Derek Hao Hu

IJCAI Conference 2011 Conference Paper

Transfer Learning for Activity Recognition via Sensor Mapping

• Derek Hao Hu
• Qiang Yang

Activity recognition aims to identify and predict human activities based on a series of sensor readings. In recent years, machine learning methods have become popular in solving activity recognition problems. A special difficulty for adopting machine learning methods is the workload to annotate a large number of sensor readings as training data. Labeling sensor readings for their corresponding activities is a time-consuming task. In practice, we often have a set of labeled training instances ready for an activity recognition task. If we can transfer such knowledge to a new activity recognition scenario that is different from, but related to, the source domain, it will ease our effort to perform manual labeling of training data for the new scenario. In this paper, we propose a transfer learning framework based on automatically learning a correspondence between different sets of sensors to solve this transfer-learning in activity recognition problem. We validate our framework on two different datasets and compare it against previous approaches of activity recognition, and demonstrate its effectiveness.

AIJ Journal 2010 Journal Article

Learning complex action models with quantifiers and logical implications

• Hankz Hankui Zhuo
• Qiang Yang
• Derek Hao Hu
• Lei Li

Automated planning requires action models described using languages such as the Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL) as input, but building action models from scratch is a very difficult and time-consuming task, even for experts. This is because it is difficult to formally describe all conditions and changes, reflected in the preconditions and effects of action models. In the past, there have been algorithms that can automatically learn simple action models from plan traces. However, there are many cases in the real world where we need more complicated expressions based on universal and existential quantifiers, as well as logical implications in action models to precisely describe the underlying mechanisms of the actions. Such complex action models cannot be learned using many previous algorithms. In this article, we present a novel algorithm called LAMP (Learning Action Models from Plan traces), to learn action models with quantifiers and logical implications from a set of observed plan traces with only partially observed intermediate state information. The LAMP algorithm generates candidate formulas that are passed to a Markov Logic Network (MLN) for selecting the most likely subsets of candidate formulas. The selected subset of formulas is then transformed into learned action models, which can then be tweaked by domain experts to arrive at the final models. We evaluate our approach in four planning domains to demonstrate that LAMP is effective in learning complex action models. We also analyze the human effort saved by using LAMP in helping to create action models through a user study. Finally, we apply LAMP to a real-world application domain for software requirement engineering to help the engineers acquire software requirements and show that LAMP can indeed help experts a great deal in real-world knowledge-engineering applications.

IJCAI Conference 2009 Conference Paper

• Hankz Hankui Zhuo
• Derek Hao Hu
• Chad Hogg
• Qiang Yang
• Hector Munoz-Avila

To apply hierarchical task network (HTN) planning to real-world planning problems, one needs to encode the HTN schemata and action models beforehand. However, acquiring such domain knowledge is difficult and time-consuming because the HTN domain definition involves a significant knowledge-engineering effort. A system that can learn the HTN planning domain knowledge automatically would save time and allow HTN planning to be used in domains where such knowledgeengineering effort is not feasible. In this paper, we present a formal framework and algorithms to acquire HTN planning domain knowledge, by learning the preconditions and effects of actions and preconditions of methods. Our algorithm, HTNlearner, first builds constraints from given observed decomposition trees to build action models and method preconditions. It then solves these constraints using a weighted MAX-SAT solver. The solution can be converted to action models and method preconditions. Unlike prior work on HTN learning, we do not depend on complete action models or state information. We test the algorithm on several domains, and show that our HTN-learner algorithm is both effective and efficient.

IJCAI Conference 2009 Conference Paper

• Derek Hao Hu
• Xian-Xing Zhang
• Jie Yin
• Vincent Wenchen Zheng
• Qiang Yang

Detecting abnormal activities from sensor readings is an important research problem in activity recognition. A number of different algorithms have been proposed in the past to tackle this problem. Many of the previous state-based approaches suffer from the problem of failing to decide the appropriate number of states, which are difficult to find through a trial-and-error approach, in real-world applications. In this paper, we propose an accurate and flexible framework for abnormal activity recognition from sensor readings that involves less human tuning of model parameters. Our approach first applies a Hierarchical Dirichlet Process Hidden Markov Model (HDP-HMM), which supports an infinite number of states, to automatically find an appropriate number of states. We incorporate a Fisher Kernel into the One-Class Support Vector Machine (OCSVM) model to filter out the activities that are likely to be normal. Finally, we derive an abnormal activity model from the normal activity models to reduce false positive rate in an unsupervised manner. Our main contribution is that our proposed HDP-HMM models can decide the appropriate number of states automatically, and that by incorporating a Fisher Kernel into the OCSVM model, we can combine the advantages from generative model and discriminative model. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by using several real-world datasets to test our algorithm’s performance.

IJCAI Conference 2009 Conference Paper

• Jie Yin
• Derek Hao Hu
• Qiang Yang

Event detection is a critical task in sensor networks for a variety of real-world applications. Many realworld events often exhibit complex spatio-temporal patterns whereby they manifest themselves via observations over time and space proximities. These spatio-temporal events cannot be handled well by many of the previous approaches. In this paper, we propose a new Spatio-Temporal Event Detection (STED) algorithm in sensor networks based on a dynamic conditional random field (DCRF) model. Our STED method handles the uncertainty of sensor data explicitly and permits neighborhood interactions in both observations and event labels. Experiments on both real data and synthetic data demonstrate that our STED method can provide accurate event detection in near real time even for large-scale sensor networks.

AAAI Conference 2008 Conference Paper

CIGAR: Concurrent and Interleaving Goal and Activity Recognition

• Derek Hao Hu

In artificial intelligence and pervasive computing research, inferring users’ high-level goals from activity sequences is an important task. A major challenge in goal recognition is that users often pursue several high-level goals in a concurrent and interleaving manner, where the pursuit of goals may spread over different parts of an activity sequence and may be pursued in parallel. Existing approaches to recognizing multiple goals often formulate this problem either as a single-goal recognition problem or in a deterministic way, ignoring uncertainty. In this paper, we propose CIGAR (Concurrent and Interleaving Goal and Activity Recognition) - a novel and simple two-level probabilistic framework for multiple-goal recognition where we can recognize both concurrent and interleaving goals. We use skip-chain conditional random fields (SCCRF) for modeling interleaving goals and we model concurrent goals by adjusting inferred probabilities through a correlation graph, which is a major advantage in that we are able to reason about goal interactions explicitly through the correlation graph. The two-level framework also avoids the high training complexity when modeling concurrency and interleaving together in a unified CRF model. Experimental results show that our method can effectively improve recognition accuracies on several real-world datasets collected from various wireless and sensor networks.