Jaeyoung Lee

Haicheng Liao, Yongkang Li, Chengyue Wang et al.

The primary goal of traffic accident anticipation is to foresee potential accidents in real time using dashcam videos, a task that is pivotal for enhancing the safety and reliability of autonomous driving technologies. In this study, we introduce an innovative framework, AccNet, which significantly advances the prediction capabilities beyond the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) 2D-based methods by incorporating monocular depth cues for sophisticated 3D scene modeling. Addressing the prevalent challenge of skewed data distribution in traffic accident datasets, we propose the Binary Adaptive Loss for Early Anticipation (BA-LEA). This novel loss function, together with a multi-task learning strategy, shifts the focus of the predictive model towards the critical moments preceding an accident. {We rigorously evaluate the performance of our framework on three benchmark datasets--Dashcam Accident Dataset (DAD), Car Crash Dataset (CCD), and AnAn Accident Detection (A3D), and DADA-2000 Dataset--demonstrating its superior predictive accuracy through key metrics such as Average Precision (AP) and mean Time-To-Accident (mTTA).

Sanghwa Lee, Jaeyoung Lee, Ichiro Hasuo

Prioritized experience replay (PER) samples important transitions, rather than uniformly, to improve the performance of a deep reinforcement learning agent. We claim that such prioritization has to be balanced with sample diversity for making the DQN stabilized and preventing forgetting. Our proposed improvement over PER, called Predictive PER (PPER), takes three countermeasures (TDInit, TDClip, TDPred) to (i) eliminate priority outliers and explosions and (ii) improve the sample diversity and distributions, weighted by priorities, both leading to stabilizing the DQN. The most notable among the three is the introduction of the second DNN called TDPred to generalize the in-distribution priorities. Ablation study and full experiments with Atari games show that each countermeasure by its own way and PPER contribute to successfully enhancing stability and thus performance over PER.

Jaeyoung Lee, Richard S. Sutton

Policy iteration (PI) is a recursive process of policy evaluation and improvement for solving an optimal decision-making/control problem, or in other words, a reinforcement learning (RL) problem. PI has also served as the fundamental for developing RL methods. In this paper, we propose two PI methods, called differential PI (DPI) and integral PI (IPI), and their variants, for a general RL framework in continuous time and space (CTS), where the environment is modeled by a system of ordinary differential equations (ODEs). The proposed methods inherit the current ideas of PI in classical RL and optimal control and theoretically support the existing RL algorithms in CTS: TD-learning and value-gradient-based (VGB) greedy policy update. We also provide case studies including 1) discounted RL and 2) optimal control tasks. Fundamental mathematical properties -- admissibility, uniqueness of the solution to the Bellman equation (BE), monotone improvement, convergence, and optimality of the solution to the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation (HJBE) -- are all investigated in-depth and improved from the existing theory, along with the general and case studies. Finally, the proposed ones are simulated with an inverted-pendulum model and their model-based and partially model-free implementations to support the theory and further investigate them beyond.