ICML Workshop on Machine Learning for Autonomous Vehicles 2017

Although dramatic progress has been made in the field of autonomous driving, there are many major challenges in achieving full-autonomy. For example, how to make perception accurate and robust to accomplish safe autonomous driving? How to reliably track cars, pedestrians, and cyclists? How to learn long term driving strategies (known as driving policies) so that autonomous vehicles can be equipped with adaptive human negotiation skills when merging, overtaking and giving way, etc? How to achieve near-zero fatality?

These complex challenges associated with autonomy in physical world naturally suggest that we take a machine learning approach. Deep learning and computer vision have found many real-world applications such as face tagging. However, perception for autonomous driving has a unique set of requirements such as safety and explainability. Autonomous vehicles need to choose actions, e.g. steering commands which will affect the subsequent inputs (driving scenes) encountered. This setting is well-suited to apply reinforcement learning to determine the best actions to take. Many autonomous driving tasks such as perception and tracking requires large data sets of labeled examples to learn rich and high-performance visual representation. However, the progress is hampered by the sheer expenses of human labelling needed. Naturally we would like to employ unsupervised learning, transfer learning leveraging simulators, and techniques can learn efficiently.
The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners from in the field of autonomous driving to address core challenges with machine learning. These challenges include, but are not limited to
accurate and efficient pedestrian detection, pedestrian intent detection,
machine learning for object tracking,
unsupervised representation learning for autonomous driving,
deep reinforcement learning for learning driving policies,
cross-modal and simulator to real-world transfer learning,
scene classification, real-time perception and prediction of traffic scenes,
uncertainty propagation in deep neural networks,
efficient inference with deep neural networks

The workshop will include invited speakers, panels, presentations of accepted papers and posters. We invite papers in the form of short, long and position papers to address the core challenges mentioned above. We encourage researchers and practitioners on self-driving cars, transportation systems and ride-sharing platforms to participate. Since this is a topic of broad and current interest, we expect at least 200 participants from leading university researchers, auto-companies and ride-sharing companies.