ICE-T: A Multi-Faceted Concept for Teaching Machine Learning

The topics of Artificial intelligence (AI) and especially Machine Learning (ML) are increasingly making their way into educational curricula. To facilitate the access for students, a variety of platforms, visual tools, and digital games are already being used to introduce ML concepts and strengthen the understanding of how AI works. We take a look at didactic principles that are employed for teaching computer science, define criteria, and, based on those, evaluate a selection of prominent existing platforms, tools, and games. Additionally, we criticize the approach of portraying ML mostly as a black-box and the resulting missing focus on creating an understanding of data, algorithms, and models that come with it. To tackle this issue, we present a concept that covers intermodal transfer, computational and explanatory thinking, ICE-T, as an extension of known didactic principles. With our multi-faceted concept, we believe that planners of learning units, creators of learning platforms and educators can improve on teaching ML.

Enhancing Safety for Autonomous Agents in Partly Concealed Urban Traffic Environments Through Representation-Based Shielding

Navigating unsignalized intersections in urban environments poses a complex challenge for self-driving vehicles, where issues such as view obstructions, unpredictable pedestrian crossings, and diverse traffic participants demand a great focus on crash prevention. In this paper, we propose a novel state representation for Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents centered around the information perceivable by an autonomous agent, enabling the safe navigation of previously uncharted road maps. Our approach surpasses several baseline models by a sig nificant margin in terms of safety and energy consumption metrics. These improvements are achieved while maintaining a competitive average travel speed. Our findings pave the way for more robust and reliable autonomous navigation strategies, promising safer and more efficient urban traffic environments.

Using Petri Nets as an Integrated Constraint Mechanism for Reinforcement Learning Tasks

The lack of trust in algorithms is usually an issue when using Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents for control in real-world domains such as production plants, autonomous vehicles, or traffic-related infrastructure, partly due to the lack of verifiability of the model itself. In such scenarios, Petri nets (PNs) are often available for flowcharts or process steps, as they are versatile and standardized. In order to facilitate integration of RL models and as a step towards increasing AI trustworthiness, we propose an approach that uses PNs with three main advantages over typical RL approaches: Firstly, the agent can now easily be modeled with a combined state including both external environmental observations and agent-specific state information from a given PN. Secondly, we can enforce constraints for state-dependent actions through the inherent PN model. And lastly, we can increase trustworthiness by verifying PN properties through techniques such as model checking. We test our approach on a typical four-way intersection traffic light control setting and present our results, beating cycle-based baselines.