--Deep Neural Networks are increasingly leveraging sparsity to reduce the scaling up of model parameter size. However, reducing wall-clock time through sparsity and pruning remains challenging due to irregular memory access patterns, leading to frequent cache misses. In this paper, we present NPU V ector Runahead (NVR), a prefetching mechanism tailored for NPUs to address cache miss problems in sparse DNN workloads. NVR provides a general micro-architectural solution for sparse DNN workloads without requiring compiler or algorithmic support, operating as a decoupled, speculative, lightweight hardware sub-thread alongside the NPU, with minimal hardware overhead (under 5%). NVR achieves an average 90% reduction in cache misses compared to SOT A prefetching in general-purpose processors, delivering 4x average speedup on sparse workloads versus NPUs without prefetching. Moreover, we investigate the advantages of incorporating a small cache (16KB) into the NPU combined with NVR. Our evaluation shows that expanding this modest cache delivers 5x higher performance benefits than increasing the L2 cache size by the same amount. Fortunately, these workloads are typically over-parameterised [3], where up to 90% of parameters in prevalent models can be pruned while maintaining comparable performance [4]. This redundancy presents an opportunity to leverage sparsity to reduce such intensive resource demands. Theoretically, more fine-grained sparsity patterns yield higher acceleration by skipping more zero-valued elements.

Predicting future trajectories of nearby objects, especially under occlusion, is a crucial task in autonomous driving and safe robot navigation. Prior works typically neglect to maintain uncertainty about occluded objects and only predict trajectories of observed objects using high-capacity models such as Transformers trained on large datasets. While these approaches are effective in standard scenarios, they can struggle to generalize to the long-tail, safety-critical scenarios. In this work, we explore a conceptual framework unifying trajectory prediction and occlusion reasoning under the same class of structured probabilistic generative model, namely, switching dynamical systems. We then present some initial experiments illustrating its capabilities using the Waymo open dataset.

Pathogenic chromosome abnormalities are very common among the general population. While numerical chromosome abnormalities can be quickly and precisely detected, structural chromosome abnormalities are far more complex and typically require considerable efforts by human experts for identification. This paper focuses on investigating the modeling of chromosome features and the identification of chromosomes with structural abnormalities. Most existing data-driven methods concentrate on a single chromosome and consider each chromosome independently, overlooking the crucial aspect of homologous chromosomes. In normal cases, homologous chromosomes share identical structures, with the exception that one of them is abnormal. Therefore, we propose an adaptive method to align homologous chromosomes and diagnose structural abnormalities through homologous similarity. Inspired by the process of human expert diagnosis, we incorporate information from multiple pairs of homologous chromosomes simultaneously, aiming to reduce noise disturbance and improve prediction performance. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of our model compared to baselines.

Understanding adaptive human driving behavior, in particular how drivers manage uncertainty, is of key importance for developing simulated human driver models that can be used in the evaluation and development of autonomous vehicles. However, existing traffic psychology models of adaptive driving behavior either lack computational rigor or only address specific scenarios and/or behavioral phenomena. While models developed in the fields of machine learning and robotics can effectively learn adaptive driving behavior from data, due to their black box nature, they offer little or no explanation of the mechanisms underlying the adaptive behavior. Thus, a generalizable, interpretable, computational model of adaptive human driving behavior is still lacking. This paper proposes such a model based on active inference, a behavioral modeling framework originating in computational neuroscience. The model offers a principled solution to how humans trade progress against caution through policy selection based on the single mandate to minimize expected free energy. This casts goal-seeking and information-seeking (uncertainty-resolving) behavior under a single objective function, allowing the model to seamlessly resolve uncertainty as a means to obtain its goals. We apply the model in two apparently disparate driving scenarios that require managing uncertainty, (1) driving past an occluding object and (2) visual time sharing between driving and a secondary task, and show how human-like adaptive driving behavior emerges from the single principle of expected free energy minimization.

Model-based Reinforcement Learning (MBRL) aims to make agents more sample-efficient, adaptive, and explainable by learning an explicit model of the environment. While the capabilities of MBRL agents have significantly improved in recent years, how to best learn the model is still an unresolved question. The majority of MBRL algorithms aim at training the model to make accurate predictions about the environment and subsequently using the model to determine the most rewarding actions. However, recent research has shown that model predictive accuracy is often not correlated with action quality, tracing the root cause to the \emph{objective mismatch} between accurate dynamics model learning and policy optimization of rewards. A number of interrelated solution categories to the objective mismatch problem have emerged as MBRL continues to mature as a research area. In this work, we provide an in-depth survey of these solution categories and propose a taxonomy to foster future research.

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) is the problem of extracting the reward function and policy of a value-maximizing agent from its behavior [1, 2]. IRL is an important tool in domains where manually specifying reward functions or policies is difficult, such as in autonomous driving [3], or when the extracted reward function can reveal novel insights about a target population and be used to device interventions, such as in biology, economics, and human-robot interaction studies [4, 5, 6]. However, wider applications of IRL face two interrelated algorithmic challenges: 1) having access to the target deployment environment or an accurate simulator thereof and 2) robustness of the learned policy and reward function due to the covariate shift between the training and deployment environments or datasets [7, 8, 9]. In this paper, we focus on model-based offline IRL to address challenge 1). A notable class of model-based offline IRL methods estimate the dynamics and reward in a two-stage fashion (see Figure 1) [10, 11, 12, 13]. In the first stage, a Figure 1: Objectives of the traditional two-stage dynamics model is estimated from the offline IRL and the proposed simultaneous estimation approach of Bayesian model-based IRL.

Driver process models play a central role in the testing, verification, and development of automated and autonomous vehicle technologies. Prior models developed from control theory and physics-based rules are limited in automated vehicle applications due to their restricted behavioral repertoire. Data-driven machine learning models are more capable than rule-based models but are limited by the need for large training datasets and their lack of interpretability, i.e., an understandable link between input data and output behaviors. We propose a novel car following modeling approach using active inference, which has comparable behavioral flexibility to data-driven models while maintaining interpretability. We assessed the proposed model, the Active Inference Driving Agent (AIDA), through a benchmark analysis against the rule-based Intelligent Driver Model, and two neural network Behavior Cloning models. The models were trained and tested on a real-world driving dataset using a consistent process. The testing results showed that the AIDA predicted driving controls significantly better than the rule-based Intelligent Driver Model and had similar accuracy to the data-driven neural network models in three out of four evaluations. Subsequent interpretability analyses illustrated that the AIDA's learned distributions were consistent with driver behavior theory and that visualizations of the distributions could be used to directly comprehend the model's decision making process and correct model errors attributable to limited training data. The results indicate that the AIDA is a promising alternative to black-box data-driven models and suggest a need for further research focused on modeling driving style and model training with more diverse datasets.