In this paper, we elaborate on the design and discuss the results of a multi-agent simulation that we have developed using the PSI cognitive architecture. We demonstrate that imbuing agents with intrinsic needs for group affiliation, certainty and competence will lead to the emergence of social behavior among agents. This behavior expresses itself in altruism toward in-group agents and adversarial tendencies toward out-group agents. Our simulation also shows how parameterization can have dramatic effects on agent behavior. Introducing an out-group bias, for example, not only made agents behave aggressively toward members of the other group, but it also increased in-group cohesion. Similarly, environmental and situational factors facilitated the emergence of outliers: agents from adversarial groups becoming close friends. Overall, this simulation showcases the power of psychological frameworks, in general, and the PSI paradigm, in particular, to bring about human-like behavioral patterns in an emergent fashion.

Computational units in artificial neural networks follow a simplified model of biological neurons. In the biological model, the output signal of a neuron runs down the axon, splits following the many branches at its end, and passes identically to all the downward neurons of the network. Each of the downward neurons will use their copy of this signal as one of many inputs dendrites, integrate them all and fire an output, if above some threshold. In the artificial neural network, this translates to the fact that the nonlinear filtering of the signal is performed in the upward neuron, meaning that in practice the same activation is shared between all the downward neurons that use that signal as their input. Dendrites thus play a passive role. We propose a slightly more complex model for the biological neuron, where dendrites play an active role: the activation in the output of the upward neuron becomes optional, and instead the signals going through each dendrite undergo independent nonlinear filterings, before the linear combination. We implement this new model into a ReLU computational unit and discuss its biological plausibility. We compare this new computational unit with the standard one and describe it from a geometrical point of view. We provide a Keras implementation of this unit into fully connected and convolutional layers and estimate their FLOPs and weights change. We then use these layers in ResNet architectures on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, Imagenette, and Imagewoof, obtaining performance improvements over standard ResNets up to 1.73%. Finally, we prove a universal representation theorem for continuous functions on compact sets and show that this new unit has more representational power than its standard counterpart.

There are many artificial intelligence algorithms for autonomous driving, but directly installing these algorithms on vehicles is unrealistic and expensive. At the same time, many of these algorithms need an environment to train and optimize. Simulation is a valuable and meaningful solution with training and testing functions, and it can say that simulation is a critical link in the autonomous driving world. There are also many different applications or systems of simulation from companies or academies such as SVL and Carla. These simulators flaunt that they have the closest real-world simulation, but their environment objects, such as pedestrians and other vehicles around the agent-vehicle, are already fixed programmed. They can only move along the pre-setting trajectory, or random numbers determine their movements. What is the situation when all environmental objects are also installed by Artificial Intelligence, or their behaviors are like real people or natural reactions of other drivers? This problem is a blind spot for most of the simulation applications, or these applications cannot be easy to solve this problem. The Neurorobotics Platform from the TUM team of Prof. Alois Knoll has the idea about "Engines" and "Transceiver Functions" to solve the multi-agents problem. This report will start with a little research on the Neurorobotics Platform and analyze the potential and possibility of developing a new simulator to achieve the true real-world simulation goal. Then based on the NRP-Core Platform, this initial development aims to construct an initial demo experiment. The consist of this report starts with the basic knowledge of NRP-Core and its installation, then focus on the explanation of the necessary components for a simulation experiment, at last, about the details of constructions for the autonomous driving system, which is integrated object detection and autonomous control.

In this paper, we present a modular methodology that combines state-of-the-art methods in (stochastic) machine learning with traditional methods in rule learning to provide efficient and scalable algorithms for the classification of vast data sets, while remaining explainable. Apart from evaluating our approach on the common large scale data sets MNIST, Fashion-MNIST and IMDB, we present novel results on explainable classifications of dental bills. The latter case study stems from an industrial collaboration with Allianz Private Krankenversicherungs-Aktiengesellschaft which is an insurance company offering diverse services in Germany.

Key Point Analysis(KPA) is a relatively new task in NLP that combines summarization and classification by extracting argumentative key points (KPs) for a topic from a collection of texts and categorizing their closeness to the different arguments. In our work, we focus on the legal domain and develop methods that identify and extract KPs from premises derived from texts of judgments. The first method is an adaptation to an existing state-of-the-art method, and the two others are new methods that we developed from scratch. We present our methods and examples of their outputs, as well a comparison between them. The full evaluation of our results is done in the matching task -- match between the generated KPs to arguments (premises).

The text-to-image model Stable Diffusion has recently become very popular. Only weeks after its open source release, millions are experimenting with image generation. This is due to its ease of use, since all it takes is a brief description of the desired image to "prompt" the generative model. Rarely do the images generated for a new prompt immediately meet the user's expectations. Usually, an iterative refinement of the prompt ("prompt engineering") is necessary for satisfying images. As a new perspective, we recast image prompt engineering as interactive image retrieval - on an "infinite index". Thereby, a prompt corresponds to a query and prompt engineering to query refinement. Selected image-prompt pairs allow direct relevance feedback, as the model can modify an image for the refined prompt. This is a form of one-sided interactive retrieval, where the initiative is on the user side, whereas the server side remains stateless. In light of an extensive literature review, we develop these parallels in detail and apply the findings to a case study of a creative search task on such a model. We note that the uncertainty in searching an infinite index is virtually never-ending. We also discuss future research opportunities related to retrieval models specialized for generative models and interactive generative image retrieval. The application of IR technology, such as query reformulation and relevance feedback, will contribute to improved workflows when using generative models, while the notion of an infinite index raises new challenges in IR research.

We show how the inherent, but often neglected, properties of large-scale LiDAR point clouds can be exploited for effective self-supervised representation learning. To this end, we design a highly data-efficient feature pre-training backbone that significantly reduces the amount of tedious 3D annotations to train state-of-the-art object detectors. In particular, we propose a Masked AutoEncoder (MAELi) that intuitively utilizes the sparsity of the LiDAR point clouds in both, the encoder and the decoder, during reconstruction. This results in more expressive and useful features, directly applicable to downstream perception tasks, such as 3D object detection for autonomous driving. In a novel reconstruction scheme, MAELi distinguishes between free and occluded space and leverages a new masking strategy which targets the LiDAR's inherent spherical projection. To demonstrate the potential of MAELi, we pre-train one of the most widespread 3D backbones, in an end-to-end fashion and show the merit of our fully unsupervised pre-trained features on several 3D object detection architectures. Given only a tiny fraction of labeled frames to fine-tune such detectors, we achieve significant performance improvements. For example, with only $\sim800$ labeled frames, MAELi features improve a SECOND model by +10.09APH/LEVEL 2 on Waymo Vehicles.

Research connecting text and images has recently seen several breakthroughs, with models like CLIP, DALL-E 2, and Stable Diffusion. However, the connection between text and other visual modalities, such as lidar data, has received less attention, prohibited by the lack of text-lidar datasets. In this work, we propose LidarCLIP, a mapping from automotive point clouds to a pre-existing CLIP embedding space. Using image-lidar pairs, we supervise a point cloud encoder with the image CLIP embeddings, effectively relating text and lidar data with the image domain as an intermediary. We show the effectiveness of LidarCLIP by demonstrating that lidar-based retrieval is generally on par with image-based retrieval, but with complementary strengths and weaknesses. By combining image and lidar features, we improve upon both single-modality methods and enable a targeted search for challenging detection scenarios under adverse sensor conditions. We also use LidarCLIP as a tool to investigate fundamental lidar capabilities through natural language. Finally, we leverage our compatibility with CLIP to explore a range of applications, such as point cloud captioning and lidar-to-image generation, without any additional training. We hope LidarCLIP can inspire future work to dive deeper into connections between text and point cloud understanding. Code and trained models available at https://github.com/atonderski/lidarclip.

The quality of consequences in a decision making problem under (severe) uncertainty must often be compared among different targets (goals, objectives) simultaneously. In addition, the evaluations of a consequence's performance under the various targets often differ in their scale of measurement, classically being either purely ordinal or perfectly cardinal. In this paper, we transfer recent developments from abstract decision theory with incomplete preferential and probabilistic information to this multi-target setting and show how -- by exploiting the (potentially) partial cardinal and partial probabilistic information -- more informative orders for comparing decisions can be given than the Pareto order. We discuss some interesting properties of the proposed orders between decision options and show how they can be concretely computed by linear optimization. We conclude the paper by demonstrating our framework in an artificial (but quite real-world) example in the context of comparing algorithms under different performance measures.

Federated learning enables cooperative training among massively distributed clients by sharing their learned local model parameters. However, with increasing model size, deploying federated learning requires a large communication bandwidth, which limits its deployment in wireless networks. To address this bottleneck, we introduce a residual-based federated learning framework (ResFed), where residuals rather than model parameters are transmitted in communication networks for training. In particular, we integrate two pairs of shared predictors for the model prediction in both server-to-client and client-to-server communication. By employing a common prediction rule, both locally and globally updated models are always fully recoverable in clients and the server. We highlight that the residuals only indicate the quasi-update of a model in a single inter-round, and hence contain more dense information and have a lower entropy than the model, comparing to model weights and gradients. Based on this property, we further conduct lossy compression of the residuals by sparsification and quantization and encode them for efficient communication. The experimental evaluation shows that our ResFed needs remarkably less communication costs and achieves better accuracy by leveraging less sensitive residuals, compared to standard federated learning. For instance, to train a 4.08 MB CNN model on CIFAR-10 with 10 clients under non-independent and identically distributed (Non-IID) setting, our approach achieves a compression ratio over 700X in each communication round with minimum impact on the accuracy. To reach an accuracy of 70%, it saves around 99% of the total communication volume from 587.61 Mb to 6.79 Mb in up-streaming and to 4.61 Mb in down-streaming on average for all clients.