arXiv subjects

Zhiyao Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Zhiyao Zhang.

26 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2024

Field Deployment of Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Based Variable Speed Limit Controllers

This article presents the first field deployment of a multi-agent reinforcement-learning (MARL) based variable speed limit (VSL) control system on the I-24 freeway near Nashville, Tennessee. We describe how we train MARL agents in a traffic simulator and directly deploy the simulation-based policy on a 17-mile stretch of Interstate 24 with 67 VSL controllers. We use invalid action masking and several safety guards to ensure the posted speed limits satisfy the real-world constraints from the traffic management center and the Tennessee Department of Transportation. Since the time of launch of the system through April, 2024, the system has made approximately 10,000,000 decisions on 8,000,000 trips. The analysis of the controller shows that the MARL policy takes control for up to 98% of the time without intervention from safety guards. The time-space diagrams of traffic speed and control commands illustrate how the algorithm behaves during rush hour. Finally, we quantify the domain mismatch between the simulation and real-world data and demonstrate the robustness of the MARL policy to this mismatch.

cs.MA↗

arXiv2024

Broadband microwave waveform generation with programmable chirp shapes via recirculating phase-modulated optical fiber loop controlled by low-speed electronics

Broadband microwave waveforms with programmable chirp shapes are captivating in numerous practical applications. Compared with electronic technology, photonic-assisted solutions exhibit excellent performance in bandwidth and flexibility, but still suffer from complex architecture and requirement of high-speed electronics. Besides, rapid manipulation of chirp shape is still a challenge in the scientific community. In this paper, we propose and demonstrate a novel concept for generating broadband microwave waveforms with programmable chirp shapes. This concept is realized on a simple fiber-optic platform involving a continuous-wave laser source, a recirculating phase-modulated optical fiber loop, and low-speed electronics with a sampling rate at the level of MS/s. Based on this method, chirped microwave waveforms with a bandwidth up to tens of GHz can be generated, where the chirp shape is identical to the low-frequency driving waveform of the recirculating phase-modulated optical fiber loop. In addition, all the parameters of the generated chirped microwave waveforms can be easily reconfigured in real time, including the bandwidth, the central frequency, and the temporal duration. In the experiment, broadband microwave waveforms with customized chirp shapes are generated, where the center frequency and bandwidth tuning ranges exceed 21 GHz, the temporal duration is tuned in the range of 9 ns to 180 ns, and the coherent time of the generated microwave waveform is larger than 100 μs. This simple fiber-optic platform paves a way to generate broadband microwave waveforms with user-definable chirp shapes, which can find applications in broadband radar systems, electronic warfare and wireless communications.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2024

S3-SLAM: Sparse Tri-plane Encoding for Neural Implicit SLAM

With the emergence of Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), neural implicit representations have gained widespread applications across various domains, including simultaneous localization and mapping. However, current neural implicit SLAM faces a challenging trade-off problem between performance and the number of parameters. To address this problem, we propose sparse tri-plane encoding, which efficiently achieves scene reconstruction at resolutions up to 512 using only 2~4% of the commonly used tri-plane parameters (reduced from 100MB to 2~4MB). On this basis, we design S3-SLAM to achieve rapid and high-quality tracking and mapping through sparsifying plane parameters and integrating orthogonal features of tri-plane. Furthermore, we develop hierarchical bundle adjustment to achieve globally consistent geometric structures and reconstruct high-resolution appearance. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves competitive tracking and scene reconstruction with minimal parameters on three datasets. Source code will soon be available.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

GraphAD: Interaction Scene Graph for End-to-end Autonomous Driving

Modeling complicated interactions among the ego-vehicle, road agents, and map elements has been a crucial part for safety-critical autonomous driving. Previous works on end-to-end autonomous driving rely on the attention mechanism for handling heterogeneous interactions, which fails to capture the geometric priors and is also computationally intensive. In this paper, we propose the Interaction Scene Graph (ISG) as a unified method to model the interactions among the ego-vehicle, road agents, and map elements. With the representation of the ISG, the driving agents aggregate essential information from the most influential elements, including the road agents with potential collisions and the map elements to follow. Since a mass of unnecessary interactions are omitted, the more efficient scene-graph-based framework is able to focus on indispensable connections and leads to better performance. We evaluate the proposed method for end-to-end autonomous driving on the nuScenes dataset. Compared with strong baselines, our method significantly outperforms in the full-stack driving tasks, including perception, prediction, and planning. Code will be released at https://github.com/zhangyp15/GraphAD.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

MARVEL: Multi-Agent Reinforcement-Learning for Large-Scale Variable Speed Limits

Variable Speed Limit (VSL) control acts as a promising highway traffic management strategy with worldwide deployment, which can enhance traffic safety by dynamically adjusting speed limits according to real-time traffic conditions. Most of the deployed VSL control algorithms so far are rule-based, lacking generalizability under varying and complex traffic scenarios. In this work, we propose MARVEL (Multi-Agent Reinforcement-learning for large-scale Variable spEed Limits), a novel framework for large-scale VSL control on highway corridors with real-world deployment settings. MARVEL utilizes only sensing information observable in the real world as state input and learns through a reward structure that incorporates adaptability to traffic conditions, safety, and mobility, thereby enabling multi-agent coordination. With parameter sharing among all VSL agents, the proposed framework scales to cover corridors with many agents. The policies are trained in a microscopic traffic simulation environment, focusing on a short freeway stretch with 8 VSL agents spanning 7 miles. For testing, these policies are applied to a more extensive network with 34 VSL agents spanning 17 miles of I-24 near Nashville, TN, USA. MARVEL-based method improves traffic safety by 63.4% compared to the no control scenario and enhances traffic mobility by 58.6% compared to a state-of-the-practice algorithm that has been deployed on I-24. Besides, we conduct an explainability analysis to examine the decision-making process of the agents and explore the learned policy under different traffic conditions. Finally, we test the response of the policy learned from the simulation-based experiments with real-world data collected from I-24 and illustrate its deployment capability.

cs.MA↗

arXiv2023

Adversarial Attacks on Cooperative Multi-agent Bandits

Cooperative multi-agent multi-armed bandits (CMA2B) consider the collaborative efforts of multiple agents in a shared multi-armed bandit game. We study latent vulnerabilities exposed by this collaboration and consider adversarial attacks on a few agents with the goal of influencing the decisions of the rest. More specifically, we study adversarial attacks on CMA2B in both homogeneous settings, where agents operate with the same arm set, and heterogeneous settings, where agents have distinct arm sets. In the homogeneous setting, we propose attack strategies that, by targeting just one agent, convince all agents to select a particular target arm $T-o(T)$ times while incurring $o(T)$ attack costs in $T$ rounds. In the heterogeneous setting, we prove that a target arm attack requires linear attack costs and propose attack strategies that can force a maximum number of agents to suffer linear regrets while incurring sublinear costs and only manipulating the observations of a few target agents. Numerical experiments validate the effectiveness of our proposed attack strategies.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Adversarial Attacks on Online Learning to Rank with Click Feedback

Online learning to rank (OLTR) is a sequential decision-making problem where a learning agent selects an ordered list of items and receives feedback through user clicks. Although potential attacks against OLTR algorithms may cause serious losses in real-world applications, little is known about adversarial attacks on OLTR. This paper studies attack strategies against multiple variants of OLTR. Our first result provides an attack strategy against the UCB algorithm on classical stochastic bandits with binary feedback, which solves the key issues caused by bounded and discrete feedback that previous works can not handle. Building on this result, we design attack algorithms against UCB-based OLTR algorithms in position-based and cascade models. Finally, we propose a general attack strategy against any algorithm under the general click model. Each attack algorithm manipulates the learning agent into choosing the target attack item $T-o(T)$ times, incurring a cumulative cost of $o(T)$. Experiments on synthetic and real data further validate the effectiveness of our proposed attack algorithms.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Contextual Information and Commonsense Based Prompt for Emotion Recognition in Conversation

Emotion recognition in conversation (ERC) aims to detect the emotion for each utterance in a given conversation. The newly proposed ERC models have leveraged pre-trained language models (PLMs) with the paradigm of pre-training and fine-tuning to obtain good performance. However, these models seldom exploit PLMs' advantages thoroughly, and perform poorly for the conversations lacking explicit emotional expressions. In order to fully leverage the latent knowledge related to the emotional expressions in utterances, we propose a novel ERC model CISPER with the new paradigm of prompt and language model (LM) tuning. Specifically, CISPER is equipped with the prompt blending the contextual information and commonsense related to the interlocutor's utterances, to achieve ERC more effectively. Our extensive experiments demonstrate CISPER's superior performance over the state-of-the-art ERC models, and the effectiveness of leveraging these two kinds of significant prompt information for performance gains. To reproduce our experimental results conveniently, CISPER's sourcecode and the datasets have been shared at https://github.com/DeqingYang/CISPER.

cs.CL↗