Abstract: In this thesis we study a perception problem in the context of autonomous driving. Specifically, we study the computer vision problem of 3D object detection, in which objects should be detected from various sensor data and their position in the 3D world should be estimated. We also study the application of Generative Adversarial Networks in domain adaptation techniques, aiming to improve the 3D object detection model's ability to transfer between different domains. The state-of-the-art Frustum-PointNet architecture for LiDAR-based 3D object detection was implemented and found to closely match its reported performance when trained and evaluated on the KITTI dataset. The architecture was also found to transfer reasonably well from the synthetic SYN dataset to KITTI, and is thus believed to be usable in a semi-automatic 3D bounding box annotation process.

Machine learning is currently dominated by largely experimental work focused on improvements in a few key tasks. However, the impressive accuracy numbers of the best performing models are questionable because the same test sets have been used to select these models for multiple years now. To understand the danger of overfitting, we measure the accuracy of CIFAR-10 classifiers by creating a new test set of truly unseen images. Although we ensure that the new test set is as close to the original data distribution as possible, we find a large drop in accuracy (4% to 10%) for a broad range of deep learning models. Yet more recent models with higher original accuracy show a smaller drop and better overall performance, indicating that this drop is likely not due to overfitting based on adaptivity. Instead, we view our results as evidence that current accuracy numbers are brittle and susceptible to even minute natural variations in the data distribution.

A lot has been written about problems with artificial intelligence recently; speech recognition failing to correctly deal with Irish accents, image recognition that cannot detect faces of colour, all kinds of biases in AI decision making, or autonomous vehicles causing accidents. In response, some have called for more rigorous testing, quality assurance, and trust certification of AI products and services and their providers. For example, in his recent keynote at a Committee for Economic Development of Australia (CEDA) event in Sydney, Dr Alan Finkel, Australia's chief scientists, proposed a solution to "overcoming our mistrust of robots in our homes and workplaces". In his talk Dr Finkel proposed a trust certification for AI, whereby providers would submit to a voluntary auditing process to establish the quality of their AI-based products, as well as the ethical standards that their organisation embodies. Dr Finkel claims that "true quality is achieved by design, not by test and reject," so we should ensure that AI products are reliable before we release them into the wild.

Understanding and interacting with everyday physical scenes requires rich knowledge about the structure of the world, represented either implicitly in a value or policy function, or explicitly in a transition model. Here we introduce a new class of learnable models--based on graph networks--which implement an inductive bias for object- and relation-centric representations of complex, dynamical systems. Our results show that as a forward model, our approach supports accurate predictions from real and simulated data, and surprisingly strong and efficient generalization, across eight distinct physical systems which we varied parametrically and structurally. We also found that our inference model can perform system identification. Our models are also differentiable, and support online planning via gradient-based trajectory optimization, as well as offline policy optimization. Our framework offers new opportunities for harnessing and exploiting rich knowledge about the world, and takes a key step toward building machines with more human-like representations of the world.

It is widely believed that the transportation systems of future will be dominated by autonomous vehicles (AVs). With the rapid advancements of this field in recent years, many have come to predict that this shift will occur within the next ten years. A major motivation for the interest and push towards development of AVs stems from the demand for safer transportation. It is generally assumed that replacing the intrinsic imperfections of human drivers with expert computational models may significantly reduce the number of accidents caused by driver error [1]. Yet, development of reliable and robust AV technologies remains an ongoing challenge, and is actively pursued from various directions of research and development [2]. Of particular importance is the research on reliable motion planning and collision avoidance mechanisms. Over the span of multiple decades, numerous approaches towards this problem have been proposed [3], ranging from control theoretic formalizations and optimal control methods to potential field-and rule-based techniques. More recently, advances in machine learning have enabled new data-driven approaches to collision avoidance based on techniques such as imitation learning [4] and deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) [5]. However, with the growing complexity in their deployment settings and mechanisms, the challenge of providing safety guarantees on these solutions is becoming increasingly difficult [2].

Speech is produced when time varying vocal tract system is excited with time varying excitation source. Therefore, the information present in a speech such as message, emotion, language, speaker is due to the combined effect of both excitation source and vocal tract system. However, there is very less utilization of excitation source features to recognize emotion. In our earlier work, we have proposed a novel method to extract glottal closure instants (GCIs) known as epochs. In this paper, we have explored epoch features namely instantaneous pitch, phase and strength of epochs for discriminating emotions. We have combined the excitation source features and the well known Male-frequency cepstral coefficient (MFCC) features to develop an emotion recognition system with improved performance. DNN-HMM speaker adaptive models have been developed using MFCC, epoch and combined features. IEMOCAP emotional database has been used to evaluate the models. The average accuracy for emotion recognition system when using MFCC and epoch features separately is 59.25% and 54.52% respectively. The recognition performance improves to 64.2% when MFCC and epoch features are combined.

Recent developments have established the vulnerability of deep reinforcement learning to policy manipulation attacks via intentionally perturbed inputs, known as adversarial examples. In this work, we propose a technique for mitigation of such attacks based on addition of noise to the parameter space of deep reinforcement learners during training. We experimentally verify the effect of parameter-space noise in reducing the transferability of adversarial examples, and demonstrate the promising performance of this technique in mitigating the impact of whitebox and blackbox attacks at both test and training times.

Learning vector embeddings of complex networks is a powerful approach used to predict missing or unobserved edges in network data. However, an open challenge in this area is developing techniques that can reason about $\textit{subgraphs}$ in network data, which can involve the logical conjunction of several edge relationships. Here we introduce a framework to make predictions about conjunctive logical queries---i.e., subgraph relationships---on heterogeneous network data. In our approach, we embed network nodes in a low-dimensional space and represent logical operators as learned geometric operations (e.g., translation, rotation) in this embedding space. We prove that a small set of geometric operations are sufficient to represent conjunctive logical queries on a network, and we introduce a series of increasingly strong implementations of these operators. We demonstrate the utility of this framework in two application studies on networks with millions of edges: predicting unobserved subgraphs in a network of drug-gene-disease interactions and in a network of social interactions derived from a popular web forum. These experiments demonstrate how our framework can efficiently make logical predictions such as "what drugs are likely to target proteins involved with both diseases X and Y?" Together our results highlight how imposing logical structure can make network embeddings more useful for large-scale knowledge discovery.

The deep learning community has proposed optimizations spanning hardware, software, and learning theory to improve the computational performance of deep learning workloads. While some of these optimizations perform the same operations faster (e.g., switching from a NVIDIA K80 to P100), many modify the semantics of the training procedure (e.g., large minibatch training, reduced precision), which can impact a model's generalization ability. Due to a lack of standard evaluation criteria that considers these trade-offs, it has become increasingly difficult to compare these different advances. To address this shortcoming, DAWNBENCH and the upcoming MLPERF benchmarks use time-to-accuracy as the primary metric for evaluation, with the accuracy threshold set close to state-of-the-art and measured on a held-out dataset not used in training; the goal is to train to this accuracy threshold as fast as possible. In DAWNBENCH , the winning entries improved time-to-accuracy on ImageNet by two orders of magnitude over the seed entries. Despite this progress, it is unclear how sensitive time-to-accuracy is to the chosen threshold as well as the variance between independent training runs, and how well models optimized for time-to-accuracy generalize. In this paper, we provide evidence to suggest that time-to-accuracy has a low coefficient of variance and that the models tuned for it generalize nearly as well as pre-trained models. We additionally analyze the winning entries to understand the source of these speedups, and give recommendations for future benchmarking efforts.

Deep reinforcement learning on Atari games maps pixel directly to actions; internally, the deep neural network bears the responsibility of both extracting useful information and making decisions based on it. Aiming at devoting entire deep networks to decision making alone, we propose a new method for learning policies and compact state representations separately but simultaneously for policy approximation in reinforcement learning. State representations are generated by a novel algorithm based on Vector Quantization and Sparse Coding, trained online along with the network, and capable of growing its dictionary size over time. We also introduce new techniques allowing both the neural network and the evolution strategy to cope with varying dimensions. This enables networks of only 6 to 18 neurons to learn to play a selection of Atari games with performance comparable---and occasionally superior---to state-of-the-art techniques using evolution strategies on deep networks two orders of magnitude larger.