arXiv subjects

Jonathan Francis

Publications and source records attributed to Jonathan Francis.

65 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

Exploring Strategies for Generalizable Commonsense Reasoning with Pre-trained Models

Commonsense reasoning benchmarks have been largely solved by fine-tuning language models. The downside is that fine-tuning may cause models to overfit to task-specific data and thereby forget their knowledge gained during pre-training. Recent works only propose lightweight model updates as models may already possess useful knowledge from past experience, but a challenge remains in understanding what parts and to what extent models should be refined for a given task. In this paper, we investigate what models learn from commonsense reasoning datasets. We measure the impact of three different adaptation methods on the generalization and accuracy of models. Our experiments with two models show that fine-tuning performs best, by learning both the content and the structure of the task, but suffers from overfitting and limited generalization to novel answers. We observe that alternative adaptation methods like prefix-tuning have comparable accuracy, but generalize better to unseen answers and are more robust to adversarial splits.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2021

Learn-to-Race: A Multimodal Control Environment for Autonomous Racing

Existing research on autonomous driving primarily focuses on urban driving, which is insufficient for characterising the complex driving behaviour underlying high-speed racing. At the same time, existing racing simulation frameworks struggle in capturing realism, with respect to visual rendering, vehicular dynamics, and task objectives, inhibiting the transfer of learning agents to real-world contexts. We introduce a new environment, where agents Learn-to-Race (L2R) in simulated competition-style racing, using multimodal information--from virtual cameras to a comprehensive array of inertial measurement sensors. Our environment, which includes a simulator and an interfacing training framework, accurately models vehicle dynamics and racing conditions. In this paper, we release the Arrival simulator for autonomous racing. Next, we propose the L2R task with challenging metrics, inspired by learning-to-drive challenges, Formula-style racing, and multimodal trajectory prediction for autonomous driving. Additionally, we provide the L2R framework suite, facilitating simulated racing on high-precision models of real-world tracks. Finally, we provide an official L2R task dataset of expert demonstrations, as well as a series of baseline experiments and reference implementations. We make all code available: https://github.com/learn-to-race/l2r.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2020

Lexically-constrained Text Generation through Commonsense Knowledge Extraction and Injection

Conditional text generation has been a challenging task that is yet to see human-level performance from state-of-the-art models. In this work, we specifically focus on the Commongen benchmark, wherein the aim is to generate a plausible sentence for a given set of input concepts. Despite advances in other tasks, large pre-trained language models that are fine-tuned on this dataset often produce sentences that are syntactically correct but qualitatively deviate from a human understanding of common sense. Furthermore, generated sequences are unable to fulfill such lexical requirements as matching part-of-speech and full concept coverage. In this paper, we explore how commonsense knowledge graphs can enhance model performance, with respect to commonsense reasoning and lexically-constrained decoding. We propose strategies for enhancing the semantic correctness of the generated text, which we accomplish through: extracting commonsense relations from Conceptnet, injecting these relations into the Unified Language Model (UniLM) through attention mechanisms, and enforcing the aforementioned lexical requirements through output constraints. By performing several ablations, we find that commonsense injection enables the generation of sentences that are more aligned with human understanding, while remaining compliant with lexical requirements.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

Knowledge-driven Data Construction for Zero-shot Evaluation in Commonsense Question Answering

Recent developments in pre-trained neural language modeling have led to leaps in accuracy on commonsense question-answering benchmarks. However, there is increasing concern that models overfit to specific tasks, without learning to utilize external knowledge or perform general semantic reasoning. In contrast, zero-shot evaluations have shown promise as a more robust measure of a model's general reasoning abilities. In this paper, we propose a novel neuro-symbolic framework for zero-shot question answering across commonsense tasks. Guided by a set of hypotheses, the framework studies how to transform various pre-existing knowledge resources into a form that is most effective for pre-training models. We vary the set of language models, training regimes, knowledge sources, and data generation strategies, and measure their impact across tasks. Extending on prior work, we devise and compare four constrained distractor-sampling strategies. We provide empirical results across five commonsense question-answering tasks with data generated from five external knowledge resources. We show that, while an individual knowledge graph is better suited for specific tasks, a global knowledge graph brings consistent gains across different tasks. In addition, both preserving the structure of the task as well as generating fair and informative questions help language models learn more effectively.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2020

Trajformer: Trajectory Prediction with Local Self-Attentive Contexts for Autonomous Driving

Effective feature-extraction is critical to models' contextual understanding, particularly for applications to robotics and autonomous driving, such as multimodal trajectory prediction. However, state-of-the-art generative methods face limitations in representing the scene context, leading to predictions of inadmissible futures. We alleviate these limitations through the use of self-attention, which enables better control over representing the agent's social context; we propose a local feature-extraction pipeline that produces more salient information downstream, with improved parameter efficiency. We show improvements on standard metrics (minADE, minFDE, DAO, DAC) over various baselines on the Argoverse dataset. We release our code at: https://github.com/Manojbhat09/Trajformer

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

COHORT: Coordination of Heterogeneous Thermostatically Controlled Loads for Demand Flexibility

Demand flexibility is increasingly important for power grids. Careful coordination of thermostatically controlled loads (TCLs) can modulate energy demand, decrease operating costs, and increase grid resiliency. We propose a novel distributed control framework for the Coordination Of HeterOgeneous Residential Thermostatically controlled loads (COHORT). COHORT is a practical, scalable, and versatile solution that coordinates a population of TCLs to jointly optimize a grid-level objective, while satisfying each TCL's end-use requirements and operational constraints. To achieve that, we decompose the grid-scale problem into subproblems and coordinate their solutions to find the global optimum using the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). The TCLs' local problems are distributed to and computed in parallel at each TCL, making COHORT highly scalable and privacy-preserving. While each TCL poses combinatorial and non-convex constraints, we characterize these constraints as a convex set through relaxation, thereby making COHORT computationally viable over long planning horizons. After coordination, each TCL is responsible for its own control and tracks the agreed-upon power trajectory with its preferred strategy. In this work, we translate continuous power back to discrete on/off actuation, using pulse width modulation. COHORT is generalizable to a wide range of grid objectives, which we demonstrate through three distinct use cases: generation following, minimizing ramping, and peak load curtailment. In a notable experiment, we validated our approach through a hardware-in-the-loop simulation, including a real-world air conditioner (AC) controlled via a smart thermostat, and simulated instances of ACs modeled after real-world data traces. During the 15-day experimental period, COHORT reduced daily peak loads by an average of 12.5% and maintained comfortable temperatures.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2020

Learning a Distributed Control Scheme for Demand Flexibility in Thermostatically Controlled Loads

Demand flexibility is increasingly important for power grids, in light of growing penetration of renewable generation. Careful coordination of thermostatically controlled loads (TCLs) can potentially modulate energy demand, decrease operating costs, and increase grid resiliency. However, it is challenging to control a heterogeneous population of TCLs: the control problem has a large state action space; each TCL has unique and complex dynamics; and multiple system-level objectives need to be optimized simultaneously. To address these challenges, we propose a distributed control solution, which consists of a central load aggregator that optimizes system-level objectives and building-level controllers that track the load profiles planned by the aggregator. To optimize our agents' policies, we draw inspirations from both reinforcement learning (RL) and model predictive control. Specifically, the aggregator is updated with an evolutionary strategy, which was recently demonstrated to be a competitive and scalable alternative to more sophisticated RL algorithms and enables policy updates independent of the building-level controllers. We evaluate our proposed approach across four climate zones in four nine-building clusters, using the newly-introduced CityLearn simulation environment. Our approach achieved an average reduction of 16.8% in the environment cost compared to the benchmark rule-based controller.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2020

Diverse and Admissible Trajectory Forecasting through Multimodal Context Understanding

Multi-agent trajectory forecasting in autonomous driving requires an agent to accurately anticipate the behaviors of the surrounding vehicles and pedestrians, for safe and reliable decision-making. Due to partial observability in these dynamical scenes, directly obtaining the posterior distribution over future agent trajectories remains a challenging problem. In realistic embodied environments, each agent's future trajectories should be both diverse since multiple plausible sequences of actions can be used to reach its intended goals, and admissible since they must obey physical constraints and stay in drivable areas. In this paper, we propose a model that synthesizes multiple input signals from the multimodal world|the environment's scene context and interactions between multiple surrounding agents|to best model all diverse and admissible trajectories. We compare our model with strong baselines and ablations across two public datasets and show a significant performance improvement over previous state-of-the-art methods. Lastly, we offer new metrics incorporating admissibility criteria to further study and evaluate the diversity of predictions. Codes are at: https://github.com/kami93/CMU-DATF.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Data-driven Thermal Model Inference with ARMAX, in Smart Environments, based on Normalized Mutual Information

Understanding the models that characterize the thermal dynamics in a smart building is important for the comfort of its occupants and for its energy optimization. A significant amount of research has attempted to utilize thermodynamics (physical) models for smart building control, but these approaches remain challenging due to the stochastic nature of the intermittent environmental disturbances. This paper presents a novel data-driven approach for indoor thermal model inference, which combines an Autoregressive Moving Average with eXogenous inputs model (ARMAX) with a Normalized Mutual Information scheme (NMI). Based on this information-theoretic method, NMI, causal dependencies between the indoor temperature and exogenous inputs are explicitly obtained as a guideline for the ARMAX model to find the dominating inputs. For validation, we use three datasets based on building energy systems-against which we compare our method to an autoregressive model with exogenous inputs (ARX), a regularized ARMAX model, and state-space models.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2020

Neuro-symbolic Architectures for Context Understanding

Computational context understanding refers to an agent's ability to fuse disparate sources of information for decision-making and is, therefore, generally regarded as a prerequisite for sophisticated machine reasoning capabilities, such as in artificial intelligence (AI). Data-driven and knowledge-driven methods are two classical techniques in the pursuit of such machine sense-making capability. However, while data-driven methods seek to model the statistical regularities of events by making observations in the real-world, they remain difficult to interpret and they lack mechanisms for naturally incorporating external knowledge. Conversely, knowledge-driven methods, combine structured knowledge bases, perform symbolic reasoning based on axiomatic principles, and are more interpretable in their inferential processing; however, they often lack the ability to estimate the statistical salience of an inference. To combat these issues, we propose the use of hybrid AI methodology as a general framework for combining the strengths of both approaches. Specifically, we inherit the concept of neuro-symbolism as a way of using knowledge-bases to guide the learning progress of deep neural networks. We further ground our discussion in two applications of neuro-symbolism and, in both cases, show that our systems maintain interpretability while achieving comparable performance, relative to the state-of-the-art.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2019

Towards Generalizable Neuro-Symbolic Systems for Commonsense Question Answering

Non-extractive commonsense QA remains a challenging AI task, as it requires systems to reason about, synthesize, and gather disparate pieces of information, in order to generate responses to queries. Recent approaches on such tasks show increased performance, only when models are either pre-trained with additional information or when domain-specific heuristics are used, without any special consideration regarding the knowledge resource type. In this paper, we perform a survey of recent commonsense QA methods and we provide a systematic analysis of popular knowledge resources and knowledge-integration methods, across benchmarks from multiple commonsense datasets. Our results and analysis show that attention-based injection seems to be a preferable choice for knowledge integration and that the degree of domain overlap, between knowledge bases and datasets, plays a crucial role in determining model success.

cs.CL↗