In this paper, we consider the problem of reinforcement learning in spatial tasks. These tasks have many states that can be aggregated together to improve learning efficiency. In an agent, this aggregation can take the form of selecting appropriate perceptual processes to arrive at a qualitative abstraction of the underlying continuous state. However, for arbitrary problems, an agent is unlikely to have the perceptual processes necessary to discriminate all relevant states in terms of such an abstraction. To help compensate for this, reinforcement learning can be integrated with an imagery system, where simple models of physical processes are applied within a low-level perceptual representation to predict the state resulting from an action. Rather than abstracting the current state, abstraction can be applied to the predicted next state. Formally, it is shown that this integration broadens the class of perceptual abstraction methods that can be used while preserving the underlying problem. Empirically, it is shown that this approach can be used in complex domains, and can be beneficial even when formal requirements are not met.

Our goal is to develop an interactive music robot, i.e., a robot that presents a musical expression together with humans. A music interaction requires two important functions: synchronization with the music and musical expression, such as singing and dancing. Many instrument-performing robots are only capable of the latter function, they may have difficulty in playing live with human performers. The synchronization function is critical for the interaction. We classify synchronization and musical expression into two levels: (1) the rhythm level and (2) the melody level. Two issues in achieving two-layer synchronization and musical expression are: (1) simultaneous estimation of the rhythm structure and the current part of the music and (2) derivation of the estimation confidence to switch behavior between the rhythm level and the melody level. This paper presents a score following algorithm, incremental audio to score alignment, that conforms to the two-level synchronization design using a particle filter. Our method estimates the score position for the melody level and the tempo for the rhythm level. The reliability of the score position estimation is extracted from the probability distribution of the score position. Experiments are carried out using polyphonic jazz songs. The results confirm that our method switches levels in accordance with the difficulty of the score estimation. When the tempo of the music is less than 120 (beats per minute; bpm), the estimated score positions are accurate and reported; when the tempo is over 120 (bpm), the system tends to report only the tempo to suppress the error in the reported score position predictions.

The work presented in this paper is part of a multidisciplinary team collaborating in the deployment of an autonomous oceanographic probe with the task of exploring marine regions and take phytoplankton samples for their subsequent analysis in a laboratory. We will describe an autonomous system that, from sensor data, is able to characterize phytoplankton structures. Because the system has to work inboard, a main goal of our approach is to dramatically reduce the dimensionality of the problem. Specifically, our development uses two AI techniques, namely Particle Swarm Optimization and Case-Based Reasoning. We report results of experiments performed with simulated environments.

Demand and capacity imbalances in the US national airspace are resolved using traffic management initiatives designed, in current operations, with little collaboration with the airspace users. NASA and its partners have developed a new collaborative concept of operations that requires the users and airspace service provider to work together to choose initiatives that better satisfy the business needs of the users while also ensuring safety to the same standard as today. In this paper, we describe an approach to implementing this concept through a software negotiation framework underpinned by technology developed in the artificial intelligence community. We describe our exploration of peer-to-peer negotiation and how the number of conversation threads and the time sensitivity of offer acceptance led us to a centralized approach. The centralized approach uses hill climbing to evaluate airport slot allocations from a user perspective and a linear programming solver to seek solutions compatible across the user community. Our experiments with full sized problems identify the potential operational benefits as well as limitations, and where future research needs to be focused.

Human vision is often guided by instinctual commonsense such as proportions and contours. In this paper, we explore how to use the proportion as the key knowledge for designing a privacy algorithm that detects human private parts in a 3D scan dataset. The Analogia Graph is introduced to study the proportion of structures. It is a graph-based representation of the proportion knowledge. The intrinsic human proportions are applied to reduce the search space by an order of magnitude. A feature shape template is constructed to match the model data points using Radial Basis Functions in a non-linear regression and the relative measurements of the height and area factors. The method is tested on 100 datasets from CAESAR database. Two surface rendering methods are studied for data privacy: blurring and transparency. It is found that test subjects normally prefer to have the most possible privacy in both rendering methods. However, the subjects adjusted their privacy measurement to a certain degree as they were informed the context of security.

Relational representations in reinforcement learning allow for the use of structural information like the presence of objects and relationships between them in the description of value functions. Through this paper, we show that such representations allow for the inclusion of background knowledge that qualitatively describes a state and can be used to design agents that demonstrate learning behavior in domains with large state and actions spaces such as computer games.

There is a growing need for efficient and scalable semantic web queries that handle inference. There is also a growing interest in representing uncertainty in semantic web knowledge bases. In this paper, we present a bit vector schema specifically designed for RDF (Resource Description Framework) datasets. We propose a system for materializing and storing inferred knowledge using this schema. We show experimental results that demonstrate that our solution drastically improves the performance of inference queries. We also propose a solution for materializing uncertain information and probabilities using multiple bit vectors and thresholds.

Automatically constructing novel representations of tasks from analysis of state spaces is a longstanding fundamental challenge in AI. I review recent progress on this problem for sequential decision making tasks modeled as Markov decision processes. Specifically, I discuss three classes of representation discovery problems: finding functional, state, and temporal abstractions. I describe solution techniques varying along several dimensions: diagonalization or dilation methods using approximate or exact transition models; reward-specific vs reward-invariant methods; global vs. local representation construction methods; multiscale vs. flat discovery methods; and finally, orthogonal vs. redundant representa- tion discovery methods. I conclude by describing a number of open problems for future work.

We present a method for unsupervised learning of event classes from videos in which multiple actions might occur simultaneously. It is assumed that all such activities are produced from an underlying set of event class generators. The learning task is then to recover this generative process from visual data. A set of event classes is derived from the most likely decomposition of the tracks into a set of labelled events involving subsets of interacting tracks. Interactions between subsets of tracks are modelled as a relational graph structure that captures qualitative spatio-temporal relationships between these tracks. The posterior probability of candidate solutions favours decompositions in which events of the same class have a similar relational structure, together with other measures of well-formedness. A Markov Chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) procedure is used to efficiently search for the MAP solution. This search moves between possible decompositions of the tracks into sets of unlabelled events and at each move adds a close to optimal labelling (for this decomposition) using spectral clustering. Experiments on real data show that the discovered event classes are often semantically meaningful and correspond well with groundtruth event classes assigned by hand.

Active object exploration is one of the hallmarks of human and animal intelligence. Research in psychology has shown that the use of multiple exploratory behaviors is crucial for learning about objects. Inspired by such research, recent work in robotics has demonstrated that by performing multiple exploratory behaviors a robot can dramatically improve its object recognition rate. But what is the cause of this improvement? To answer this question, this paper examines the conditions under which combining information from multiple behaviors and sensory modalities leads to better object recognition results. Two different problems are considered: interactive object recognition using auditory and proprioceptive feedback, and surface texture recognition using tactile and proprioceptive feedback. Analysis of the results shows that metrics designed to estimate classifier model diversity can explain the improvement in recognition accuracy. This finding establishes, for the first time, an important link between empirical studies of exploratory behaviors in robotics and theoretical results on boosting in machine learning.