Learning Lane Graph Representations for Motion Forecasting

We propose a motion forecasting model that exploits a novel structured map representation as well as actor-map interactions. Instead of encoding vectorized maps as raster images, we construct a lane graph from raw map data to explicitly preserve the map structure. To capture the complex topology and long range dependencies of the lane graph, we propose LaneGCN which extends graph convolutions with multiple adjacency matrices and along-lane dilation. To capture the complex interactions between actors and maps, we exploit a fusion network consisting of four types of interactions, actor-to-lane, lane-to-lane, lane-to-actor and actor-to-actor. Powered by LaneGCN and actor-map interactions, our model is able to predict accurate and realistic multi-modal trajectories. Our approach significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art on the large scale Argoverse motion forecasting benchmark.

PnPNet: End-to-End Perception and Prediction with Tracking in the Loop

We tackle the problem of joint perception and motion forecasting in the context of self-driving vehicles. Towards this goal we propose PnPNet, an end-to-end model that takes as input sequential sensor data, and outputs at each time step object tracks and their future trajectories. The key component is a novel tracking module that generates object tracks online from detections and exploits trajectory level features for motion forecasting. Specifically, the object tracks get updated at each time step by solving both the data association problem and the trajectory estimation problem. Importantly, the whole model is end-to-end trainable and benefits from joint optimization of all tasks. We validate PnPNet on two large-scale driving datasets, and show significant improvements over the state-of-the-art with better occlusion recovery and more accurate future prediction.

Multi-Class Uncertainty Calibration via Mutual Information Maximization-based Binning

Post-hoc calibration is a common approach for providing high-quality confidence estimates of deep neural network predictions. Recent work has shown that widely used scaling methods underestimate their calibration error, while alternative Histogram Binning (HB) methods with verifiable calibration performance often fail to preserve classification accuracy. In the case of multi-class calibration with a large number of classes K, HB also faces the issue of severe sample-inefficiency due to a large class imbalance resulting from the conversion into K one-vs-rest class-wise calibration problems. The goal of this paper is to resolve the identified issues of HB in order to provide verified and calibrated confidence estimates using only a small holdout calibration dataset for bin optimization while preserving multi-class ranking accuracy. From an information-theoretic perspective, we derive the I-Max concept for binning, which maximizes the mutual information between labels and binned (quantized) logits. This concept mitigates potential loss in ranking performance due to lossy quantization, and by disentangling the optimization of bin edges and representatives allows simultaneous improvement of ranking and calibration performance. In addition, we propose a shared class-wise (sCW) binning strategy that fits a single calibrator on the merged training sets of all K class-wise problems, yielding reliable estimates from a small calibration set. The combination of sCW and I-Max binning outperforms the state of the art calibration methods on various evaluation metrics across different benchmark datasets and models, even when using only a small set of calibration data, e.g. 1k samples for ImageNet.

LiDARsim: Realistic LiDAR Simulation by Leveraging the Real World

We tackle the problem of producing realistic simulations of LiDAR point clouds, the sensor of preference for most self-driving vehicles. We argue that, by leveraging real data, we can simulate the complex world more realistically compared to employing virtual worlds built from CAD/procedural models. Towards this goal, we first build a large catalog of 3D static maps and 3D dynamic objects by driving around several cities with our self-driving fleet. We can then generate scenarios by selecting a scene from our catalog and "virtually" placing the self-driving vehicle (SDV) and a set of dynamic objects from the catalog in plausible locations in the scene. To produce realistic simulations, we develop a novel simulator that captures both the power of physics-based and learning-based simulation. We first utilize ray casting over the 3D scene and then use a deep neural network to produce deviations from the physics-based simulation, producing realistic LiDAR point clouds. We showcase LiDARsim's usefulness for perception algorithms-testing on long-tail events and end-to-end closed-loop evaluation on safety-critical scenarios.

Physically Realizable Adversarial Examples for LiDAR Object Detection

Modern autonomous driving systems rely heavily on deep learning models to process point cloud sensory data; meanwhile, deep models have been shown to be susceptible to adversarial attacks with visually imperceptible perturbations. Despite the fact that this poses a security concern for the self-driving industry, there has been very little exploration in terms of 3D perception, as most adversarial attacks have only been applied to 2D flat images. In this paper, we address this issue and present a method to generate universal 3D adversarial objects to fool LiDAR detectors. In particular, we demonstrate that placing an adversarial object on the rooftop of any target vehicle to hide the vehicle entirely from LiDAR detectors with a success rate of 80%. We report attack results on a suite of detectors using various input representation of point clouds. We also conduct a pilot study on adversarial defense using data augmentation. This is one step closer towards safer self-driving under unseen conditions from limited training data.

SELD-TCN: Sound Event Localization & Detection via Temporal Convolutional Networks

The understanding of the surrounding environment plays a critical role in autonomous robotic systems, such as self-driving cars. Extensive research has been carried out concerning visual perception. Yet, to obtain a more complete perception of the environment, autonomous systems of the future should also take acoustic information into account. Recent sound event localization and detection (SELD) frameworks utilize convolutional recurrent neural networks (CRNNs). However, considering the recurrent nature of CRNNs, it becomes challenging to implement them efficiently on embedded hardware. Not only are their computations strenuous to parallelize, but they also require high memory bandwidth and large memory buffers. In this work, we develop a more robust and hardware-friendly novel architecture based on a temporal convolutional network(TCN). The proposed framework (SELD-TCN) outperforms the state-of-the-art SELDnet performance on four different datasets. Moreover, SELD-TCN achieves 4x faster training time per epoch and 40x faster inference time on an ordinary graphics processing unit (GPU).

Infinitely Wide Graph Convolutional Networks: Semi-supervised Learning via Gaussian Processes

Graph convolutional neural networks~(GCNs) have recently demonstrated promising results on graph-based semi-supervised classification, but little work has been done to explore their theoretical properties. Recently, several deep neural networks, e.g., fully connected and convolutional neural networks, with infinite hidden units have been proved to be equivalent to Gaussian processes~(GPs). To exploit both the powerful representational capacity of GCNs and the great expressive power of GPs, we investigate similar properties of infinitely wide GCNs. More specifically, we propose a GP regression model via GCNs~(GPGC) for graph-based semi-supervised learning. In the process, we formulate the kernel matrix computation of GPGC in an iterative analytical form. Finally, we derive a conditional distribution for the labels of unobserved nodes based on the graph structure, labels for the observed nodes, and the feature matrix of all the nodes. We conduct extensive experiments to evaluate the semi-supervised classification performance of GPGC and demonstrate that it outperforms other state-of-the-art methods by a clear margin on all the datasets while being efficient.

On-manifold Adversarial Data Augmentation Improves Uncertainty Calibration

Uncertainty estimates help to identify ambiguous, novel, or anomalous inputs, but the reliable quantification of uncertainty has proven to be challenging for modern deep networks. To improve uncertainty estimation, we propose On-Manifold Adversarial Data Augmentation or OMADA, which specifically attempts to generate the most challenging examples by following an on-manifold adversarial attack path in the latent space of an autoencoder-based generative model that closely approximates decision boundaries between two or more classes. On a variety of datasets and for multiple network architectures, OMADA consistently yields more accurate and better calibrated classifiers than baseline models, and outperforms competing approaches such as Mixup and CutMix, as well as achieving similar performance to (at times better than) post-processing calibration methods such as temperature scaling. Variants of OMADA can employ different sampling schemes for ambiguous on-manifold examples based on the entropy of their estimated soft labels, which exhibit specific strengths for generalization, calibration of predicted uncertainty, or detection of out-of-distribution inputs.

Perceptual Speech Enhancement via Generative Adversarial Networks

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems are of vital importance nowadays in commonplace tasks such as speech-to-text processing and language translation. This created the need of an ASR system that can operate in realistic crowded environments. Thus, speech enhancement is now considered as a fundamental building block in newly developed ASR systems. In this paper, a generative adversarial network (GAN) based framework is investigated for the task of speech enhancement of audio tracks. A new architecture based on CasNet generator and additional perceptual loss is incorporated to get realistically denoised speech phonetics. Finally, the proposed framework is shown to quantitatively outperform other GAN-based speech enhancement approaches.