Motion forecasting plays a significant role in various domains (e.g., autonomous driving, human-robot interaction), which aims to predict future motion sequences given a set of historical observations. However, the observed elements may be of different levels of importance. Some information may be irrelevant or even distracting to the forecasting in certain situations. To address this issue, we propose a generic motion forecasting framework (named RAIN) with dynamic key information selection and ranking based on a hybrid attention mechanism. The general framework is instantiated to handle multi-agent trajectory prediction and human motion forecasting tasks, respectively. In the former task, the model learns to recognize the relations between agents with a graph representation and to determine their relative significance. In the latter task, the model learns to capture the temporal proximity and dependency in long-term human motions. We also propose an effective double-stage training pipeline with an alternating training strategy to optimize the parameters in different modules of the framework. We validate the framework on both synthetic simulations and motion forecasting benchmarks in different domains, demonstrating that our method not only achieves state-of-the-art forecasting performance, but also provides interpretable and reasonable hybrid attention weights.

Nodule segmentation from breast ultrasound images is challenging yet essential for the diagnosis. Weakly-supervised segmentation (WSS) can help reduce time-consuming and cumbersome manual annotation. Unlike existing weakly-supervised approaches, in this study, we propose a novel and general WSS framework called Flip Learning, which only needs the box annotation. Specifically, the target in the label box will be erased gradually to flip the classification tag, and the erased region will be considered as the segmentation result finally. Our contribution is three-fold. First, our proposed approach erases on superpixel level using a Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning framework to exploit the prior boundary knowledge and accelerate the learning process. Second, we design two rewards: classification score and intensity distribution reward, to avoid under- and over-segmentation, respectively. Third, we adopt a coarse-to-fine learning strategy to reduce the residual errors and improve the segmentation performance. Extensively validated on a large dataset, our proposed approach achieves competitive performance and shows great potential to narrow the gap between fully-supervised and weakly-supervised learning.

This paper addresses a generalization of the well known multi-agent path finding (MAPF) problem that optimizes multiple conflicting objectives simultaneously such as travel time and path risk. This generalization, referred to as multi-objective MAPF (MOMAPF), arises in several applications ranging from hazardous material transportation to construction site planning. In this paper, we present a new multi-objective conflict-based search (MO-CBS) approach that relies on a novel multi-objective safe interval path planning (MO-SIPP) algorithm for its low-level search. We first develop the MO-SIPP algorithm, show its properties and then embed it in MO-CBS. We present extensive numerical results to show that (1) there is an order of magnitude improvement in the average low level search time, and (2) a significant improvement in the success rates of finding the Pareto-optimal front can be obtained using the proposed approach in comparison with the state of the art. Finally, we also provide a case study to demonstrate the potential application of the proposed algorithms for construction site planning.

In this paper, the design of a rational decision support system (RDSS) for a connected and autonomous vehicle charging infrastructure (CAV-CI) is studied. In the considered CAV-CI, the distribution system operator (DSO) deploys electric vehicle supply equipment (EVSE) to provide an EV charging facility for human-driven connected vehicles (CVs) and autonomous vehicles (AVs). The charging request by the human-driven EV becomes irrational when it demands more energy and charging period than its actual need. Therefore, the scheduling policy of each EVSE must be adaptively accumulated the irrational charging request to satisfy the charging demand of both CVs and AVs. To tackle this, we formulate an RDSS problem for the DSO, where the objective is to maximize the charging capacity utilization by satisfying the laxity risk of the DSO. Thus, we devise a rational reward maximization problem to adapt the irrational behavior by CVs in a data-informed manner. We propose a novel risk adversarial multi-agent learning system (RAMALS) for CAV-CI to solve the formulated RDSS problem. In RAMALS, the DSO acts as a centralized risk adversarial agent (RAA) for informing the laxity risk to each EVSE. Subsequently, each EVSE plays the role of a self-learner agent to adaptively schedule its own EV sessions by coping advice from RAA. Experiment results show that the proposed RAMALS affords around 46.6% improvement in charging rate, about 28.6% improvement in the EVSE's active charging time and at least 33.3% more energy utilization, as compared to a currently deployed ACN EVSE system, and other baselines.

In recent years, a new branch of auction models called diffusion auction has extended the traditional auction into social network scenarios. The diffusion auction models the auction as a networked market whose nodes are potential customers and whose edges are the relations between these customers. The diffusion auction mechanism can incentivize buyers to not only submit a truthful bid, but also further invite their surrounding neighbors to participate into the auction. It can convene more participants than traditional auction mechanisms, which leads to better optimizations of different key aspects, such as social welfare, seller's revenue, amount of redistributed money and so on. The diffusion auctions have recently attracted a discrete interest in the algorithmic game theory and market design communities. This survey summarizes the current progress of diffusion auctions.

Autonomous systems often operate in environments where the behavior of multiple agents is coordinated by a shared global state. Reliable estimation of the global state is thus critical for successfully operating in a multi-agent setting. We introduce agent-aware state estimation -- a framework for calculating indirect estimations of state given observations of the behavior of other agents in the environment. We also introduce transition-independent agent-aware state estimation -- a tractable class of agent-aware state estimation -- and show that it allows the speed of inference to scale linearly with the number of agents in the environment. As an example, we model traffic light classification in instances of complete loss of direct observation. By taking into account observations of vehicular behavior from multiple directions of traffic, our approach exhibits accuracy higher than that of existing traffic light-only HMM methods on a real-world autonomous vehicle data set under a variety of simulated occlusion scenarios.

Networks are landmarks of many complex phenomena where interweaving interactions between different agents transform simple local rule-sets into nonlinear emergent behaviors. While some recent studies unveil associations between the network structure and the underlying dynamical process, identifying stochastic nonlinear dynamical processes continues to be an outstanding problem. Here we develop a simple data-driven framework based on operator-theoretic techniques to identify and control stochastic nonlinear dynamics taking place over large-scale networks. The proposed approach requires no prior knowledge of the network structure and identifies the underlying dynamics solely using a collection of two-step snapshots of the states. This data-driven system identification is achieved by using the Koopman operator to find a low dimensional representation of the dynamical patterns that evolve linearly. Further, we use the global linear Koopman model to solve critical control problems by applying to model predictive control (MPC)--typically, a challenging proposition when applied to large networks. We show that our proposed approach tackles this by converting the original nonlinear programming into a more tractable optimization problem that is both convex and with far fewer variables.

In this work we create agents that can perform well beyond a single, individual task, that exhibit much wider generalisation of behaviour to a massive, rich space of challenges. We define a universe of tasks within an environment domain and demonstrate the ability to train agents that are generally capable across this vast space and beyond. The environment is natively multi-agent, spanning the continuum of competitive, cooperative, and independent games, which are situated within procedurally generated physical 3D worlds. The resulting space is exceptionally diverse in terms of the challenges posed to agents, and as such, even measuring the learning progress of an agent is an open research problem. We propose an iterative notion of improvement between successive generations of agents, rather than seeking to maximise a singular objective, allowing us to quantify progress despite tasks being incomparable in terms of achievable rewards. We show that through constructing an open-ended learning process, which dynamically changes the training task distributions and training objectives such that the agent never stops learning, we achieve consistent learning of new behaviours. The resulting agent is able to score reward in every one of our humanly solvable evaluation levels, with behaviour generalising to many held-out points in the universe of tasks. Examples of this zero-shot generalisation include good performance on Hide and Seek, Capture the Flag, and Tag. Through analysis and hand-authored probe tasks we characterise the behaviour of our agent, and find interesting emergent heuristic behaviours such as trial-and-error experimentation, simple tool use, option switching, and cooperation. Finally, we demonstrate that the general capabilities of this agent could unlock larger scale transfer of behaviour through cheap finetuning.

Pat Calhoun, a visionary leader focused on UX and adoption, is the CEO and Founder of Espressive, transforming enterprise self-help with AI. One of the most dramatic workplace shifts caused by the pandemic is the escalation of digital transformation initiatives. The numbers say it all. According to research by Twilio, 79% of digital transformation budgets grew in response to the pandemic -- and 26% grew "dramatically." Gartner, Inc. also found that over 80% of CEOs have a digital transformation program underway, and 69% are using Covid-19 as a catalyst to focus on resigning their businesses.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are now becoming increasingly accessible to amateur and commercial users alike. An air traffic management (ATM) system is needed to help ensure that this newest entrant into the skies does not collide with others. In an ATM, airspace can be composed of airways, intersections and nodes. In this paper, for simplicity, distributed coordinating the motions of Vertical TakeOff and Landing (VTOL) UAVs to pass an airway is focused. This is formulated as a virtual tube passing problem, which includes passing a virtual tube, inter-agent collision avoidance and keeping within the virtual tube. Lyapunov-like functions are designed elaborately, and formal analysis based on invariant set theorem is made to show that all UAVs can pass the virtual tube without getting trapped, avoid collision and keep within the virtual tube. What is more, by the proposed distributed control, a VTOL UAV can keep away from another VTOL UAV or return back to the virtual tube as soon as possible, once it enters into the safety area of another or has a collision with the virtual tube during it is passing the virtual tube. Simulations and experiments are carried out to show the effectiveness of the proposed method and the comparison with other methods.