Publications | Empirical Inference - Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems

Biologische Kybernetik, Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany, November 2007, passed with "ausgezeichnet", summa cum laude, published online (phdthesis)

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2007

Jäkel, F. Some Theoretical Aspects of Human Categorization Behavior: Similarity and Generalization Biologische Kybernetik, Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany, November 2007, passed with "ausgezeichnet", summa cum laude, published online (phdthesis)

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Statistical Learning Theory Approaches to Clustering

Jegelka, S.

Biologische Kybernetik, Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany, November 2007 (diplomathesis)

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Jegelka, S. Statistical Learning Theory Approaches to Clustering Biologische Kybernetik, Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany, November 2007 (diplomathesis)

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Error Correcting Codes for the P300 Visual Speller

Biessmann, F.

Biologische Kybernetik, Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany, July 2007 (diplomathesis)

Abstract

The aim of brain-computer interface (BCI) research is to establish a communication system based on intentional modulation of brain activity. This is accomplished by classifying patterns of brain ac- tivity, volitionally induced by the user. The BCI presented in this study is based on a classical paradigm as proposed by (Farwell and Donchin, 1988), the P300 visual speller. Recording electroencephalo- grams (EEG) from the scalp while presenting letters successively to the user, the speller can infer from the brain signal which letter the user was focussing on. Since EEG recordings are noisy, usually many repetitions are needed to detect the correct letter. The focus of this study was to improve the accuracy of the visual speller applying some basic principles from information theory: Stimulus sequences of the speller have been modi&amp;amp;#64257;ed into error-correcting codes. Additionally a language model was incorporated into the probabilistic letter de- coder. Classi&amp;amp;#64257;cation of single EEG epochs was less accurate using error correcting codes. However, the novel code could compensate for that such that overall, letter accuracies were as high as or even higher than for classical stimulus codes. In particular at high noise levels, error-correcting decoding achieved higher letter accuracies.

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Biessmann, F. Error Correcting Codes for the P300 Visual Speller Biologische Kybernetik, Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany, July 2007 (diplomathesis)

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Data-driven goodness-of-fit tests

Langovoy, MA.

Biologische Kybernetik, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany, July 2007 (phdthesis)

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Langovoy, MA. Data-driven goodness-of-fit tests Biologische Kybernetik, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany, July 2007 (phdthesis)

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Nonparametric Bayesian Discrete Latent Variable Models for Unsupervised Learning

Görür, D.

Biologische Kybernetik, Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany, April 2007, published online (phdthesis)

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Görür, D. Nonparametric Bayesian Discrete Latent Variable Models for Unsupervised Learning Biologische Kybernetik, Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany, April 2007, published online (phdthesis)

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Applications of Kernel Machines to Structured Data

Eichhorn, J.

Biologische Kybernetik, Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany, March 2007, passed with "sehr gut", published online (phdthesis)

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Eichhorn, J. Applications of Kernel Machines to Structured Data Biologische Kybernetik, Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, Germany, March 2007, passed with "sehr gut", published online (phdthesis)

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A priori Knowledge from Non-Examples

Sinz, FH.

Biologische Kybernetik, Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany, March 2007 (diplomathesis)

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Sinz, FH. A priori Knowledge from Non-Examples Biologische Kybernetik, Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany, March 2007 (diplomathesis)

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Machine Learning for Mass Production and Industrial Engineering

Pfingsten, T.

Biologische Kybernetik, Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany, February 2007 (phdthesis)

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Pfingsten, T. Machine Learning for Mass Production and Industrial Engineering Biologische Kybernetik, Eberhard-Karls-Universität Tübingen, Tübingen, Germany, February 2007 (phdthesis)

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Development of a Brain-Computer Interface Approach Based on Covert Attention to Tactile Stimuli

Raths, C.

University of Tübingen, Germany, University of Tübingen, Germany, January 2007 (diplomathesis)

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Raths, C. Development of a Brain-Computer Interface Approach Based on Covert Attention to Tactile Stimuli University of Tübingen, Germany, University of Tübingen, Germany, January 2007 (diplomathesis)

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A Machine Learning Approach for Estimating the Attenuation Map for a Combined PET/MR Scanner

Hofmann, M.

Biologische Kybernetik, Max-Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany, 2007 (diplomathesis)

[BibTex]

Hofmann, M. A Machine Learning Approach for Estimating the Attenuation Map for a Combined PET/MR Scanner Biologische Kybernetik, Max-Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany, 2007 (diplomathesis)

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Machine Learning of Motor Skills for Robotics

Peters, J.

University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA, 2007, clmc (phdthesis)

Abstract

Autonomous robots that can assist humans in situations of daily life have been a long standing vision of robotics, artificial intelligence, and cognitive sciences. A first step towards this goal is to create robots that can accomplish a multitude of different tasks, triggered by environmental context or higher level instruction. Early approaches to this goal during the heydays of artificial intelligence research in the late 1980s, however, made it clear that an approach purely based on reasoning and human insights would not be able to model all the perceptuomotor tasks that a robot should fulfill. Instead, new hope was put in the growing wake of machine learning that promised fully adaptive control algorithms which learn both by observation and trial-and-error. However, to date, learning techniques have yet to fulfill this promise as only few methods manage to scale into the high-dimensional domains of manipulator robotics, or even the new upcoming trend of humanoid robotics, and usually scaling was only achieved in precisely pre-structured domains. In this thesis, we investigate the ingredients for a general approach to motor skill learning in order to get one step closer towards human-like performance. For doing so, we study two major components for such an approach, i.e., firstly, a theoretically well-founded general approach to representing the required control structures for task representation and execution and, secondly, appropriate learning algorithms which can be applied in this setting. As a theoretical foundation, we first study a general framework to generate control laws for real robots with a particular focus on skills represented as dynamical systems in differential constraint form. We present a point-wise optimal control framework resulting from a generalization of Gauss' principle and show how various well-known robot control laws can be derived by modifying the metric of the employed cost function. The framework has been successfully applied to task space tracking control for holonomic systems for several different metrics on the anthropomorphic SARCOS Master Arm. In order to overcome the limiting requirement of accurate robot models, we first employ learning methods to find learning controllers for task space control. However, when learning to execute a redundant control problem, we face the general problem of the non-convexity of the solution space which can force the robot to steer into physically impossible configurations if supervised learning methods are employed without further consideration. This problem can be resolved using two major insights, i.e., the learning problem can be treated as locally convex and the cost function of the analytical framework can be used to ensure global consistency. Thus, we derive an immediate reinforcement learning algorithm from the expectation-maximization point of view which leads to a reward-weighted regression technique. This method can be used both for operational space control as well as general immediate reward reinforcement learning problems. We demonstrate the feasibility of the resulting framework on the problem of redundant end-effector tracking for both a simulated 3 degrees of freedom robot arm as well as for a simulated anthropomorphic SARCOS Master Arm. While learning to execute tasks in task space is an essential component to a general framework to motor skill learning, learning the actual task is of even higher importance, particularly as this issue is more frequently beyond the abilities of analytical approaches than execution. We focus on the learning of elemental tasks which can serve as the "building blocks of movement generation", called motor primitives. Motor primitives are parameterized task representations based on splines or nonlinear differential equations with desired attractor properties. While imitation learning of parameterized motor primitives is a relatively well-understood problem, the self-improvement by interaction of the system with the environment remains a challenging problem, tackled in the fourth chapter of this thesis. For pursuing this goal, we highlight the difficulties with current reinforcement learning methods, and outline both established and novel algorithms for the gradient-based improvement of parameterized policies. We compare these algorithms in the context of motor primitive learning, and show that our most modern algorithm, the Episodic Natural Actor-Critic outperforms previous algorithms by at least an order of magnitude. We demonstrate the efficiency of this reinforcement learning method in the application of learning to hit a baseball with an anthropomorphic robot arm. In conclusion, in this thesis, we have contributed a general framework for analytically computing robot control laws which can be used for deriving various previous control approaches and serves as foundation as well as inspiration for our learning algorithms. We have introduced two classes of novel reinforcement learning methods, i.e., the Natural Actor-Critic and the Reward-Weighted Regression algorithm. These algorithms have been used in order to replace the analytical components of the theoretical framework by learned representations. Evaluations have been performed on both simulated and real robot arms.

[BibTex]

Peters, J. Machine Learning of Motor Skills for Robotics University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA, 2007, clmc (phdthesis)

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