Jörg Wagner

Jörg Wagner, Jan Mathias Köhler, Tobias Gindele et al.

To verify and validate networks, it is essential to gain insight into their decisions, limitations as well as possible shortcomings of training data. In this work, we propose a post-hoc, optimization based visual explanation method, which highlights the evidence in the input image for a specific prediction. Our approach is based on a novel technique to defend against adversarial evidence (i.e. faulty evidence due to artefacts) by filtering gradients during optimization. The defense does not depend on human-tuned parameters. It enables explanations which are both fine-grained and preserve the characteristics of images, such as edges and colors. The explanations are interpretable, suited for visualizing detailed evidence and can be tested as they are valid model inputs. We qualitatively and quantitatively evaluate our approach on a multitude of models and datasets.

Jörg Wagner, Volker Fischer, Michael Herman et al.

The performance of autonomous systems heavily relies on their ability to generate a robust representation of the environment. Deep neural networks have greatly improved vision-based perception systems but still fail in challenging situations, e.g. sensor outages or heavy weather. These failures are often introduced by data-inherent perturbations, which significantly reduce the information provided to the perception system. We propose a functionally modularized temporal filter, which stabilizes an abstract feature representation of a single-frame segmentation model using information of previous time steps. Our filter module splits the filter task into multiple less complex and more interpretable subtasks. The basic structure of the filter is inspired by a Bayes estimator consisting of a prediction and an update step. To make the prediction more transparent, we implement it using a geometric projection and estimate its parameters. This additionally enables the decomposition of the filter task into static representation filtering and low-dimensional motion filtering. Our model can cope with missing frames and is trainable in an end-to-end fashion. Using photorealistic, synthetic video data, we show the ability of the proposed architecture to overcome data-inherent perturbations. The experiments especially highlight advantages introduced by an interpretable and explicit filter module.

Jörg Wagner, Volker Fischer, Michael Herman et al.

Generating a robust representation of the environment is a crucial ability of learning agents. Deep learning based methods have greatly improved perception systems but still fail in challenging situations. These failures are often not solvable on the basis of a single image. In this work, we present a parameter-efficient temporal filtering concept which extends an existing single-frame segmentation model to work with multiple frames. The resulting recurrent architecture temporally filters representations on all abstraction levels in a hierarchical manner, while decoupling temporal dependencies from scene representation. Using a synthetic dataset, we show the ability of our model to cope with data perturbations and highlight the importance of recurrent and hierarchical filtering.

Michael Herman, Tobias Gindele, Jörg Wagner et al.

Inverse Reinforcement Learning (IRL) describes the problem of learning an unknown reward function of a Markov Decision Process (MDP) from observed behavior of an agent. Since the agent's behavior originates in its policy and MDP policies depend on both the stochastic system dynamics as well as the reward function, the solution of the inverse problem is significantly influenced by both. Current IRL approaches assume that if the transition model is unknown, additional samples from the system's dynamics are accessible, or the observed behavior provides enough samples of the system's dynamics to solve the inverse problem accurately. These assumptions are often not satisfied. To overcome this, we present a gradient-based IRL approach that simultaneously estimates the system's dynamics. By solving the combined optimization problem, our approach takes into account the bias of the demonstrations, which stems from the generating policy. The evaluation on a synthetic MDP and a transfer learning task shows improvements regarding the sample efficiency as well as the accuracy of the estimated reward functions and transition models.