Uncertainties in dynamic road environments pose significant challenges for behavior and trajectory planning in autonomous driving. This paper introduces BoT-Drive, a planning algorithm that addresses uncertainties at both behavior and trajectory levels within a Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) framework. BoT-Drive employs driver models to characterize unknown behavioral intentions and utilizes their model parameters to infer hidden driving styles. By also treating driver models as decision-making actions for the autonomous vehicle, BoT-Drive effectively tackles the exponential complexity inherent in POMDPs. To enhance safety and robustness, the planner further applies importance sampling to refine the driving trajectory conditioned on the planned high-level behavior. Evaluation on real-world data shows that BoT-Drive consistently outperforms both existing planning methods and learning-based methods in regular and complex urban driving scenes, demonstrating significant improvements in driving safety and reliability.

A broad challenge of research on generalization for sequential decision-making tasks in interactive environments is designing benchmarks that clearly landmark progress. While there has been notable headway, current benchmarks either do not provide suitable exposure nor intuitive control of the underlying factors, are not easy-to-implement, customizable, or extensible, or are computationally expensive to run. We built the Sandbox Environment for Generalizable Agent Research (SEGAR) with all of these things in mind. SEGAR improves the ease and accountability of generalization research in RL, as generalization objectives can be easy designed by specifying task distributions, which in turns allows the researcher to measure the nature of the generalization objective. We present an overview of SEGAR and how it contributes to these goals, as well as experiments that demonstrate a few types of research questions SEGAR can help answer.

The standard paradigm of modeling marked point processes is by parameterizing the intensity function using an attention-based (Transformer-style) architecture. Despite the flexibility of these methods, their inference is based on the computationally intensive thinning algorithm. In this work, we propose a framework where the advantages of the attention-based architecture are maintained and the limitation of the thinning algorithm is circumvented. The framework depends on modeling the conditional distribution of inter-event times with a mixture of log-normals satisfying a Markov property and the conditional probability mass function for the marks with a Transformer-based architecture. The proposed method attains state-of-the-art performance in predicting the next event of a sequence given its history. The experiments also reveal the efficacy of the methods that do not rely on the thinning algorithm during inference over the ones they do. Finally, we test our method on the challenging long-horizon prediction task and find that it outperforms a baseline developed specifically for tackling this task; importantly, inference requires just a fraction of time compared to the thinning-based baseline.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown its remarkable and generalizable capability in legged locomotion through sim-to-real transfer. However, while adaptive methods like domain randomization are expected to make policy more robust to diverse environments, such comprehensiveness potentially detracts from the policy's performance in any specific environment according to the No Free Lunch theorem, leading to a suboptimal solution once deployed in the real world. To address this issue, we propose a lifelong policy adaptation framework named LoopSR, which utilizes a transformer-based encoder to project real-world trajectories into a latent space, and accordingly reconstruct the real-world environments back in simulation for further improvement. Autoencoder architecture and contrastive learning methods are adopted to better extract the characteristics of real-world dynamics. The simulation parameters for continual training are derived by combining predicted parameters from the decoder with retrieved parameters from the simulation trajectory dataset. By leveraging the continual training, LoopSR achieves superior data efficiency compared with strong baselines, with only a limited amount of data to yield eminent performance in both sim-to-sim and sim-to-real experiments.

The current scenario of IoT is witnessing a constant increase on the volume of data, which is generated in constant stream, calling for novel architectural and logical solutions for processing it. Moving the data handling towards the edge of the computing spectrum guarantees better distribution of load and, in principle, lower latency and better privacy. However, managing such a structure is complex, especially when requirements, also referred to Service Level Objectives (SLOs), specified by applications' owners and infrastructure managers need to be ensured. Despite the rich number of proposals of Machine Learning (ML) based management solutions, researchers and practitioners yet struggle to guarantee long-term prediction and control, and accurate troubleshooting. Therefore, we present a novel ML paradigm based on Active Inference (AIF) -- a concept from neuroscience that describes how the brain constantly predicts and evaluates sensory information to decrease long-term surprise. We implement it and evaluate it in a heterogeneous real stream processing use case, where an AIF-based agent continuously optimizes the fulfillment of three SLOs for three autonomous driving services running on multiple devices. The agent used causal knowledge to gradually develop an understanding of how its actions are related to requirements fulfillment, and which configurations to favor. Through this approach, our agent requires up to thirty iterations to converge to the optimal solution, showing the capability of offering accurate results in a short amount of time. Furthermore, thanks to AIF and its causal structures, our method guarantees full transparency on the decision making, making the interpretation of the results and the troubleshooting effortless.

Detecting and measuring confounding effects from data is a key challenge in causal inference. Existing methods frequently assume causal sufficiency, disregarding the presence of unobserved confounding variables. Causal sufficiency is both unrealistic and empirically untestable. Additionally, existing methods make strong parametric assumptions about the underlying causal generative process to guarantee the identifiability of confounding variables. Relaxing the causal sufficiency and parametric assumptions and leveraging recent advancements in causal discovery and confounding analysis with non-i.i.d. data, we propose a comprehensive approach for detecting and measuring confounding. We consider various definitions of confounding and introduce tailored methodologies to achieve three objectives: (i) detecting and measuring confounding among a set of variables, (ii) separating observed and unobserved confounding effects, and (iii) understanding the relative strengths of confounding bias between different sets of variables. We present useful properties of a confounding measure and present measures that satisfy those properties. Empirical results support the theoretical analysis.

End-to-end autonomous driving offers a streamlined alternative to the traditional modular pipeline, integrating perception, prediction, and planning within a single framework. While Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) has recently gained traction in this domain, existing approaches often overlook the critical connection between feature extraction of DRL and perception. In this paper, we bridge this gap by mapping the DRL feature extraction network directly to the perception phase, enabling clearer interpretation through semantic segmentation. By leveraging Bird's-Eye-View (BEV) representations, we propose a novel DRL-based end-to-end driving framework that utilizes multi-sensor inputs to construct a unified three-dimensional understanding of the environment. This BEV-based system extracts and translates critical environmental features into high-level abstract states for DRL, facilitating more informed control. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate that our approach not only enhances interpretability but also significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in autonomous driving control tasks, reducing the collision rate by 20%.

Last decade has seen the emergence of numerous methods for learning on graphs, particularly Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). These methods, however, are often not directly applicable to more complex structures like bipartite graphs (equivalent to hypergraphs), which represent interactions among two entity types (e.g. a user liking a movie). This paper proposes Convolutional Signal Propagation (CSP), a non-parametric simple and scalable method that natively operates on bipartite graphs (hypergraphs) and can be implemented with just a few lines of code. After defining CSP, we demonstrate its relationship with well-established methods like label propagation, Naive Bayes, and Hypergraph Convolutional Networks. We evaluate CSP against several reference methods on real-world datasets from multiple domains, focusing on retrieval and classification tasks. Our results show that CSP offers competitive performance while maintaining low computational complexity, making it an ideal first choice as a baseline for hypergraph node classification and retrieval. Moreover, despite operating on hypergraphs, CSP achieves good results in tasks typically not associated with hypergraphs, such as natural language processing.

B.1 Conditional convergence in distribution Suppose (X, d The proof of this Lemma is identical to the portmanteau lemma for weak convergence by replacing probabilities/expectations with conditional probabilities/expectations (for example, see [38, Section 2.1]). Lemma B.2. Suppose X, X X as m, and X is a constant a.s., then X A, where A is a constant. We can exchange the expectation and limit by the dominated convergence theorem. The result follows by taking ϵ 0. 4. Since X is a.s. For any K > 0, we have x x K is a bounded and continuous function. R. Because f g: X is a bounded and A. We now show that (X The result follows by an application of the continuous mapping theorem with the function (x, A) Ax. B.2 Model assumptions The following sets of assumptions are only used to prove the large-data limit results of Proposition 3.1, Proposition 3.2, and Proposition 3.3. We will always use a subscript m to indicate that the quantity is dependent on the data. For the remainder of this section we will assume the following regularity conditions.