Sang Hyun Lee

Sanghyun Lee, Sunwoo Kim, Seungryong Kim et al.

Test-time scaling through reward-guided generation remains largely unexplored for discrete diffusion models despite its potential as a promising alternative. In this work, we introduce Iterative Reward-Guided Refinement (IterRef), a novel test-time scaling method tailored to discrete diffusion that leverages reward-guided noising-denoising transitions to progressively refine misaligned intermediate states. We formalize this process within a Multiple-Try Metropolis (MTM) framework, proving convergence to the reward-aligned distribution. Unlike prior methods that assume the current state is already aligned with the reward distribution and only guide the subsequent transition, our approach explicitly refines each state in situ, progressively steering it toward the optimal intermediate distribution. Across both text and image domains, we evaluate IterRef on diverse discrete diffusion models and observe consistent improvements in reward-guided generation quality. In particular, IterRef achieves striking gains under low compute budgets, far surpassing prior state-of-the-art baselines.

Sang-Hyun Lee, Daehyeok Kwon, Seung-Woo Seo

Recent reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms have demonstrated impressive results in simulated driving environments. However, autonomous vehicles trained in simulation often struggle to work well in the real world due to the fidelity gap between simulated and real-world environments. While directly training real-world autonomous vehicles with RL algorithms is a promising approach to bypass the fidelity gap problem, it presents several challenges. One critical yet often overlooked challenge is the need to reset a driving environment between every episode. This reset process demands significant human intervention, leading to poor training efficiency in the real world. In this paper, we introduce a novel autonomous algorithm that enables off-the-shelf RL algorithms to train autonomous vehicles with minimal human intervention. Our algorithm reduces unnecessary human intervention by aborting episodes to prevent unsafe states and identifying informative initial states for subsequent episodes. The key idea behind identifying informative initial states is to estimate the expected amount of information that can be obtained from under-explored but reachable states. Our algorithm also revisits rule-based autonomous driving algorithms and highlights their benefits in safely returning an autonomous vehicle to initial states. To evaluate how much human intervention is required during training, we implement challenging urban driving tasks that require an autonomous vehicle to reset to initial states on its own. The experimental results show that our autonomous algorithm is task-agnostic and achieves competitive driving performance with much less human intervention than baselines.

Sanghyun Lee, Chanyoung Park

The real-world traffic networks undergo expansion through the installation of new sensors, implying that the traffic patterns continually evolve over time. Incrementally training a model on the newly added sensors would make the model forget the past knowledge, i.e., catastrophic forgetting, while retraining the model on the entire network to capture these changes is highly inefficient. To address these challenges, we propose a novel Traffic Forecasting Mixture of Experts (TFMoE) for traffic forecasting under evolving networks. The main idea is to segment the traffic flow into multiple homogeneous groups, and assign an expert model responsible for a specific group. This allows each expert model to concentrate on learning and adapting to a specific set of patterns, while minimizing interference between the experts during training, thereby preventing the dilution or replacement of prior knowledge, which is a major cause of catastrophic forgetting. Through extensive experiments on a real-world long-term streaming network dataset, PEMSD3-Stream, we demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of TFMoE. Our results showcase superior performance and resilience in the face of catastrophic forgetting, underscoring the effectiveness of our approach in dealing with continual learning for traffic flow forecasting in long-term streaming networks.

Sanghyun Lee, Yeonjong Shin

We present a novel training method for deep operator networks (DeepONets), one of the most popular neural network models for operators. DeepONets are constructed by two sub-networks, namely the branch and trunk networks. Typically, the two sub-networks are trained simultaneously, which amounts to solving a complex optimization problem in a high dimensional space. In addition, the nonconvex and nonlinear nature makes training very challenging. To tackle such a challenge, we propose a two-step training method that trains the trunk network first and then sequentially trains the branch network. The core mechanism is motivated by the divide-and-conquer paradigm and is the decomposition of the entire complex training task into two subtasks with reduced complexity. Therein the Gram-Schmidt orthonormalization process is introduced which significantly improves stability and generalization ability. On the theoretical side, we establish a generalization error estimate in terms of the number of training data, the width of DeepONets, and the number of input and output sensors. Numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the two-step training method, including Darcy flow in heterogeneous porous media.

Byungjoo Choi, Gaang Lee, Houtan Jebelli et al.

The construction industry has demonstrated a high frequency and severity of accidents. Construction accidents are the result of the interaction between unsafe work conditions and workers unsafe behaviors. Given this relation, perceived risk is determined by an individual response to a potential work hazard during the work. As such, risk perception is critical to understand workers unsafe behaviors. Established methods of assessing workers perceived risk have mainly relied on surveys and interviews. However, these post-hoc methods, which are limited to monitoring dynamic changes in risk perception and conducting surveys at a construction site, may prove cumbersome to workers. Additionally, these methods frequently suffer from self-reported bias. To overcome the limitations of previous subjective measures, this study aims to develop a framework for the objective and continuous prediction of construction workers perceived risk using physiological signals [e.g., electrodermal activity (EDA)] acquired from workers wristband-type biosensors. To achieve this objective, physiological signals were collected from eight construction workers while they performed regular tasks in the field. Various filtering methods were applied to exclude noises recorded in the signal and to extract various features of the signals as workers experienced different risk levels. Then, a supervised machine-learning model was trained to explore the applicability of the collected physiological signals for the prediction of risk perception. The results showed that features based on EDA data collected from wristbands are feasible and useful to the process of continuously monitoring workers perceived risk during ongoing work. This study contributes to an in-depth understanding of construction workers perceived risk by developing a noninvasive means of continuously monitoring workers perceived risk.