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Krzysztof Czarnecki

Publications and source records attributed to Krzysztof Czarnecki.

69 records · Page 4Linked to original sources

A behavior driven approach for sampling rare event situations for autonomous vehicles

Performance evaluation of urban autonomous vehicles requires a realistic model of the behavior of other road users in the environment. Learning such models from data involves collecting naturalistic data of real-world human behavior. In many cases, acquisition of this data can be prohibitively expensive or intrusive. Additionally, the available data often contain only typical behaviors and exclude behaviors that are classified as rare events. To evaluate the performance of AV in such situations, we develop a model of traffic behavior based on the theory of bounded rationality. Based on the experiments performed on a large naturalistic driving data, we show that the developed model can be applied to estimate probability of rare events, as well as to generate new traffic situations.

eess.SY↗

Towards a Framework to Manage Perceptual Uncertainty for Safe Automated Driving

Perception is a safety-critical function of autonomous vehicles and machine learning (ML) plays a key role in its implementation. This position paper identifies (1) perceptual uncertainty as a performance measure used to define safety requirements and (2) its influence factors when using supervised ML. This work is a first step towards a framework for measuring and controling the effects of these factors and supplying evidence to support claims about perceptual uncertainty.

cs.AI↗

Urban Driving with Multi-Objective Deep Reinforcement Learning

Autonomous driving is a challenging domain that entails multiple aspects: a vehicle should be able to drive to its destination as fast as possible while avoiding collision, obeying traffic rules and ensuring the comfort of passengers. In this paper, we present a deep learning variant of thresholded lexicographic Q-learning for the task of urban driving. Our multi-objective DQN agent learns to drive on multi-lane roads and intersections, yielding and changing lanes according to traffic rules. We also propose an extension for factored Markov Decision Processes to the DQN architecture that provides auxiliary features for the Q function. This is shown to significantly improve data efficiency. We then show that the learned policy is able to zero-shot transfer to a ring road without sacrificing performance.

cs.LG↗

WiseMove: A Framework for Safe Deep Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving

Machine learning can provide efficient solutions to the complex problems encountered in autonomous driving, but ensuring their safety remains a challenge. A number of authors have attempted to address this issue, but there are few publicly-available tools to adequately explore the trade-offs between functionality, scalability, and safety. We thus present WiseMove, a software framework to investigate safe deep reinforcement learning in the context of motion planning for autonomous driving. WiseMove adopts a modular learning architecture that suits our current research questions and can be adapted to new technologies and new questions. We present the details of WiseMove, demonstrate its use on a common traffic scenario, and describe how we use it in our ongoing safe learning research.

cs.LG↗

Improving Reconstruction Autoencoder Out-of-distribution Detection with Mahalanobis Distance

There is an increasingly apparent need for validating the classifications made by deep learning systems in safety-critical applications like autonomous vehicle systems. A number of recent papers have proposed methods for detecting anomalous image data that appear different from known inlier data samples, including reconstruction-based autoencoders. Autoencoders optimize the compression of input data to a latent space of a dimensionality smaller than the original input and attempt to accurately reconstruct the input using that compressed representation. Since the latent vector is optimized to capture the salient features from the inlier class only, it is commonly assumed that images of objects from outside of the training class cannot effectively be compressed and reconstructed. Some thus consider reconstruction error as a kind of novelty measure. Here we suggest that reconstruction-based approaches fail to capture particular anomalies that lie far from known inlier samples in latent space but near the latent dimension manifold defined by the parameters of the model. We propose incorporating the Mahalanobis distance in latent space to better capture these out-of-distribution samples and our results show that this method often improves performance over the baseline approach.

cs.LG↗

Calibrating Uncertainties in Object Localization Task

In many safety-critical applications such as autonomous driving and surgical robots, it is desirable to obtain prediction uncertainties from object detection modules to help support safe decision-making. Specifically, such modules need to estimate the probability of each predicted object in a given region and the confidence interval for its bounding box. While recent Bayesian deep learning methods provide a principled way to estimate this uncertainty, the estimates for the bounding boxes obtained using these methods are uncalibrated. In this paper, we address this problem for the single-object localization task by adapting an existing technique for calibrating regression models. We show, experimentally, that the resulting calibrated model obtains more reliable uncertainty estimates.

cs.LG↗

Using Machine Learning Safely in Automotive Software: An Assessment and Adaption of Software Process Requirements in ISO 26262

The use of machine learning (ML) is on the rise in many sectors of software development, and automotive software development is no different. In particular, Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) and Automated Driving Systems (ADS) are two areas where ML plays a significant role. In automotive development, safety is a critical objective, and the emergence of standards such as ISO 26262 has helped focus industry practices to address safety in a systematic and consistent way. Unfortunately, these standards were not designed to accommodate technologies such as ML or the type of functionality that is provided by an ADS and this has created a conflict between the need to innovate and the need to improve safety. In this report, we take steps to address this conflict by doing a detailed assessment and adaption of ISO 26262 for ML, specifically in the context of supervised learning. First we analyze the key factors that are the source of the conflict. Then we assess each software development process requirement (Part 6 of ISO 26262) for applicability to ML. Where there are gaps, we propose new requirements to address the gaps. Finally we discuss the application of this adapted and extended variant of Part 6 to ML development scenarios.

cs.LG↗

Clafer: Lightweight Modeling of Structure, Behaviour, and Variability

Embedded software is growing fast in size and complexity, leading to intimate mixture of complex architectures and complex control. Consequently, software specification requires modeling both structures and behaviour of systems. Unfortunately, existing languages do not integrate these aspects well, usually prioritizing one of them. It is common to develop a separate language for each of these facets. In this paper, we contribute Clafer: a small language that attempts to tackle this challenge. It combines rich structural modeling with state of the art behavioural formalisms. We are not aware of any other modeling language that seamlessly combines these facets common to system and software modeling. We show how Clafer, in a single unified syntax and semantics, allows capturing feature models (variability), component models, discrete control models (automata) and variability encompassing all these aspects. The language is built on top of first order logic with quantifiers over basic entities (for modeling structures) combined with linear temporal logic (for modeling behaviour). On top of this semantic foundation we build a simple but expressive syntax, enriched with carefully selected syntactic expansions that cover hierarchical modeling, associations, automata, scenarios, and Dwyer's property patterns. We evaluate Clafer using a power window case study, and comparing it against other notations that substantially overlap with its scope (SysML, AADL, Temporal OCL and Live Sequence Charts), discussing benefits and perils of using a single notation for the purpose.

cs.PL↗

Unlimited Road-scene Synthetic Annotation (URSA) Dataset

In training deep neural networks for semantic segmentation, the main limiting factor is the low amount of ground truth annotation data that is available in currently existing datasets. The limited availability of such data is due to the time cost and human effort required to accurately and consistently label real images on a pixel level. Modern sandbox video game engines provide open world environments where traffic and pedestrians behave in a pseudo-realistic manner. This caters well to the collection of a believable road-scene dataset. Utilizing open-source tools and resources found in single-player modding communities, we provide a method for persistent, ground truth, asset annotation of a game world. By collecting a synthetic dataset containing upwards of $1,000,000$ images, we demonstrate real-time, on-demand, ground truth data annotation capability of our method. Supplementing this synthetic data to Cityscapes dataset, we show that our data generation method provides qualitative as well as quantitative improvements---for training networks---over previous methods that use video games as surrogate.

cs.CV↗

An Analysis of ISO 26262: Using Machine Learning Safely in Automotive Software

Machine learning (ML) plays an ever-increasing role in advanced automotive functionality for driver assistance and autonomous operation; however, its adequacy from the perspective of safety certification remains controversial. In this paper, we analyze the impacts that the use of ML as an implementation approach has on ISO 26262 safety lifecycle and ask what could be done to address them. We then provide a set of recommendations on how to adapt the standard to accommodate ML.

cs.AI↗

Relating Complexity-theoretic Parameters with SAT Solver Performance

Over the years complexity theorists have proposed many structural parameters to explain the surprising efficiency of conflict-driven clause-learning (CDCL) SAT solvers on a wide variety of large industrial Boolean instances. While some of these parameters have been studied empirically, until now there has not been a unified comparative study of their explanatory power on a comprehensive benchmark. We correct this state of affairs by conducting a large-scale empirical evaluation of CDCL SAT solver performance on nearly 7000 industrial and crafted formulas against several structural parameters such as backdoors, treewidth, backbones, and community structure. Our study led us to several results. First, we show that while such parameters only weakly correlate with CDCL solving time, certain combinations of them yield much better regression models. Second, we show how some parameters can be used as a "lens" to better understand the efficiency of different solving heuristics. Finally, we propose a new complexity-theoretic parameter, which we call learning-sensitive with restarts (LSR) backdoors, that extends the notion of learning-sensitive (LS) backdoors to incorporate restarts and discuss algorithms to compute them. We mathematically prove that for certain class of instances minimal LSR-backdoors are exponentially smaller than minimal-LS backdoors.

cs.AI↗

Adaptive Restart and CEGAR-based Solver for Inverting Cryptographic Hash Functions

SAT solvers are increasingly being used for cryptanalysis of hash functions and symmetric encryption schemes. Inspired by this trend, we present MapleCrypt which is a SAT solver-based cryptanalysis tool for inverting hash functions. We reduce the hash function inversion problem for fixed targets into the satisfiability problem for Boolean logic, and use MapleCrypt to construct preimages for these targets. MapleCrypt has two key features, namely, a multi-armed bandit based adaptive restart (MABR) policy and a counterexample-guided abstraction refinement (CEGAR) technique. The MABR technique uses reinforcement learning to adaptively choose between different restart policies during the run of the solver. The CEGAR technique abstracts away certain steps of the input hash function, replacing them with the identity function, and verifies whether the solution constructed by MapleCrypt indeed hashes to the previously fixed targets. If it is determined that the solution produced is spurious, the abstraction is refined until a correct inversion to the input hash target is produced. We show that the resultant system is faster for inverting the SHA-1 hash function than state-of-the-art inversion tools.

cs.CR↗

Understanding VSIDS Branching Heuristics in Conflict-Driven Clause-Learning SAT Solvers

Conflict-Driven Clause-Learning SAT solvers crucially depend on the Variable State Independent Decaying Sum (VSIDS) branching heuristic for their performance. Although VSIDS was proposed nearly fifteen years ago, and many other branching heuristics for SAT solving have since been proposed, VSIDS remains one of the most effective branching heuristics. In this paper, we advance our understanding of VSIDS by answering the following key questions. The first question we pose is "what is special about the class of variables that VSIDS chooses to additively bump?" In answering this question we showed that VSIDS overwhelmingly picks, bumps, and learns bridge variables, defined as the variables that connect distinct communities in the community structure of SAT instances. This is surprising since VSIDS was invented more than a decade before the link between community structure and SAT solver performance was discovered. Additionally, we show that VSIDS viewed as a ranking function correlates strongly with temporal graph centrality measures. Putting these two findings together, we conclude that VSIDS picks high-centrality bridge variables. The second question we pose is "what role does multiplicative decay play in making VSIDS so effective?" We show that the multiplicative decay behaves like an exponential moving average (EMA) that favors variables that persistently occur in conflicts (the signal) over variables that occur intermittently (the noise). The third question we pose is "whether VSIDS is temporally and spatially focused." We show that VSIDS disproportionately picks variables from a few communities unlike, say, the random branching heuristic. We put these findings together to invent a new adaptive VSIDS branching heuristic that solves more instances than one of the best-known VSIDS variants over the SAT Competition 2013 benchmarks.

cs.LO↗

SAT-based Analysis of Large Real-world Feature Models is Easy

Modern conflict-driven clause-learning (CDCL) Boolean SAT solvers provide efficient automatic analysis of real-world feature models (FM) of systems ranging from cars to operating systems. It is well-known that solver-based analysis of real-world FMs scale very well even though SAT instances obtained from such FMs are large, and the corresponding analysis problems are known to be NP-complete. To better understand why SAT solvers are so effective, we systematically studied many syntactic and semantic characteristics of a representative set of large real-world FMs. We discovered that a key reason why large real-world FMs are easy-to-analyze is that the vast majority of the variables in these models are unrestricted, i.e., the models are satisfiable for both true and false assignments to such variables under the current partial assignment. Given this discovery and our understanding of CDCL SAT solvers, we show that solvers can easily find satisfying assignments for such models without too many backtracks relative to the model size, explaining why solvers scale so well. Further analysis showed that the presence of unrestricted variables in these real-world models can be attributed to their high-degree of variability. Additionally, we experimented with a series of well-known non-backtracking simplifications that are particularly effective in solving FMs. The remaining variables/clauses after simplifications, called the core, are so few that they are easily solved even with backtracking, further strengthening our conclusions.

cs.SE↗

DCLfix: A Recommendation System for Repairing Architectural Violations

Architectural erosion is a recurrent problem in software evolution. Despite this fact, the process is usually tackled in ad hoc ways, without adequate tool support at the architecture level. To address this shortcoming, this paper presents a recommendation system -- called DCLfix -- that provides refactoring guidelines for maintainers when tackling architectural erosion. In short, DCLfix suggests refactoring recommendations for violations detected after an architecture conformance process using DCL, an architectural constraint language

cs.SE↗