness of EvoCLINICAL. Furthermore, we replace the active learning part of EvoCLINICAL with random selection to study the contribution of transfer learning to the overall performance of EvoCLINICAL. Results show that employing active learning in EvoCLINICAL increases its performances consistently.

Chengjie Lu, Tao Yue, Man Zhang et al.

Autonomous driving systems (ADSs) are capable of sensing the environment and making driving decisions autonomously. These systems are safety-critical, and testing them is one of the important approaches to ensure their safety. However, due to the inherent complexity of ADSs and the high dimensionality of their operating environment, the number of possible test scenarios for ADSs is infinite. Besides, the operating environment of ADSs is dynamic, continuously evolving, and full of uncertainties, which requires a testing approach adaptive to the environment. In addition, existing ADS testing techniques have limited effectiveness in ensuring the realism of test scenarios, especially the realism of weather conditions and their changes over time. Recently, reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated great potential in addressing challenging problems, especially those requiring constant adaptations to dynamic environments. To this end, we present DeepQTest, a novel ADS testing approach that uses RL to learn environment configurations with a high chance of revealing abnormal ADS behaviors. Specifically, DeepQTest employs Deep Q-Learning and adopts three safety and comfort measures to construct the reward functions. To ensure the realism of generated scenarios, DeepQTest defines a set of realistic constraints and introduces real-world weather conditions into the simulated environment. We employed three comparison baselines, i.e., random, greedy, and a state-of-the-art RL-based approach DeepCOllision, for evaluating DeepQTest on an industrial-scale ADS. Evaluation results show that DeepQTest demonstrated significantly better effectiveness in terms of generating scenarios leading to collisions and ensuring scenario realism compared with the baselines. In addition, among the three reward functions implemented in DeepQTest, Time-To-Collision is recommended as the best design according to our study.

Chengjie Lu, Jiahui Wu, Shaukat Ali et al.

Refurbishing laptops extends their lives while contributing to reducing electronic waste, which promotes building a sustainable future. To this end, the Danish Technological Institute (DTI) focuses on the research and development of several robotic applications empowered with software, including laptop refurbishing. Cleaning represents a major step in refurbishing and involves identifying and removing stickers from laptop surfaces. Software plays a crucial role in the cleaning process. For instance, the software integrates various object detection models to identify and remove stickers from laptops automatically. However, given the diversity in types of stickers (e.g., shapes, colors, locations), identification of the stickers is highly uncertain, thereby requiring explicit quantification of uncertainty associated with the identified stickers. Such uncertainty quantification can help reduce risks in removing stickers, which, for example, could otherwise result in software faults damaging laptop surfaces. For uncertainty quantification, we adopted the Monte Carlo Dropout method to evaluate six sticker detection models (SDMs) from DTI using three datasets: the original image dataset from DTI and two datasets generated with vision language models, i.e., DALL-E-3 and Stable Diffusion-3. In addition, we presented novel robustness metrics concerning detection accuracy and uncertainty to assess the robustness of the SDMs based on adversarial datasets generated from the three datasets using a dense adversary method. Our evaluation results show that different SDMs perform differently regarding different metrics. Based on the results, we provide SDM selection guidelines and lessons learned from various perspectives.

Jiahui Wu, Chengjie Lu, Aitor Arrieta et al.

Autonomous vehicles (AVs) make driving decisions without human intervention. Therefore, ensuring AVs' dependability is critical. Despite significant research and development in AV development, their dependability assurance remains a significant challenge due to the complexity and unpredictability of their operating environments. Scenario-based testing evaluates AVs under various driving scenarios, but the unlimited number of potential scenarios highlights the importance of identifying critical scenarios that can violate safety or functional requirements. Such requirements are inherently interdependent and need to be tested simultaneously. To this end, we propose MOEQT, a novel multi-objective reinforcement learning (MORL)-based approach to generate critical scenarios that simultaneously test interdependent safety and functional requirements. MOEQT adapts Envelope Q-learning as the MORL algorithm, which dynamically adapts multi-objective weights to balance the relative importance between multiple objectives. MOEQT generates critical scenarios to violate multiple requirements through dynamically interacting with the AV environment, ensuring comprehensive AV testing. We evaluate MOEQT using an advanced end-to-end AV controller and a high-fidelity simulator and compare MOEQT with two baselines: a random strategy and a single-objective RL with a weighted reward function. Our evaluation results show that MOEQT achieved an overall better performance in identifying critical scenarios for violating multiple requirements than the baselines.