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Main Authors: Howard, Rhys, Kunze, Lars
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.01384
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author Howard, Rhys
Kunze, Lars
author_facet Howard, Rhys
Kunze, Lars
contents In this work we aim to bridge the divide between autonomous vehicles and causal reasoning. Autonomous vehicles have come to increasingly interact with human drivers, and in many cases may pose risks to the physical or mental well-being of those they interact with. Meanwhile causal models, despite their inherent transparency and ability to offer contrastive explanations, have found limited usage within such systems. As such, we first identify the challenges that have limited the integration of structural causal models within autonomous vehicles. We then introduce a number of theoretical extensions to the structural causal model formalism in order to tackle these challenges. This augments these models to possess greater levels of modularisation and encapsulation, as well presenting temporal causal model representation with constant space complexity. We also prove through the extensions we have introduced that dynamically mutable sets (e.g. varying numbers of autonomous vehicles across time) can be used within a structural causal model while maintaining a relaxed form of causal stationarity. Finally we discuss the application of the extensions in the context of the autonomous vehicle and service robotics domain along with potential directions for future work.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_01384
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Extending Structural Causal Models for Autonomous Vehicles to Simplify Temporal System Construction & Enable Dynamic Interactions Between Agents
Howard, Rhys
Kunze, Lars
Artificial Intelligence
Robotics
Software Engineering
D.1.5; D.2.11; G.2.2; I.2.9; J.2
In this work we aim to bridge the divide between autonomous vehicles and causal reasoning. Autonomous vehicles have come to increasingly interact with human drivers, and in many cases may pose risks to the physical or mental well-being of those they interact with. Meanwhile causal models, despite their inherent transparency and ability to offer contrastive explanations, have found limited usage within such systems. As such, we first identify the challenges that have limited the integration of structural causal models within autonomous vehicles. We then introduce a number of theoretical extensions to the structural causal model formalism in order to tackle these challenges. This augments these models to possess greater levels of modularisation and encapsulation, as well presenting temporal causal model representation with constant space complexity. We also prove through the extensions we have introduced that dynamically mutable sets (e.g. varying numbers of autonomous vehicles across time) can be used within a structural causal model while maintaining a relaxed form of causal stationarity. Finally we discuss the application of the extensions in the context of the autonomous vehicle and service robotics domain along with potential directions for future work.
title Extending Structural Causal Models for Autonomous Vehicles to Simplify Temporal System Construction & Enable Dynamic Interactions Between Agents
topic Artificial Intelligence
Robotics
Software Engineering
D.1.5; D.2.11; G.2.2; I.2.9; J.2
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.01384