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Controller design for continuous dynamical systems is a core algorithmic problem in the design of cyber-physical systems (CPS). When the CPS application is safety critical, additionally we require the controller to have strong correctness guarantees. One approach for this design problem is to use simpler discrete abstraction of the original continuous system, on which known reactive synthesis methods can be used to design the controller. This approach is known as the abstraction-based controller design (ABCD) paradigm.
In this thesis, we build ABCD procedures which are faster and more modular compared to the state-of-the-art, and can handle problems which were beyond the scope of the existing techniques.
Usually, existing ABCD approaches use state space discretization for computing the abstractions, for which the procedures do not scale well for larger systems. Our first contribution is a multi-layered ABCD algorithm, where we combine coarse abstractions and lazily computed fine abstractions to improve scalability. So far, we only address reach-avoid and safety specifications, for which our prototype tool (called Mascot) showed up to an order of magnitude speedup on standard benchmark examples.
Second, we consider the problem of modular design of sound local controllers for a network of local discrete abstractions communicating via discrete/boolean variables and having local specifications. We propose a sound algorithm, where the systems negotiate a pair of local assume-guarantee contracts, in order to synchronize on a set of non-conflicting and correct behaviors. As a by-product, we also obtain a set of local controllers for the systems which ensure simultaneous satisfaction of the local specifications. We show the effectiveness of the our algorithm using a prototype tool (called Agnes) on a set of discrete benchmark examples.
Our third contribution is a novel ABCD algorithm for a more expressive model of nonlinear dynamical systems with stochastic disturbances and ω-regular specifications. This part has two subparts, which are of significant merits on their own rights. First, we present an abstraction algorithm for nonlinear stochastic systems using 2.5-player games (turn-based stochastic graph games). We show that an almost sure winning strategy in this abstract 2.5-player game gives us a sound controller for the original system for satisfying the specification with probability one. Second, we present symbolic algorithms for a seemingly different class of 2-player games with certain environmental fairness assumptions, which can also be used to efficiently compute winning strategies in the aforementioned abstract 2.5-player game. Using our prototype tool (Mascot-SDS), we show that our algorithm significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art implementation on standard benchmark examples from the literature.
Comparative Uncertainty Visualization for High-Level Analysis of Scalar- and Vector-Valued Ensembles
(2022)
With this thesis, I contribute to the research field of uncertainty visualization, considering parameter dependencies in multi valued fields and the uncertainty of automated data analysis. Like uncertainty visualization in general, both of these fields are becoming more and more important due to increasing computational power, growing importance and availability of complex models and collected data, and progress in artificial intelligence. I contribute in the following application areas:
Uncertain Topology of Scalar Field Ensembles.
The generalization of topology-based visualizations to multi valued data involves many challenges. An example is the comparative visualization of multiple contour trees, complicated by the random nature of prevalent contour tree layout algorithms. I present a novel approach for the comparative visualization of contour trees - the Fuzzy Contour Tree.
Uncertain Topological Features in Time-Dependent Scalar Fields.
Tracking features in time-dependent scalar fields is an active field of research, where most approaches rely on the comparison of consecutive time steps. I created a more holistic visualization for time-varying scalar field topology by adapting Fuzzy Contour Trees to the time-dependent setting.
Uncertain Trajectories in Vector Field Ensembles.
Visitation maps are an intuitive and well-known visualization of uncertain trajectories in vector field ensembles. For large ensembles, visitation maps are not applicable, or only with extensive time requirements. I developed Visitation Graphs, a new representation and data reduction method for vector field ensembles that can be calculated in situ and is an optimal basis for the efficient generation of visitation maps. This is accomplished by bringing forward calculation times to the pre-processing.
Visually Supported Anomaly Detection in Cyber Security.
Numerous cyber attacks and the increasing complexity of networks and their protection necessitate the application of automated data analysis in cyber security. Due to uncertainty in automated anomaly detection, the results need to be communicated to analysts to ensure appropriate reactions. I introduce a visualization system combining device readings and anomaly detection results: the Security in Process System. To further support analysts I developed an application agnostic framework that supports the integration of knowledge assistance and applied it to the Security in Process System. I present this Knowledge Rocks Framework, its application and the results of evaluations for both, the original and the knowledge assisted Security in Process System. For all presented systems, I provide implementation details, illustrations and applications.
Robotic systems are entering the stage. Enabled by advances in both hardware components and software techniques, robots are increasingly able to operate outside of factories, assist humans, and work alongside them. The limiting factor of robots’ expansion remains the programming of robotic systems. Due to the many diverse skills necessary to build a multi-robot system, only the biggest organizations are able to innovate in the space of services provided by robots.
To make developing new robotic services easier, in this dissertation I propose a program- ming model in which users (programmers) give a declarative specification of what needs to be accomplished, and then a backend system makes sure that the specification is safely and reliably executed. I present Antlab, one such backend system. Antlab accepts Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) specifications from multiple users and executes them using a set of robots of different capabilities.
Building on the experience acquired implementing Antlab, I identify problems arising from the proposed programming model. These problems fall into two broad categories, specification and planning.
In the category of specification problems, I solve the problem of inferring an LTL formula from sets of positive and negative example traces, as well as from a set of positive examples only. Building on top of these solutions, I develop a method to help users transfer their intent into a formal specification. The approach taken in this dissertation is combining the intent signals from a single demonstration and a natural language description given by a user. A set of candidate specifications is inferred by encoding the problem as a satisfiability problem for propositional logic. This set is narrowed down to a single specification through interaction with the user; the user approves or declines generated simulations of the robot’s behavior in different situations.
In the category of planning problems, I first solve the problem of planning for robots that are currently executing their tasks. In such a situation, it is unclear what to take as the initial state for planning. I solve the problem by considering multiple, speculative initial states. The paths from those states are explored based on a quality function that repeatedly estimates the planning time. The second problem is a problem of reinforcement learning when the reward function is non-Markovian. The proposed solution consists of iteratively learning an automaton representing the reward function and using it to guide the exploration.
Data-driven and Sparse-to-Dense Concepts in Scene Flow Estimation for Automotive Applications
(2022)
Highly assisted driving and autonomous vehicles require a detailed and accurate perception of the environment. This includes the perception of the 3D geometry of the scene and the 3D motion of other road users. The estimation of both based on images is known as the scene flow problem in computer vision. This thesis deals with a solution to the scene flow problem that is suitable for application in autonomous vehicles. This application imposes strict requirements on accuracy, robustness, and speed. Previous work was lagging behind in at least one of these metrics. To work towards the fulfillment of those requirements, the sparse-to-dense concept for scene flow estimation is introduced in this thesis. The idea can be summarized as follows: First, scene flow is estimated for some points of the scene for which this can be done comparatively easily and reliably. Then, an interpolation is performed to obtain a dense estimate for the entire scene. Because of the separation into two steps, each part can be optimized individually. In a series of experiments, it is shown that the proposed methods achieve competitive results and are preferable to previous techniques in some aspects. As a second contribution, individual components in the sparse-to-dense pipeline are replaced by deep learning modules. These are a highly localized and highly accurate feature descriptor to represent pixels for dense matching, and a network for robust and generic sparse-to-dense interpolation. Compared to end-to-end architectures, the advantage of deep modules is that they can be trained more effciently with data from different domains. The recombination approach applies a similar concept as the sparse-to-dense approach by solving and combining less diffcult, auxiliary sub-problems. 3D geometry and 2D motion are estimated separately, the individual results are combined, and then also interpolated into a dense scene flow. As a final contribution, the thesis proposes a set of monolithic end-to-end networks for scene flow estimation.
Today’s digital world would be unthinkable without complex data sets. Whether in private, business or industrial environments, complex data provide the basis for important and critical decisions and determine many processes, some of which are automated. This is often associated with Big Data. However, often only one aspect of the usual Big Data definitions is sufficient and a human observer can no longer capture the data completely and correctly. In this thesis, different approaches are presented in order to master selected challenges in a more effective, efficient and userfriendly way. The approaches range from easier pre-processing of data sets for later analysis and the identification of design guidelines of such assistants, new visualization techniques for presenting uncertainty, extensions of existing visualizations for categorical data, concepts for time-saving selection methods for subsets of data points and faster navigation and zoom interaction–especially in the web-based area with enormous amounts of data–to new and innovative orientation-based interaction metaphors for mobile devices as well as stationary working environments. Evaluations and appropriate use case of the individual approaches show the usability also in comparison with state-of-the-art techniques.
Industrial manufacturing companies have different IT control functions that can be represented with a so-called hierarchical automation pyramid. While these conventional software systems especially support the mass production with consistent demand, the future project “Industry 4.0” focuses on customer-oriented and adaptable production processes. In order to move from conventional production systems to a factory of the future, the control levels must be redistributed. With the help of cyber-physical production systems, an interoperable architecture must be, implemented which removes the hierarchical connection of the former control levels. The accompanied digitalisation of industrial companies makes the transition to modular production possible. At the same time, the requirements for production planning and control are increasing, which can be solved with approaches such as multi-agent systems (MASs). These software solutions are autonomous and intelligent objects with a distinct collaborative ability. There are different modelling methods, communication and interaction structures, as well as different development frameworks for these new systems. Since multi-agent systems have not yet been established as an industrial standard due to their high complexity, they are usually only tested in simulations. In this bachelor thesis, a detailed literature review on the topic of MASs in the field of production planning and control is presented. In addition, selected multi-agent approaches are evaluated and compared using specific classification criteria. In addition, the applicability of using these systems in digital and modular production is assessed.
Sequence learning describes the process of understanding the spatio-temporal
relations in a sequence in order to classify it, label its elements or generate
new sequences. Due to the prevalence of structured sequences in nature
and everyday life, it has many practical applications including any language
related processing task. One particular such task that has seen recent success
using sequence learning techniques is the optical recognition of characters
(OCR).
State-of-the-art sequence learning solutions for OCR achieve high performance
through supervised training, which requires large amounts of transcribed
training data. On the other hand, few solutions have been proposed on how
to apply sequence learning in the absence of such data, which is especially
common for hard to transcribe historical documents. Rather than solving
the unsupervised training problem, research has focused on creating efficient
methods for collecting training data through smart annotation tools or generating
synthetic training data. These solutions come with various limitations
and do not solve all of the related problems.
In this work, first the use of erroneous transcriptions for supervised sequence
learning is introduced and it is described how this concept can be applied in
unsupervised training scenarios by collecting or generating such transcriptions.
The proposed OCR pipeline reduces the need of domain specific expertise
to apply OCR, with the goal of making it more accessible. Furthermore, an
approach for evaluating sequence learning OCR models in the absence of
reference transcriptions is presented and its different properties compared
to the standard method are discussed. In a second approach, unsupervised
OCR is treated as an alignment problem between the latent features of the
different language modalities. The outlined solution is to extract language
properties from both the text and image domain through adversarial training
and learn to align them by adding a cycle consistency constraint. The proposed
approach has some strict limitations on the input data, but the results
encourage future research into more widespread applications.
Recommender systems recommend items (e.g., movies, products, books) to users. In this thesis, we proposed two comprehensive and cluster-induced recommendation-based methods: Orthogonal Inductive Matrix Completion (OMIC) and Burst-induced Multi-armed Bandit (BMAB). Given the presence of side information, the first method is categorized as context-aware. OMIC is the first matrix completion method to approach the problem of incorporating biases, side information terms and a pure low-rank term into a single flexible framework with a well-principled optimization procedure. The second method, BMAB, is context-free. That is, it does not require any side data about users or items. Unlike previous context-free multi-armed bandit approaches, our method considers the temporal dynamics of human communication on the web and treats the problem in a continuous time setting. We built our models' assumptions under solid theoretical foundations. For OMIC, we provided theoretical guarantees in the form of generalization bounds by considering the distribution-free case: no assumptions about the sampling distribution are made. Additionally, we conducted a theoretical analysis of community side information when the sampling distribution is known and an adjusted nuclear norm regularization is applied. We showed that our method requires just a few entries to accurately recover the ratings matrix if the structure of the ground truth closely matches the cluster side information. For BMAB, we provided regret guarantees under mild conditions that demonstrate how the system's stability affects the expected reward. Furthermore, we conducted extensive experiments to validate our proposed methodologies. In a controlled environment, we implemented synthetic data generation techniques capable of replicating the domains for which OMIC and BMAB were designed. As a result, we were able to analyze our algorithms' performance across a broad spectrum of ground truth regimes. Finally, we replicated a real-world scenario by utilizing well-established recommender datasets. After comparing our approaches to several baselines, we observe that they achieved state-of-the-art results in terms of accuracy. Apart from being highly accurate, these methods improve interpretability by describing and quantifying features of the datasets they characterize.
In the past, information and knowledge dissemination was relegated to the
brick-and-mortar classrooms, newspapers, radio, and television. As these
processes were simple and centralized, the models behind them were well
understood and so were the empirical methods for optimizing them. In today’s
world, the internet and social media has become a powerful tool for information
and knowledge dissemination: Wikipedia gets more than 1 million edits per day,
Stack Overflow has more than 17 million questions, 25% of US population visits
Yahoo! News for articles and discussions, Twitter has more than 60 million
active monthly users, and Duolingo has 25 million users learning languages
online. These developments have introduced a paradigm shift in the process of
dissemination. Not only has the nature of the task moved from being centralized
to decentralized, but the developments have also blurred the boundary between
the creator and the consumer of the content, i.e., information and knowledge.
These changes have made it necessary to develop new models, which are better
suited to understanding and analysing the dissemination, and to develop new
methods to optimize them.
At a broad level, we can view the participation of users in the process of
dissemination as falling in one of two settings: collaborative or competitive.
In the collaborative setting, the participants work together in crafting
knowledge online, e.g., by asking questions and contributing answers, or by
discussing news or opinion pieces. In contrast, as competitors, they vie for
the attention of their followers on social media. This thesis investigates both
these settings.
The first part of the thesis focuses on the understanding and analysis of
content being created online collaboratively. To this end, I propose models for
understanding the complexity of the content of collaborative online discussions
by looking exclusively at the signals of agreement and disagreement expressed
by the crowd. This leads to a formal notion of complexity of opinions and
online discussions. Next, I turn my attention to the participants of the crowd,
i.e., the creators and consumers themselves, and propose an intuitive model for
both, the evolution of their expertise and the value of the content they
collaboratively contribute and learn from on online Q&A based forums. The
second part of the thesis explores the competitive setting. It provides methods
to help the creators gain more attention from their followers on social media.
In particular, I consider the problem of controlling the timing of the posts of
users with the aim of maximizing the attention that their posts receive under
the idealized setting of full-knowledge of timing of posts of others. To solve
it, I develop a general reinforcement learning based method which is shown to
have good performance on the when-to-post problem and which can be employed in
many other settings as well, e.g., determining the reviewing times for spaced
repetition which lead to optimal learning. The last part of the thesis looks at
methods for relaxing the idealized assumption of full knowledge. This basic
question of determining the visibility of one’s posts on the followers’ feeds
becomes difficult to answer on the internet when constantly observing the feeds
of all the followers becomes unscalable. I explore the links of this problem to
the well-studied problem of web-crawling to update a search engine’s index and
provide algorithms with performance guarantees for feed observation policies
which minimize the error in the estimate of visibility of one’s posts.
Data is the new gold and serves as a key to answer the five W’s (Who, What, Where, When, Why) and How’s of any business. Companies are now mining data more than ever and one of the most important aspects while analyzing this data is to detect anomalous patterns to identify critical patterns and points. To tackle the vital aspects of timeseries analysis, this thesis presents a novel hybrid framework that stands on three pillars: Anomaly Detection, Uncertainty Estimation,
and Interpretability and Explainability.
The first pillar is comprised of contributions in the area of time-series anomaly detection. Deep Anomaly Detection for Time-series (DeepAnT), a novel deep learning-based anomaly detection method, lies at the foundation of the proposed hybrid framework and addresses the inadequacy of traditional anomaly detection methods. To the best of the author’s knowledge, Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) was used for the first time in Deep Anomaly Detection for Time-series (DeepAnT) to robustly detect multiple types of anomalies in the tricky
and continuously changing time-series data. To further improve the anomaly detection performance, a fusion-based method, Fusion of
Statistical and Deep Learning for Anomaly Detection (FuseAD) is proposed. This method aims to combine the strengths of existing wellfounded
statistical methods and powerful data-driven methods.
In the second pillar of this framework, a hybrid approach that combines the high accuracy of the deterministic models with the posterior distribution approximation of Bayesian neural networks is proposed.
In the third pillar of the proposed framework, mechanisms to enable both HOW and WHY parts are presented.