Dong Xu

Dong Xu, Xiao Huang, Joseph Mango et al.

Conventional simulations on multi-exit indoor evacuation focus primarily on how to determine a reasonable exit based on numerous factors in a changing environment. Results commonly include some congested and other under-utilized exits, especially with massive pedestrians. We propose a multi-exit evacuation simulation based on Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL), referred to as the MultiExit-DRL, which involves in a Deep Neural Network (DNN) framework to facilitate state-to-action mapping. The DNN framework applies Rainbow Deep Q-Network (DQN), a DRL algorithm that integrates several advanced DQN methods, to improve data utilization and algorithm stability, and further divides the action space into eight isometric directions for possible pedestrian choices. We compare MultiExit-DRL with two conventional multi-exit evacuation simulation models in three separate scenarios: 1) varying pedestrian distribution ratios, 2) varying exit width ratios, and 3) varying open schedules for an exit. The results show that MultiExit-DRL presents great learning efficiency while reducing the total number of evacuation frames in all designed experiments. In addition, the integration of DRL allows pedestrians to explore other potential exits and helps determine optimal directions, leading to the high efficiency of exit utilization.

Xiao Huang, Dong Xu, Zhenlong Li et al.

Nighttime satellite imagery has been applied in a wide range of fields. However, our limited understanding of how observed light intensity is formed and whether it can be simulated greatly hinders its further application. This study explores the potential of conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (cGAN) in translating multispectral imagery to nighttime imagery. A popular cGAN framework, pix2pix, was adopted and modified to facilitate this translation using gridded training image pairs derived from Landsat 8 and Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite (VIIRS). The results of this study prove the possibility of multispectral-to-nighttime translation and further indicate that, with the additional social media data, the generated nighttime imagery can be very similar to the ground-truth imagery. This study fills the gap in understanding the composition of satellite observed nighttime light and provides new paradigms to solve the emerging problems in nighttime remote sensing fields, including nighttime series construction, light desaturation, and multi-sensor calibration.

Eleanor Quint, Dong Xu, Samuel Flint et al.

In order to satisfy safety conditions, an agent may be constrained from acting freely. A safe controller can be designed a priori if an environment is well understood, but not when learning is employed. In particular, reinforcement learned (RL) controllers require exploration, which can be hazardous in safety critical situations. We study the benefits of giving structure to the constraints of a constrained Markov decision process by specifying them in formal languages as a step towards using safety methods from software engineering and controller synthesis. We instantiate these constraints as finite automata to efficiently recognise constraint violations. Constraint states are then used to augment the underlying MDP state and to learn a dense cost function, easing the problem of quickly learning joint MDP/constraint dynamics. We empirically evaluate the effect of these methods on training a variety of RL algorithms over several constraints specified in Safety Gym, MuJoCo, and Atari environments.

David Shriver, Dong Xu, Sebastian Elbaum et al.

Deep neural networks (DNN) are growing in capability and applicability. Their effectiveness has led to their use in safety critical and autonomous systems, yet there is a dearth of cost-effective methods available for reasoning about the behavior of a DNN. In this paper, we seek to expand the applicability and scalability of existing DNN verification techniques through DNN refactoring. A DNN refactoring defines (a) the transformation of the DNN's architecture, i.e., the number and size of its layers, and (b) the distillation of the learned relationships between the input features and function outputs of the original to train the transformed network. Unlike with traditional code refactoring, DNN refactoring does not guarantee functional equivalence of the two networks, but rather it aims to preserve the accuracy of the original network while producing a simpler network that is amenable to more efficient property verification. We present an automated framework for DNN refactoring, and demonstrate its potential effectiveness through three case studies on networks used in autonomous systems.