Learning to Reason With Relational Abstractions

Large language models have recently shown promising progress in mathematical reasoning when fine-tuned with human-generated sequences walking through a sequence of solution steps. However, the solution sequences are not formally structured and the resulting model-generated sequences may not reflect the kind of systematic reasoning we might expect an expert human to produce. In this paper, we study how to build stronger reasoning capability in language models using the idea of relational abstractions. We introduce new types of sequences that more explicitly provide an abstract characterization of the transitions through intermediate solution steps to the goal state. We find that models that are supplied with such sequences as prompts can solve tasks with a significantly higher accuracy, and models that are trained to produce such sequences solve problems better than those that are trained with previously used human-generated sequences and other baselines. Our work thus takes several steps toward elucidating and improving how language models perform on tasks requiring multi-step mathematical reasoning.

Online Unsupervised Learning of Visual Representations and Categories

Real world learning scenarios involve a nonstationary distribution of classes with sequential dependencies among the samples, in contrast to the standard machine learning formulation of drawing samples independently from a fixed, typically uniform distribution. Furthermore, real world interactions demand learning on-the-fly from few or no class labels. In this work, we propose an unsupervised model that simultaneously performs online visual representation learning and few-shot learning of new categories without relying on any class labels. Our model is a prototype-based memory network with a control component that determines when to form a new class prototype. We formulate it as an online Gaussian mixture model, where components are created online with only a single new example, and assignments do not have to be balanced, which permits an approximation to natural imbalanced distributions from uncurated raw data. Learning includes a contrastive loss that encourages different views of the same image to be assigned to the same prototype. The result is a mechanism that forms categorical representations of objects in nonstationary environments. Experiments show that our method can learn from an online stream of visual input data and is significantly better at category recognition compared to state-of-the-art self-supervised learning methods.

Just Label What You Need: Fine-Grained Active Selection for Perception and Prediction through Partially Labeled Scenes

Self-driving vehicles must perceive and predict the future positions of nearby actors in order to avoid collisions and drive safely. A learned deep learning module is often responsible for this task, requiring large-scale, high-quality training datasets. As data collection is often significantly cheaper than labeling in this domain, the decision of which subset of examples to label can have a profound impact on model performance. Active learning techniques, which leverage the state of the current model to iteratively select examples for labeling, offer a promising solution to this problem. However, despite the appeal of this approach, there has been little scientific analysis of active learning approaches for the perception and prediction (P&P) problem. In this work, we study active learning techniques for P&P and find that the traditional active learning formulation is ill-suited for the P&P setting. We thus introduce generalizations that ensure that our approach is both cost-aware and allows for fine-grained selection of examples through partially labeled scenes. Our experiments on a real-world, large-scale self-driving dataset suggest that fine-grained selection can improve the performance across perception, prediction, and downstream planning tasks.

Exploring Adversarial Robustness of Multi-Sensor Perception Systems in Self Driving

Modern self-driving perception systems have been shown to improve upon processing complementary inputs such as LiDAR with images. In isolation, 2D images have been found to be extremely vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Yet, there have been limited studies on the adversarial robustness of multi-modal models that fuse LiDAR features with image features. Furthermore, existing works do not consider physically realizable perturbations that are consistent across the input modalities. In this paper, we showcase practical susceptibilities of multi-sensor detection by placing an adversarial object on top of a host vehicle. We focus on physically realizable and input-agnostic attacks as they are feasible to execute in practice, and show that a single universal adversary can hide different host vehicles from state-of-the-art multi-modal detectors. Our experiments demonstrate that successful attacks are primarily caused by easily corrupted image features. Furthermore, we find that in modern sensor fusion methods which project image features into 3D, adversarial attacks can exploit the projection process to generate false positives across distant regions in 3D. Towards more robust multi-modal perception systems, we show that adversarial training with feature denoising can boost robustness to such attacks significantly. However, we find that standard adversarial defenses still struggle to prevent false positives which are also caused by inaccurate associations between 3D LiDAR points and 2D pixels.

Cost-Efficient Online Hyperparameter Optimization

Recent work on hyperparameters optimization (HPO) has shown the possibility of training certain hyperparameters together with regular parameters. However, these online HPO algorithms still require running evaluation on a set of validation examples at each training step, steeply increasing the training cost. To decide when to query the validation loss, we model online HPO as a time-varying Bayesian optimization problem, on top of which we propose a novel \textit{costly feedback} setting to capture the concept of the query cost. Under this setting, standard algorithms are cost-inefficient as they evaluate on the validation set at every round. In contrast, the cost-efficient GP-UCB algorithm proposed in this paper queries the unknown function only when the model is less confident about current decisions. We evaluate our proposed algorithm by tuning hyperparameters online for VGG and ResNet on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet100. Our proposed online HPO algorithm reaches human expert-level performance within a single run of the experiment, while incurring only modest computational overhead compared to regular training.

Adversarial Attacks On Multi-Agent Communication

Growing at a very fast pace, modern autonomous systems will soon be deployed at scale, opening up the possibility for cooperative multi-agent systems. By sharing information and distributing workloads, autonomous agents can better perform their tasks and enjoy improved computation efficiency. However, such advantages rely heavily on communication channels which have been shown to be vulnerable to security breaches. Thus, communication can be compromised to execute adversarial attacks on deep learning models which are widely employed in modern systems. In this paper, we explore such adversarial attacks in a novel multi-agent setting where agents communicate by sharing learned intermediate representations. We observe that an indistinguishable adversarial message can severely degrade performance, but becomes weaker as the number of benign agents increase. Furthermore, we show that transfer attacks are more difficult in this setting when compared to directly perturbing the inputs, as it is necessary to align the distribution of communication messages with domain adaptation. Finally, we show that low-budget online attacks can be achieved by exploiting the temporal consistency of streaming sensory inputs.

Self-Supervised Representation Learning from Flow Equivariance

Self-supervised representation learning is able to learn semantically meaningful features; however, much of its recent success relies on multiple crops of an image with very few objects. Instead of learning view-invariant representation from simple images, humans learn representations in a complex world with changing scenes by observing object movement, deformation, pose variation, and ego motion. Motivated by this ability, we present a new self-supervised learning representation framework that can be directly deployed on a video stream of complex scenes with many moving objects. Our framework features a simple flow equivariance objective that encourages the network to predict the features of another frame by applying a flow transformation to the features of the current frame. Our representations, learned from high-resolution raw video, can be readily used for downstream tasks on static images. Readout experiments on challenging semantic segmentation, instance segmentation, and object detection benchmarks show that we are able to outperform representations obtained from previous state-of-the-art methods including SimCLR and BYOL.

AdvSim: Generating Safety-Critical Scenarios for Self-Driving Vehicles

As self-driving systems become better, simulating scenarios where the autonomy stack is likely to fail becomes of key importance. Traditionally, those scenarios are generated for a few scenes with respect to the planning module that takes ground-truth actor states as input. This does not scale and cannot identify all possible autonomy failures, such as perception failures due to occlusion. In this paper, we propose AdvSim, an adversarial framework to generate safety-critical scenarios for any LiDAR-based autonomy system. Given an initial traffic scenario, AdvSim modifies the actors' trajectories in a physically plausible manner and updates the LiDAR sensor data to create realistic observations of the perturbed world. Importantly, by simulating directly from sensor data, we obtain adversarial scenarios that are safety-critical for the full autonomy stack. Our experiments show that our approach is general and can identify thousands of semantically meaningful safety-critical scenarios for a wide range of modern self-driving systems. Furthermore, we show that the robustness and safety of these autonomy systems can be further improved by training them with scenarios generated by AdvSim.

SceneGen: Learning to Generate Realistic Traffic Scenes

We consider the problem of generating realistic traffic scenes automatically. Existing methods typically insert actors into the scene according to a set of hand-crafted heuristics and are limited in their ability to model the true complexity and diversity of real traffic scenes, thus inducing a content gap between synthesized traffic scenes versus real ones. As a result, existing simulators lack the fidelity necessary to train and test self-driving vehicles. To address this limitation, we present SceneGen, a neural autoregressive model of traffic scenes that eschews the need for rules and heuristics. In particular, given the ego-vehicle state and a high definition map of surrounding area, SceneGen inserts actors of various classes into the scene and synthesizes their sizes, orientations, and velocities. We demonstrate on two large-scale datasets SceneGen's ability to faithfully model distributions of real traffic scenes. Moreover, we show that SceneGen coupled with sensor simulation can be used to train perception models that generalize to the real world.