Sim-to-Real Causal Transfer: A Metric Learning Approach to Causally-Aware Interaction Representations

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Rahimi, Ahmad, Luan, Po-Chien, Liu, Yuejiang, Rajič, Frano, Alahi, Alexandre
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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_version_ 1866908402400100352
author Rahimi, Ahmad
Luan, Po-Chien
Liu, Yuejiang
Rajič, Frano
Alahi, Alexandre
author_facet Rahimi, Ahmad
Luan, Po-Chien
Liu, Yuejiang
Rajič, Frano
Alahi, Alexandre
contents Modeling spatial-temporal interactions among neighboring agents is at the heart of multi-agent problems such as motion forecasting and crowd navigation. Despite notable progress, it remains unclear to which extent modern representations can capture the causal relationships behind agent interactions. In this work, we take an in-depth look at the causal awareness of these representations, from computational formalism to real-world practice. First, we cast doubt on the notion of non-causal robustness studied in the recent CausalAgents benchmark. We show that recent representations are already partially resilient to perturbations of non-causal agents, and yet modeling indirect causal effects involving mediator agents remains challenging. To address this challenge, we introduce a metric learning approach that regularizes latent representations with causal annotations. Our controlled experiments show that this approach not only leads to higher degrees of causal awareness but also yields stronger out-of-distribution robustness. To further operationalize it in practice, we propose a sim-to-real causal transfer method via cross-domain multi-task learning. Experiments on pedestrian datasets show that our method can substantially boost generalization, even in the absence of real-world causal annotations. We hope our work provides a new perspective on the challenges and pathways towards causally-aware representations of multi-agent interactions. Our code is available at https://github.com/vita-epfl/CausalSim2Real.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2312_04540
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Sim-to-Real Causal Transfer: A Metric Learning Approach to Causally-Aware Interaction Representations
Rahimi, Ahmad
Luan, Po-Chien
Liu, Yuejiang
Rajič, Frano
Alahi, Alexandre
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Multiagent Systems
Robotics
Modeling spatial-temporal interactions among neighboring agents is at the heart of multi-agent problems such as motion forecasting and crowd navigation. Despite notable progress, it remains unclear to which extent modern representations can capture the causal relationships behind agent interactions. In this work, we take an in-depth look at the causal awareness of these representations, from computational formalism to real-world practice. First, we cast doubt on the notion of non-causal robustness studied in the recent CausalAgents benchmark. We show that recent representations are already partially resilient to perturbations of non-causal agents, and yet modeling indirect causal effects involving mediator agents remains challenging. To address this challenge, we introduce a metric learning approach that regularizes latent representations with causal annotations. Our controlled experiments show that this approach not only leads to higher degrees of causal awareness but also yields stronger out-of-distribution robustness. To further operationalize it in practice, we propose a sim-to-real causal transfer method via cross-domain multi-task learning. Experiments on pedestrian datasets show that our method can substantially boost generalization, even in the absence of real-world causal annotations. We hope our work provides a new perspective on the challenges and pathways towards causally-aware representations of multi-agent interactions. Our code is available at https://github.com/vita-epfl/CausalSim2Real.
title Sim-to-Real Causal Transfer: A Metric Learning Approach to Causally-Aware Interaction Representations
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Multiagent Systems
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.04540