We introduce a novel framework, Online Relational Inference (ORI), designed to efficiently identify hidden interaction graphs in evolving multi-agent interacting systems using streaming data. Unlike traditional offline methods that rely on a fixed training set, ORI employs online backpropagation, updating the model with each new data point, thereby allowing it to adapt to changing environments in real-time. A key innovation is the use of an adjacency matrix as a trainable parameter, optimized through a new adaptive learning rate technique called AdaRelation, which adjusts based on the historical sensitivity of the decoder to changes in the interaction graph. Additionally, a data augmentation method named Trajectory Mirror (TM) is introduced to improve generalization by exposing the model to varied trajectory patterns. Experimental results on both synthetic datasets and real-world data (CMU MoCap for human motion) demonstrate that ORI significantly improves the accuracy and adaptability of relational inference in dynamic settings compared to existing methods. This approach is model-agnostic, enabling seamless integration with various neural relational inference (NRI) architectures, and offers a robust solution for real-time applications in complex, evolving systems.

We present the MagNet, a neural network-based multi-agent interaction model to discover the governing dynamics and predict evolution of a complex multi-agent system from observations. We formulate a multi-agent system as a coupled non-linear network with a generic ordinary differential equation (ODE) based state evolution, and develop a neural network-based realization of its time-discretized model. MagNet is trained to discover the core dynamics of a multi-agent system from observations, and tuned on-line to learn agent-specific parameters of the dynamics to ensure accurate prediction even when physical or relational attributes of agents, or number of agents change. We evaluate MagNet on a point-mass system in two-dimensional space, Kuramoto phase synchronization dynamics and predator-swarm interaction dynamics demonstrating orders of magnitude improvement in prediction accuracy over traditional deep learning models.

We present a Deep Neural Network with Spike Assisted Feature Extraction (SAFE-DNN) to improve robustness of classification under stochastic perturbation of inputs. The proposed network augments a DNN with unsupervised learning of low-level features using spiking neural network (SNN) with spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP). The complete network learns to ignore local perturbation while performing global feature detection and classification. The experimental results on CIFAR-10 and ImageNet subset demonstrate improved noise robustness for multiple DNN architectures without sacrificing accuracy on clean images.

The cameras today are designed to capture signals with highest possible accuracy to most faithfully represent what it sees. However, many mission-critical autonomous applications ranging from traffic monitoring to disaster recovery to defense requires quality of information, where useful information depends on the tasks and is defined using complex features, rather than only changes in captured signal. Such applications require cameras that capture useful information from a scene with highest quality while meeting system constraints such as power, performance, and bandwidth. This paper will discuss the feasibility of a camera that learns how to capture task-dependent information with highest quality, paving the pathway to design a camera with brain. 3D integration of digital pixel sensors with massively parallel computing platform for machine learning creates a hardware architecture for such a camera. The paper will discuss embedded machine learning algorithms that can run on such platform to enhance quality of useful information by real-time control of the sensor parameters. We conclude by identifying critical challenges as well as opportunities for hardware and algorithmic innovations to enable machine learning in the feedback loop of a 3D image sensor based camera.

Deep learning on an edge device requires energy efficient operation due to ever diminishing power budget. Intentional low quality data during the data acquisition for longer battery life, and natural noise from the low cost sensor degrade the quality of target output which hinders adoption of deep learning on an edge device. To overcome these problems, we propose simple yet efficient mixture of pre-processing experts (MoPE) model to handle various image distortions including low resolution and noisy images. We also propose to use adversarially trained auto encoder as a pre-processing expert for the noisy images. We evaluate our proposed method for various machine learning tasks including object detection on MS-COCO 2014 dataset, multiple object tracking problem on MOT-Challenge dataset, and human activity classification on UCF 101 dataset. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves better detection, tracking and activity classification accuracies under noise without sacrificing accuracies for the clean images. The overheads of our proposed MoPE are 0.67% and 0.17% in terms of memory and computation compared to the baseline object detection network.

Round-the-clock surveillance requires robust object detection and tracking independent of lighting conditions. Fusing information from visual-infrared object detection network pair at feature level or decision level shows promising accuracy. However, such fused object detection network is not suitable for edge devices with limited processing power and memory. In this paper, we propose a technique to control spatial modality using feedback from the object detection network and create a mixed-modality image by eliminating the redundancy between visual and infrared information. Mixed-modality image enables object tracking with a single deep neural network as opposed to the decision- level fusion with two separate networks for visual image and infrared image. Proposed approach achieves at least 8% better object tracking accuracy than decision-level fusion while operating at 2X frame-rate and consuming 50% less energy.