Sim2Real Docs: Domain Randomization for Documents in Natural Scenes using Ray-traced Rendering

In the past, computer vision systems for digitized documents could rely on systematically captured, high-quality scans. Today, transactions involving digital documents are more likely to start as mobile phone photo uploads taken by non-professionals. As such, computer vision for document automation must now account for documents captured in natural scene contexts. An additional challenge is that task objectives for document processing can be highly use-case specific, which makes publicly-available datasets limited in their utility, while manual data labeling is also costly and poorly translates between use cases. To address these issues we created Sim2Real Docs - a framework for synthesizing datasets and performing domain randomization of documents in natural scenes. Sim2Real Docs enables programmatic 3D rendering of documents using Blender, an open source tool for 3D modeling and ray-traced rendering. By using rendering that simulates physical interactions of light, geometry, camera, and background, we synthesize datasets of documents in a natural scene context. Each render is paired with use-case specific ground truth data specifying latent characteristics of interest, producing unlimited fit-for-task training data. The role of machine learning models is then to solve the inverse problem posed by the rendering pipeline. Such models can be further iterated upon with real-world data by either fine tuning or making adjustments to domain randomization parameters.

Grounded Relational Inference: Domain Knowledge Driven Explainable Autonomous Driving

Explainability is essential for autonomous vehicles and other robotics systems interacting with humans and other objects during operation. Humans need to understand and anticipate the actions taken by the machines for trustful and safe cooperation. In this work, we aim to enable the explainability of an autonomous driving system at the design stage by incorporating expert domain knowledge into the model. We propose Grounded Relational Inference (GRI). It models an interactive system's underlying dynamics by inferring an interaction graph representing the agents' relations. We ensure an interpretable interaction graph by grounding the relational latent space into semantic behaviors defined with expert domain knowledge. We demonstrate that it can model interactive traffic scenarios under both simulation and real-world settings, and generate interpretable graphs explaining the vehicle's behavior by their interactions.

Flow-FL: Data-Driven Federated Learning for Spatio-Temporal Predictions in Multi-Robot Systems

In this paper, we show how the Federated Learning (FL) framework enables learning collectively from distributed data in connected robot teams. This framework typically works with clients collecting data locally, updating neural network weights of their model, and sending updates to a server for aggregation into a global model. We explore the design space of FL by comparing two variants of this concept. The first variant follows the traditional FL approach in which a server aggregates the local models. In the second variant, that we call Flow-FL, the aggregation process is serverless thanks to the use of a gossip-based shared data structure. In both variants, we use a data-driven mechanism to synchronize the learning process in which robots contribute model updates when they collect sufficient data. We validate our approach with an agent trajectory forecasting problem in a multi-agent setting. Using a centralized implementation as a baseline, we study the effects of staggered online data collection, and variations in data flow, number of participating robots, and time delays introduced by the decentralization of the framework in a multi-robot setting.