arXiv subjects

Chao Huang

Publications and source records attributed to Chao Huang.

At least 307 records · Page 17Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

Social Recommendation with Self-Supervised Metagraph Informax Network

In recent years, researchers attempt to utilize online social information to alleviate data sparsity for collaborative filtering, based on the rationale that social networks offers the insights to understand the behavioral patterns. However, due to the overlook of inter-dependent knowledge across items (e.g., categories of products), existing social recommender systems are insufficient to distill the heterogeneous collaborative signals from both user and item sides. In this work, we propose a Self-Supervised Metagraph Infor-max Network (SMIN) which investigates the potential of jointly incorporating social- and knowledge-aware relational structures into the user preference representation for recommendation. To model relation heterogeneity, we design a metapath-guided heterogeneous graph neural network to aggregate feature embeddings from different types of meta-relations across users and items, em-powering SMIN to maintain dedicated representations for multi-faceted user- and item-wise dependencies. Additionally, to inject high-order collaborative signals, we generalize the mutual information learning paradigm under the self-supervised graph-based collaborative filtering. This endows the expressive modeling of user-item interactive patterns, by exploring global-level collaborative relations and underlying isomorphic transformation property of graph topology. Experimental results on several real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our SMIN model over various state-of-the-art recommendation methods. We release our source code at https://github.com/SocialRecsys/SMIN.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2021

Recent Advances in Heterogeneous Relation Learning for Recommendation

Recommender systems have played a critical role in many web applications to meet user's personalized interests and alleviate the information overload. In this survey, we review the development of recommendation frameworks with the focus on heterogeneous relational learning, which consists of different types of dependencies among users and items. The objective of this task is to map heterogeneous relational data into latent representation space, such that the structural and relational properties from both user and item domain can be well preserved. To address this problem, recent research developments can fall into three major lines: social recommendation, knowledge graph-enhanced recommender system, and multi-behavior recommendation. We discuss the learning approaches in each category, such as matrix factorization, attention mechanism and graph neural networks, for effectively distilling heterogeneous contextual information. Finally, we present an exploratory outlook to highlight several promising directions and opportunities in heterogeneous relational learning frameworks for recommendation.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2021

Unidirectional substitutes and complements

In discrete matching markets, substitutes and complements can be unidirectional between two groups of workers when members of one group are more important or competent than those of the other group for firms. We show that a stable matching exists and can be found by a two-stage Deferred Acceptance mechanism when firms' preferences satisfy a unidirectional substitutes and complements condition. This result applies to both firm-worker matching and controlled school choice. Under the framework of matching with continuous monetary transfers and quasi-linear utilities, we show that substitutes and complements are bidirectional for a pair of workers.

econ.TH↗

arXiv2021

Synthesized Trust Learning from Limited Human Feedback for Human-Load-Reduced Multi-Robot Deployments

Human multi-robot system (MRS) collaboration is demonstrating potentials in wide application scenarios due to the integration of human cognitive skills and a robot team's powerful capability introduced by its multi-member structure. However, due to limited human cognitive capability, a human cannot simultaneously monitor multiple robots and identify the abnormal ones, largely limiting the efficiency of the human-MRS collaboration. There is an urgent need to proactively reduce unnecessary human engagements and further reduce human cognitive loads. Human trust in human MRS collaboration reveals human expectations on robot performance. Based on trust estimation, the work between a human and MRS will be reallocated that an MRS will self-monitor and only request human guidance in critical situations. Inspired by that, a novel Synthesized Trust Learning (STL) method was developed to model human trust in the collaboration. STL explores two aspects of human trust (trust level and trust preference), meanwhile accelerates the convergence speed by integrating active learning to reduce human workload. To validate the effectiveness of the method, tasks "searching victims in the context of city rescue" were designed in an open-world simulation environment, and a user study with 10 volunteers was conducted to generate real human trust feedback. The results showed that by maximally utilizing human feedback, the STL achieved higher accuracy in trust modeling with a few human feedback, effectively reducing human interventions needed for modeling an accurate trust, therefore reducing human cognitive load in the collaboration.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2021

Repairing Human Trust by Promptly Correcting Robot Mistakes with An Attention Transfer Model

In human-robot collaboration (HRC), human trust in the robot is the human expectation that a robot executes tasks with desired performance. A higher-level trust increases the willingness of a human operator to assign tasks, share plans, and reduce the interruption during robot executions, thereby facilitating human-robot integration both physically and mentally. However, due to real-world disturbances, robots inevitably make mistakes, decreasing human trust and further influencing collaboration. Trust is fragile and trust loss is triggered easily when robots show incapability of task executions, making the trust maintenance challenging. To maintain human trust, in this research, a trust repair framework is developed based on a human-to-robot attention transfer (H2R-AT) model and a user trust study. The rationale of this framework is that a prompt mistake correction restores human trust. With H2R-AT, a robot localizes human verbal concerns and makes prompt mistake corrections to avoid task failures in an early stage and to finally improve human trust. User trust study measures trust status before and after the behavior corrections to quantify the trust loss. Robot experiments were designed to cover four typical mistakes, wrong action, wrong region, wrong pose, and wrong spatial relation, validated the accuracy of H2R-AT in robot behavior corrections; a user trust study with $252$ participants was conducted, and the changes in trust levels before and after corrections were evaluated. The effectiveness of the human trust repairing was evaluated by the mistake correction accuracy and the trust improvement.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2021

Verification in the Loop: Correct-by-Construction Control Learning with Reach-avoid Guarantees

In the current control design of safety-critical autonomous systems, formal verification techniques are typically applied after the controller is designed to evaluate whether the required properties (e.g., safety) are satisfied. However, due to the increasing system complexity and the fundamental hardness of designing a controller with formal guarantees, such an open-loop process of design-then-verify often results in many iterations and fails to provide the necessary guarantees. In this paper, we propose a correct-by-construction control learning framework that integrates the verification into the control design process in a closed-loop manner, i.e., design-while-verify. Specifically, we leverage the verification results (computed reachable set of the system state) to construct feedback metrics for control learning, which measure how likely the current design of control parameters can meet the required reach-avoid property for safety and goal-reaching. We formulate an optimization problem based on such metrics for tuning the controller parameters, and develop an approximated gradient descent algorithm with a difference method to solve the optimization problem and learn the controller. The learned controller is formally guaranteed to meet the required reach-avoid property. By treating verifiability as a first-class objective and effectively leveraging the verification results during the control learning process, our approach can significantly improve the chance of finding a control design with formal property guarantees. This is demonstrated via a set of experiments on both linear and non-linear systems that use model-based or neural network based controllers.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2021

On partitions of integers with restrictions involving squares

In this paper, we study partitions of positive integers with restrictions involving squares. We mainly establish the following two results (which were conjectured by Sun in 2013): (i) Each positive integer $n$ can be written as $n=x+y+z$ with $x,y,z$ positive integers such that $x^2+y^2+z^2$ is a square, unless $n$ has the form $n=2^{a}3^{b}$ or $2^{a}7$ with $a$ and $b$ nonnegative integers. (ii) Each integer $n>7$ with $n\not=11,14,17$ can be written as $n=x+y+2z$ with $x,y,z$ positive integers such that $x^2+y^2+2z^2$ is a square.

math.NT↗

arXiv2021

VSpSR: Explorable Super-Resolution via Variational Sparse Representation

Super-resolution (SR) is an ill-posed problem, which means that infinitely many high-resolution (HR) images can be degraded to the same low-resolution (LR) image. To study the one-to-many stochastic SR mapping, we implicitly represent the non-local self-similarity of natural images and develop a Variational Sparse framework for Super-Resolution (VSpSR) via neural networks. Since every small patch of a HR image can be well approximated by the sparse representation of atoms in an over-complete dictionary, we design a two-branch module, i.e., VSpM, to explore the SR space. Concretely, one branch of VSpM extracts patch-level basis from the LR input, and the other branch infers pixel-wise variational distributions with respect to the sparse coefficients. By repeatedly sampling coefficients, we could obtain infinite sparse representations, and thus generate diverse HR images. According to the preliminary results of NTIRE 2021 challenge on learning SR space, our team (FudanZmic21) ranks 7-th in terms of released scores. The implementation of VSpSR is released at https://zmiclab.github.io/.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Human-in-the-Loop Deep Reinforcement Learning with Application to Autonomous Driving

Due to the limited smartness and abilities of machine intelligence, currently autonomous vehicles are still unable to handle all kinds of situations and completely replace drivers. Because humans exhibit strong robustness and adaptability in complex driving scenarios, it is of great importance to introduce humans into the training loop of artificial intelligence, leveraging human intelligence to further advance machine learning algorithms. In this study, a real-time human-guidance-based deep reinforcement learning (Hug-DRL) method is developed for policy training of autonomous driving. Leveraging a newly designed control transfer mechanism between human and automation, human is able to intervene and correct the agent's unreasonable actions in real time when necessary during the model training process. Based on this human-in-the-loop guidance mechanism, an improved actor-critic architecture with modified policy and value networks is developed. The fast convergence of the proposed Hug-DRL allows real-time human guidance actions to be fused into the agent's training loop, further improving the efficiency and performance of deep reinforcement learning. The developed method is validated by human-in-the-loop experiments with 40 subjects and compared with other state-of-the-art learning approaches. The results suggest that the proposed method can effectively enhance the training efficiency and performance of the deep reinforcement learning algorithm under human guidance, without imposing specific requirements on participant expertise and experience.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2021

Decision Making of Connected Automated Vehicles at An Unsignalized Roundabout Considering Personalized Driving Behaviours

To improve the safety and efficiency of the intelligent transportation system, particularly in complex urban scenarios, in this paper a game theoretic decision-making framework is designed for connected automated vehicles (CAVs) at unsignalized roundabouts considering their personalized driving behaviours. Within the decision-making framework, a motion prediction module is designed and optimized using model predictive control (MPC) to enhance the effectiveness and accuracy of the decision-making algorithm. Besides, the payoff function of decision making is defined with the consideration of vehicle safety, ride comfort and travel efficiency. Additionally, the constraints of the decision-making problem are constructed. Based on the established decision-making model, Stackelberg game and grand coalition game approaches are adopted to address the decision making of CAVs at an unsignalized roundabout. Three testing cases considering personalized driving behaviours are carried out to verify the performance of the developed decision-making algorithms. The testing results show that the proposed game theoretic decision-making framework is able to make safe and reasonable decisions for CAVs in the complex urban scenarios, validating its feasibility and effectiveness. Stackelberg game approach shows its advantage in guaranteeing personalized driving objectives of individuals, while the grand coalition game approach is advantageous regarding the efficiency improvement of the transportation system.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2021

Strategic Information Revelation in Crowdsourcing Systems Without Verification

We study a crowdsourcing problem where the platform aims to incentivize distributed workers to provide high quality and truthful solutions without the ability to verify the solutions. While most prior work assumes that the platform and workers have symmetric information, we study an asymmetric information scenario where the platform has informational advantages. Specifically, the platform knows more information regarding worker average solution accuracy, and can strategically reveal such information to workers. Workers will utilize the announced information to determine the likelihood that they obtain a reward if exerting effort on the task. We study two types of workers, naive workers who fully trust the announcement, and strategic workers who update prior belief based on the announcement. For naive workers, we show that the platform should always announce a high average accuracy to maximize its payoff. However, this is not always optimal for strategic workers, as it may reduce the credibility of the platform announcement and hence reduce the platform payoff. Interestingly, the platform may have an incentive to even announce an average accuracy lower than the actual value when facing strategic workers. Another counterintuitive result is that the platform payoff may decrease in the number of high accuracy workers.

cs.GT↗

arXiv2021

BERT-based Chinese Text Classification for Emergency Domain with a Novel Loss Function

This paper proposes an automatic Chinese text categorization method for solving the emergency event report classification problem. Since bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT) has achieved great success in natural language processing domain, it is employed to derive emergency text features in this study. To overcome the data imbalance problem in the distribution of emergency event categories, a novel loss function is proposed to improve the performance of the BERT-based model. Meanwhile, to avoid the impact of the extreme learning rate, the Adabound optimization algorithm that achieves a gradual smooth transition from Adam to SGD is employed to learn parameters of the model. To verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method, a Chinese emergency text dataset collected from the Internet is employed. Compared with benchmarking methods, the proposed method has achieved the best performance in terms of accuracy, weighted-precision, weighted-recall, and weighted-F1 values. Therefore, it is promising to employ the proposed method for real applications in smart emergency management systems.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2021

Robot Inner Attention Modeling for Task-Adaptive Teaming of Heterogeneous Multi Robots

Attracted by team scale and function diversity, a heterogeneous multi-robot system (HMRS), where multiple robots with different functions and numbers are coordinated to perform tasks, has been widely used for complex and large-scale scenarios, including disaster search and rescue, site surveillance, and social security. However, due to the variety of the task requirements, it is challenging to accurately compose a robot team with appropriate sizes and functions to dynamically satisfy task needs while limiting the robot resource cost to a low level. To solve this problem, in this paper, a novel adaptive cooperation method, inner attention (innerATT), is developed to flexibly team heterogeneous robots to execute tasks as task types and environment change. innerATT is designed by integrating a novel attention mechanism into a multi-agent actor-critic reinforcement learning architecture. With an attention mechanism, robot capability will be analyzed to flexibly form teams to meet task requirements. Scenarios with different task variety ("Single Task", "Double Task", and "Mixed Task") were designed. The effectiveness of the innerATT was validated by its accuracy in flexible cooperation.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2021

Cooperative Decision Making of Connected Automated Vehicles at Multi-lane Merging Zone: A Coalitional Game Approach

To address the safety and efficiency issues of vehicles at multi-lane merging zones, a cooperative decision-making framework is designed for connected automated vehicles (CAVs) using a coalitional game approach. Firstly, a motion prediction module is established based on the simplified single-track vehicle model for enhancing the accuracy and reliability of the decision-making algorithm. Then, the cost function and constraints of the decision making are designed considering multiple performance indexes, i.e. the safety, comfort and efficiency. Besides, in order to realize human-like and personalized smart mobility, different driving characteristics are considered and embedded in the modeling process. Furthermore, four typical coalition models are defined for CAVS at the scenario of a multi-lane merging zone. Then, the coalitional game approach is formulated with model predictive control (MPC) to deal with decision making of CAVs at the defined scenario. Finally, testings are carried out in two cases considering different driving characteristics to evaluate the performance of the developed approach. The testing results show that the proposed coalitional game based method is able to make reasonable decisions and adapt to different driving characteristics for CAVs at the multi-lane merging zone. It guarantees the safety and efficiency of CAVs at the complex dynamic traffic condition, and simultaneously accommodates the objectives of individual vehicles, demonstrating the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed approach.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2021

Meta Preference Learning for Fast User Adaptation in Human-Supervisory Multi-Robot Deployments

As multi-robot systems (MRS) are widely used in various tasks such as natural disaster response and social security, people enthusiastically expect an MRS to be ubiquitous that a general user without heavy training can easily operate. However, humans have various preferences on balancing between task performance and safety, imposing different requirements onto MRS control. Failing to comply with preferences makes people feel difficult in operation and decreases human willingness of using an MRS. Therefore, to improve social acceptance as well as performance, there is an urgent need to adjust MRS behaviors according to human preferences before triggering human corrections, which increases cognitive load. In this paper, a novel Meta Preference Learning (MPL) method was developed to enable an MRS to fast adapt to user preferences. MPL based on meta learning mechanism can quickly assess human preferences from limited instructions; then, a neural network based preference model adjusts MRS behaviors for preference adaption. To validate method effectiveness, a task scenario "An MRS searches victims in an earthquake disaster site" was designed; 20 human users were involved to identify preferences as "aggressive", "medium", "reserved"; based on user guidance and domain knowledge, about 20,000 preferences were simulated to cover different operations related to "task quality", "task progress", "robot safety". The effectiveness of MPL in preference adaption was validated by the reduced duration and frequency of human interventions.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2021

Human-Machine Adaptive Shared Control for Safe Automated Driving under Automation Degradation

In this paper, a human-machine adaptive shared control method is proposed for automated vehicles (AVs) under automation performance degradation. First, a novel risk assessment module is proposed to monitor driving behavior and evaluate automation performance degradation for AVs. Then, an adaptive control authority allocation module is developed. In the event of any performance degradation detection, the allocated control authority of the automation system is decreased based on the assessed risk to reduce the potential risk of vehicle motion. Consequently, the control authority allocated to the human driver is adaptively increased and thus requires more driver engagement in the control loop to compensate for the automation degradation and ensure AV safety. Experimental validation is conducted under different driving scenarios. The testing results show that the proposed approach is able to effectively compensate for the performance degradation of vehicle automation through the human-machine adaptive shared control, ensuring the safety of automated driving

eess.SY↗

arXiv2021

On Joint Reconstruction of State and Input-Output Injection Attacks for Nonlinear Systems

We address the problem of robust state reconstruction for discrete-time nonlinear systems when the actuators and sensors are injected with (potentially unbounded) attack signals. Exploiting redundancy in sensors and actuators and using a bank of unknown input observers (UIOs), we propose an observer-based estimator capable of providing asymptotic estimates of the system state and attack signals under the condition that the numbers of sensors and actuators under attack are sufficiently small. Using the proposed estimator, we provide methods for isolating the compromised actuators and sensors. Numerical examples are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of our methods.

eess.SY↗

arXiv2021

Cocktail: Learn a Better Neural Network Controller from Multiple Experts via Adaptive Mixing and Robust Distillation

Neural networks are being increasingly applied to control and decision-making for learning-enabled cyber-physical systems (LE-CPSs). They have shown promising performance without requiring the development of complex physical models; however, their adoption is significantly hindered by the concerns on their safety, robustness, and efficiency. In this work, we propose COCKTAIL, a novel design framework that automatically learns a neural network-based controller from multiple existing control methods (experts) that could be either model-based or neural network-based. In particular, COCKTAIL first performs reinforcement learning to learn an optimal system-level adaptive mixing strategy that incorporates the underlying experts with dynamically-assigned weights and then conducts a teacher-student distillation with probabilistic adversarial training and regularization to synthesize a student neural network controller with improved control robustness (measured by a safe control rate metric with respect to adversarial attacks or measurement noises), control energy efficiency, and verifiability (measured by the computation time for verification). Experiments on three non-linear systems demonstrate significant advantages of our approach on these properties over various baseline methods.

eess.SY↗