PhD Defense: LEARNING-BASED AUTONOMOUS DRIVING WITH ENHANCED DATA EFFICIENCY AND POLICY TRAINING
Yu Shen
Monday, August 14, 2023, 2:00-4:00 pm 
Abstract
Autonomous vehicles are capable of sensing their environment and moving safely with little to no human input. They will impact our means of transportation and ways of life in years to come. Increasingly autonomous driving is adopted in real-world applications, e.g. autonomous truck for cargo transportation, self-driving taxi in an urban area, etc. With the rapid advances in hardware and software design, learning-based autonomous driving is becoming a viable and popular solution. As commonly known, data is central to all learning-based methods. We aim to improve performance by utilizing self-augmented data (data augmentation and adversarial learning), other modalities' data (multi modality learning and auxiliary modality learning), and other domains' data (transfer learning and domain adaptation). In addition, while input data is the key component of autonomous driving in the front-end, policy is also an important component in the back-end, which actually controls the vehicle to navigate safely. We thus address the issue on policy learning with enhanced inverse reinforcement learning.
Examining Committee
Bio
Yu Shen, a Ph.D. student majoring in Computer Science at the University of Maryland. His research interests are AI technologies like computer vision, 3D perception, multi-modality learning, robust learning, reinforcement learning, etc., in real-world applications like autonomous driving, AR/VR/Metaverse, virtual try-on, etc. Previously, he worked for Tencent, DJI, and Hiscene, and interned at Microsoft, Bytedance, Baidu, Amazon, Adobe. His working experiences mainly focus on vision-based/lidar-based 3D perception, like SLAM, VIO, 3D object/2D image recognition/tracking with 3D pose estimation, etc.
This talk is organized by Tom Hurst