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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Harrison, Nicholas, Wallace, Nathan, Sukkarieh, Salah
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.18064
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author Harrison, Nicholas
Wallace, Nathan
Sukkarieh, Salah
author_facet Harrison, Nicholas
Wallace, Nathan
Sukkarieh, Salah
contents The efficient collection of samples is an important factor in outdoor information gathering applications on account of high sampling costs such as time, energy, and potential destruction to the environment. Utilization of available a-priori data can be a powerful tool for increasing efficiency. However, the relationships of this data with the quantity of interest are often not known ahead of time, limiting the ability to leverage this knowledge for improved planning efficiency. To this end, this work combines transfer learning and active learning through a Multi-Task Gaussian Process and an information-based objective function. Through this combination it can explore the space of hypothetical inter-quantity relationships and evaluate these hypotheses in real-time, allowing this new knowledge to be immediately exploited for future plans. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated against synthetic data and is shown to evaluate multiple hypotheses correctly. Its effectiveness is also demonstrated on real datasets. The technique is able to identify and leverage hypotheses which show a medium or strong correlation to reduce prediction error by a factor of 1.4--3.4 within the first 7 samples, and poor hypotheses are quickly identified and rejected eventually having no adverse effect.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_18064
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Automated Testing of Spatially-Dependent Environmental Hypotheses through Active Transfer Learning
Harrison, Nicholas
Wallace, Nathan
Sukkarieh, Salah
Robotics
Machine Learning
The efficient collection of samples is an important factor in outdoor information gathering applications on account of high sampling costs such as time, energy, and potential destruction to the environment. Utilization of available a-priori data can be a powerful tool for increasing efficiency. However, the relationships of this data with the quantity of interest are often not known ahead of time, limiting the ability to leverage this knowledge for improved planning efficiency. To this end, this work combines transfer learning and active learning through a Multi-Task Gaussian Process and an information-based objective function. Through this combination it can explore the space of hypothetical inter-quantity relationships and evaluate these hypotheses in real-time, allowing this new knowledge to be immediately exploited for future plans. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated against synthetic data and is shown to evaluate multiple hypotheses correctly. Its effectiveness is also demonstrated on real datasets. The technique is able to identify and leverage hypotheses which show a medium or strong correlation to reduce prediction error by a factor of 1.4--3.4 within the first 7 samples, and poor hypotheses are quickly identified and rejected eventually having no adverse effect.
title Automated Testing of Spatially-Dependent Environmental Hypotheses through Active Transfer Learning
topic Robotics
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.18064