Beyond Marginals: Learning Joint Spatio-Temporal Patterns for Multivariate Anomaly Detection

In this paper, we aim to improve multivariate anomaly detection (AD) by modeling the \textit{time-varying non-linear spatio-temporal correlations} found in multivariate time series data . In multivariate time series data, an anomaly may be indicated by the simultaneous deviation of interrelated time series from their expected collective behavior, even when no individual time series exhibits a clearly abnormal pattern on its own. In many existing approaches, time series variables are assumed to be (conditionally) independent, which oversimplifies real-world interactions. Our approach addresses this by modeling joint dependencies in the latent space and decoupling the modeling of \textit{marginal distributions, temporal dynamics, and inter-variable dependencies}. We use a transformer encoder to capture temporal patterns, and to model spatial (inter-variable) dependencies, we fit a multi-variate likelihood and a copula. The temporal and the spatial components are trained jointly in a latent space using a self-supervised contrastive learning objective to learn meaningful feature representations to separate normal and anomaly samples.

In Search of a Lost Metric: Human Empowerment as a Pillar of Socially Conscious Navigation

In social robot navigation, traditional metrics like proxemics and behavior naturalness emphasize human comfort and adherence to social norms but often fail to capture an agent's autonomy and adaptability in dynamic environments. This paper introduces human empowerment, an information-theoretic concept that measures a human's ability to influence their future states and observe those changes, as a complementary metric for evaluating social compliance. This metric reveals how robot navigation policies can indirectly impact human empowerment. We present a framework that integrates human empowerment into the evaluation of social performance in navigation tasks. Through numerical simulations, we demonstrate that human empowerment as a metric not only aligns with intuitive social behavior, but also shows statistically significant differences across various robot navigation policies. These results provide a deeper understanding of how different policies affect social compliance, highlighting the potential of human empowerment as a complementary metric for future research in social navigation.

Learning Emergence of Interaction Patterns across Independent RL Agents in Multi-Agent Environments

Many real-world problems, such as controlling swarms of drones and urban traffic, naturally lend themselves to modeling as multi-agent reinforcement learning (RL) problems. However, existing multi-agent RL methods often suffer from scalability challenges, primarily due to the introduction of communication among agents. Consequently, a key challenge lies in adapting the success of deep learning in single-agent RL to the multi-agent setting. In response to this challenge, we propose an approach that fundamentally reimagines multi-agent environments. Unlike conventional methods that model each agent individually with separate networks, our approach, the Bottom Up Network (BUN), adopts a unique perspective. BUN treats the collective of multi-agents as a unified entity while employing a specialized weight initialization strategy that promotes independent learning. Furthermore, we dynamically establish connections among agents using gradient information, enabling coordination when necessary while maintaining these connections as limited and sparse to effectively manage the computational budget. Our extensive empirical evaluations across a variety of cooperative multi-agent scenarios, including tasks such as cooperative navigation and traffic control, consistently demonstrate BUN's superiority over baseline methods with substantially reduced computational costs.