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Nvidia on new self-driving system: “basically 5 years ahead and coming in 2017”

electrek.co

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Re: Nvidia on new self-driving system: “basically 5 years ahead and coming in 2017”

#131

Post by pakl »

Animats wrote: post #20

I'm still not happy with self-driving on vision alone, or vision augmented with radar. There are too many hard cases for vision. Everybody who has good self-driving right now - Google, Otto, Volvo, GM - uses LIDAR. Self-driving is coming to the first end users in 2017, in Volvo's test of 100 vehicles. Volvo has multiple LIDARs, multiple radars, multiple cameras, redundant computers, and redundant actuators. They're b…

> There are too many hard cases for vision.

Even worse, most machine learning vision approaches make the vision problem much harder on themselves. They do not treat the visual world as the dynamic physical interacting processes that give rise to it.

A disadvantage treating of vision as static frames of pixels is that deep feedforward networks have to "memorize" all the physical dynamical effects of e.g., shadows on textures.

Such systems cannot generalize well. A more promising approach is hierarchical systems with ubiquitous recurrent connectivity.

Re: Nvidia on new self-driving system: “basically 5 years ahead and coming in 2017”

#132

Post by tmzt »

dogma1138 wrote: post #101
cambion wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I agree that Google is not buying GeForce GPUs, their general use-case for GPUs does not require virtualization. They use containers to isolate and throttle different tasks/jobs running on the same hardware. At their scale, virtualization would be significantly wasteful in terms of manageability and overhead.

I think we have different meaning for virtualization when it comes to GPU. I'm not talking about running virtual OS, I'm talking about things like rCUDA, GPU direct and RDMA. But still even for their containers solution they need support for gpu passtrough and vGPU if not they can't run containers. NVIDIA doesn't allow you to run GeForce cards over a hypervisor.

Containers would imply there is no hypervisor involved, only a dri device exposed by the kernel and bind-mounted into the namespace. You would still need support for multiple contexts but that doesn't require multiple (virtual) PCI devices or an IOMMU.

Re: Nvidia on new self-driving system: “basically 5 years ahead and coming in 2017”

#133

Post by pakl »

Cybiote wrote: post #85
ChuckMcM wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument reasoning I've heard goes like this; People drive reasonably well using vision primarily and with imperfect visibility of their environment. Computer learning networks can classify imagery at least as accurately as humans and sometimes more so. A computer using imagery that is well classified from an array of visual sensors with near perfect visibility should be able to drive as well, or better, than a h…

> People drive reasonably well using vision primarily This is not accurate however. Other important senses in use include proprioceptive, hearing and tactile feedback from wheels. In addition to vision and the improved dynamic range of eyes, there is the important fact that human vision integrates a world model into expectations. Human vision also models time and motion which help manage where to focus attention. Hum…

I commend you. Very few people actually try feeding images into these things to show how bad they are.

For a real shock at how poor performance is, try feeding frames of video in. (Video is different because it generally doesn't have carefully stereotypically framed, exposed, in-focus content).

Edit: examples of ResNet applied to video by a colleague http://blog.piekniewski.info/2016/08/12/how-close-are-we-to-...

Re: Nvidia on new self-driving system: “basically 5 years ahead and coming in 2017”

#134

Post by aetherson »

mikeash wrote: post #116
closeparen wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Maybe 10, 20% better, but still fundamentally close. You are asserting that human drivers are essentially perfect, because in 80-90% of their crashes, the information necessary to avoid the collision just isn't available visually. That seems like an incredibly optimistic view of human drivers. Collisions happen because a driver does not look at, see, understand, or act appropriately on available visual signals. Or t…

A huge number of traffic deaths are due to alcohol. An autonomous system that's as safe as a sober human would improve safety by a factor of 2 or 3. Many of the other deaths are due to distraction, inattention, or slow reaction times. Get rid of those and you can probably see an order of magnitude improvement with something that is nominally "no better than a human driver."

Would you (while sober) get into a car driven by an autonomous system that was demonstrably more likely to get into a crash than the average sober, awake, healthy driver, but less likely to get into a crash than the average driver?

Honest question.

I don't think I would.

Re: Nvidia on new self-driving system: “basically 5 years ahead and coming in 2017”

#135

Post by drcross »

throwaway123dse wrote: post #130

One thing I haven't seen discussed: Many times I'm driving and have the police wave me through a traffic light. Would a self-driving car realize what's happening? What about a driver waving me to get ahead?

It's not a solved problem but it's something that people are working on.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=8aEWHdduPwc This is the Mercedes car that communicates to pedestrians about the vehicle's intent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicular_communication_system... Something like this might feature prominently as well.

Re: Nvidia on new self-driving system: “basically 5 years ahead and coming in 2017”

#136

Post by inimino »

aetherson wrote: post #134
mikeash wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A huge number of traffic deaths are due to alcohol. An autonomous system that's as safe as a sober human would improve safety by a factor of 2 or 3. Many of the other deaths are due to distraction, inattention, or slow reaction times. Get rid of those and you can probably see an order of magnitude improvement with something that is nominally "no better than a human driver."

Would you (while sober) get into a car driven by an autonomous system that was demonstrably more likely to get into a crash than the average sober, awake, healthy driver, but less likely to get into a crash than the average driver? Honest question. I don't think I would.

Interesting question.

As long as you still have the manual option, it doesn't really matter. You can just get in and drive if you want to.

As the option becomes more common, obviously impaired driving becomes less common.

Re: Nvidia on new self-driving system: “basically 5 years ahead and coming in 2017”

#137

Post by argonaut »

viraptor wrote: post #108
Cybiote wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People drive reasonably well using vision primarily This is not accurate however. Other important senses in use include proprioceptive, hearing and tactile feedback from wheels. In addition to vision and the improved dynamic range of eyes, there is the important fact that human vision integrates a world model into expectations. Human vision also models time and motion which help manage where to focus attention. Hum…

> This is true but only in a limited sense. Isn't what we need very limited anyway? What the cars need is recognition of obstacles and the type of the obstacle in a very limited range. Basically when something is on the road, it doesn't matter whether it's a moose or a deer - you slow down and avoid, or brake depending on the environment. "what is in this picture" classifiers don't seem like a good algorithm to use i…

Object detection is considered a more difficult problem than image classification in the vision community. So I'm not sure what the point is there.

Re: Nvidia on new self-driving system: “basically 5 years ahead and coming in 2017”

#138

Post by argonaut »

vidarh wrote: post #64
tedunangst wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ML seems pretty bad at classifying things it hasn't seen before though. There are quite a few examples where an input outside the training data resulted in misclassification. Humans may not always see a white truck in a snowstorm, but is computer vision going to see it either? Or will it pattern match the few visible parts as something else entirely? Or dismiss the truck entirely as noise?

But the computer vision systems can be endlessly improved and merge experience from millions of cars, while human drivers accumulate experience from a single driver, age, and are eventually replaced by younger, inexperienced drivers. Soon enough these systems will have data from encounters with far more varied situations than any single human will ever be physically able to encounter in a lifetime.

You need humans to label those "millions of experiences." The bottleneck is not raw video. You need humans to label that data. Otherwise it's useless.

Re: Nvidia on new self-driving system: “basically 5 years ahead and coming in 2017”

#139

Post by argonaut »

visarga wrote: post #73
tedunangst wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ML seems pretty bad at classifying things it hasn't seen before though. There are quite a few examples where an input outside the training data resulted in misclassification. Humans may not always see a white truck in a snowstorm, but is computer vision going to see it either? Or will it pattern match the few visible parts as something else entirely? Or dismiss the truck entirely as noise?

> Humans may not always see a white truck in a snowstorm, but is computer vision going to see it either? So you put in your training and test dataset a bunch of such situations. At some point you've covered enough cases to extrapolate the rest. Good testing is going to hunt for these blind spots and fix them. Fact is that it's already safer than humans, even with all its hidden imperfections.

What if that point is 20 years from now? What if every time Ford/GM/Toyota substantially changes the look of their cars, your classifier no longer recognizes them because all your data only has the old models in it. That's what people are driving at. Simply collecting more data is not enough to solve this problem.

Re: Nvidia on new self-driving system: “basically 5 years ahead and coming in 2017”

#140

Post by aetherson »

inimino wrote: post #136
aetherson wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you (while sober) get into a car driven by an autonomous system that was demonstrably more likely to get into a crash than the average sober, awake, healthy driver, but less likely to get into a crash than the average driver? Honest question. I don't think I would.

Interesting question. As long as you still have the manual option, it doesn't really matter. You can just get in and drive if you want to. As the option becomes more common, obviously impaired driving becomes less common.

It matters if, for example, the car is an Uber and you aren't allowed to drive it.
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