Jonathan Balloch

Jonathan Balloch

Atlanta, Georgia, United States
815 followers 500+ connections

Experience

  • rapt AI Graphic

    rapt AI

    Atlanta, Georgia, United States

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    Atlanta, GA

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    Princeton, New Jersey, United States

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    Greater Seattle Area

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    Rockville, MD

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    Advanced Technology Center, Palo Alto, CA

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    Pasadena, California, United States

Education

Volunteer Experience

  • FIRST Graphic

    Mentor, Montgomery Blair High School

    FIRST

    - 1 year 7 months

    Education

    Mentor assisting with the first robotics team developing their competition robot and assisting with computer science education of the team as they transition from LabView to Java

Publications

  • Neuro-Symbolic World Models for Adapting to Open World Novelty

    AAMAS '23: Proceedings of the 2023 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems

    Most reinforcement learning (RL) methods assume that the world is a closed, fixed process, when in reality most real world problems are open, changing over time. To address this, we introduce WorldCloner, an end-to-end trainable neuro-symbolic world model that learns an efficient symbolic model of transitions and uses this world model to improve novelty adaptation. We show that the symbolic world model helps WorldCloner adapt its policy more efficiently than neural-only reinforcement learning…

    Most reinforcement learning (RL) methods assume that the world is a closed, fixed process, when in reality most real world problems are open, changing over time. To address this, we introduce WorldCloner, an end-to-end trainable neuro-symbolic world model that learns an efficient symbolic model of transitions and uses this world model to improve novelty adaptation. We show that the symbolic world model helps WorldCloner adapt its policy more efficiently than neural-only reinforcement learning methods.

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  • NovGrid: A Flexible Grid World for Evaluating Agent Response to Novelty

    AAAI 2022 Spring Symposium on Designing Artificial Intelligence for Open Worlds

    A robust body of reinforcement learning techniques have been developed to solve complex sequential decision making problems. However, these methods assume that train and evaluation tasks come from similarly or identically distributed environments. This assumption does not hold in real life where small novel changes to the environment can make a previously learned policy fail or introduce simpler solutions that might never be found. To that end we explore the concept of {\em novelty}, defined in…

    A robust body of reinforcement learning techniques have been developed to solve complex sequential decision making problems. However, these methods assume that train and evaluation tasks come from similarly or identically distributed environments. This assumption does not hold in real life where small novel changes to the environment can make a previously learned policy fail or introduce simpler solutions that might never be found. To that end we explore the concept of {\em novelty}, defined in this work as the sudden change to the mechanics or properties of environment. We provide an ontology of for novelties most relevant to sequential decision making, which distinguishes between novelties that affect objects versus actions, unary properties versus non-unary relations, and the distribution of solutions to a task. We introduce NovGrid, a novelty generation framework built on MiniGrid, acting as a toolkit for rapidly developing and evaluating novelty-adaptation-enabled reinforcement learning techniques. Along with the core NovGrid we provide exemplar novelties aligned with our ontology and instantiate them as novelty templates that can be applied to many MiniGrid-compliant environments. Finally, we present a set of metrics built into our framework for the evaluation of novelty-adaptation-enabled machine-learning techniques, and show characteristics of a baseline RL model using these metrics.

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  • Automated story generation as question-answering

    Proc. of the 3rd Workshop on Narrative Understanding

    Neural language model-based approaches to automated story generation suffer from two important limitations. First, language model-based story generators generally do not work toward a given goal or ending. Second, they often lose coherence as the story gets longer. We propose a novel approach to automated story generation that treats the problem as one of generative question-answering. Our proposed story generation system starts with sentences encapsulating the final event of the story. The…

    Neural language model-based approaches to automated story generation suffer from two important limitations. First, language model-based story generators generally do not work toward a given goal or ending. Second, they often lose coherence as the story gets longer. We propose a novel approach to automated story generation that treats the problem as one of generative question-answering. Our proposed story generation system starts with sentences encapsulating the final event of the story. The system then iteratively (1) analyzes the text describing the most recent event, (2) generates a question about "why" a character is doing the thing they are doing in the event, and then (3) attempts to generate another, preceding event that answers this question.

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  • Memory-efficient semi-supervised continual learning: The world is its own replay buffer

    2021 International Joint Conference on Neural Networks (IJCNN)

    Rehearsal is a critical component for class-incremental continual learning, yet it requires a substantial memory budget. Our work investigates whether we can significantly reduce this memory budget by leveraging unlabeled data from an agent's environment in a realistic and challenging continual learning paradigm. Specifically, we explore and formalize a novel semi-supervised continual learning (SSCL) setting, where labeled data is scarce yet non-i.i.d. unlabeled data from the agent's…

    Rehearsal is a critical component for class-incremental continual learning, yet it requires a substantial memory budget. Our work investigates whether we can significantly reduce this memory budget by leveraging unlabeled data from an agent's environment in a realistic and challenging continual learning paradigm. Specifically, we explore and formalize a novel semi-supervised continual learning (SSCL) setting, where labeled data is scarce yet non-i.i.d. unlabeled data from the agent's environment is plentiful. Importantly, data distributions in the SSCL setting are realistic and therefore reflect object class correlations between, and among, the labeled and unlabeled data distributions. We show that a strategy built on pseudo-labeling, consistency regularization, Out-of- Distribution (OoD) detection, and knowledge distillation reduces forgetting in this setting. Our approach, DistillMatch, increases performance over the state-of-the-art by no less than 8.7% average task accuracy and up to 54.5% average task accuracy in SSCL CIFAR-100 experiments. Moreover, we demonstrate that DistillMatch can save up to 0.23 stored images per processed unlabeled image compared to the next best method which only saves 0.08. Our results suggest that focusing on realistic correlated distributions is a significantly new perspective, which accentuates the importance of leveraging the world's structure as a continual learning strategy. Our code is available at https://github.com/GT-RIPL/DistillMatch-SSCL

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  • Always be dreaming: A new approach for data-free class-incremental learning

    Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision

    Modern computer vision applications suffer from catastrophic forgetting when incrementally learning new concepts over time. The most successful approaches to alleviate this forgetting require extensive replay of previously seen data, which is problematic when memory constraints or data legality concerns exist. In this work, we consider the high-impact problem of Data-Free Class-Incremental Learning (DFCIL), where an incremental learning agent must learn new concepts over time without storing…

    Modern computer vision applications suffer from catastrophic forgetting when incrementally learning new concepts over time. The most successful approaches to alleviate this forgetting require extensive replay of previously seen data, which is problematic when memory constraints or data legality concerns exist. In this work, we consider the high-impact problem of Data-Free Class-Incremental Learning (DFCIL), where an incremental learning agent must learn new concepts over time without storing generators or training data from past tasks. One approach for DFCIL is to replay synthetic images produced by inverting a frozen copy of the learner's classification model, but we show this approach fails for common class-incremental benchmarks when using standard distillation strategies. We diagnose the cause of this failure and propose a novel incremental distillation strategy for DFCIL, contributing a modified cross-entropy training and importance-weighted feature distillation, and show that our method results in up to a 25.1% increase in final task accuracy (absolute difference) compared to SOTA DFCIL methods for common class-incremental benchmarks. Our method even outperforms several standard replay based methods which store a coreset of images.

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  • Tool Macgyvering: Tool Construction Using Geometric Reasoning

    2019 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)

    MacGyvering is defined as creating or repairing something in an inventive or improvised way by utilizing objects that are available at hand. In this paper, we explore a subset of Macgyvering problems involving tool construction, i.e., creating tools from parts available in the environment. We formalize the overall problem domain of tool Macgyvering, introducing three levels of complexity for tool construction and substitution problems, and presenting a novel computational framework aimed at…

    MacGyvering is defined as creating or repairing something in an inventive or improvised way by utilizing objects that are available at hand. In this paper, we explore a subset of Macgyvering problems involving tool construction, i.e., creating tools from parts available in the environment. We formalize the overall problem domain of tool Macgyvering, introducing three levels of complexity for tool construction and substitution problems, and presenting a novel computational framework aimed at solving one level of the tool Macgyvering problem, specifically contributing a novel algorithm for tool construction based on geometric reasoning. We validate our approach by constructing three tools using a 7-DOF robot arm.

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  • Unbiasing semantic segmentation for robot perception using synthetic data feature transfer

    Robot perception systems need to perform reliable image segmentation in real-time on noisy, raw perception data. State-of-the-art segmentation approaches use large CNN models and carefully constructed datasets; however, these models focus on accuracy at the cost of real-time inference. Furthermore, the standard semantic segmentation datasets are not large enough for training CNNs without augmentation and are not representative of noisy, uncurated robot perception data. We propose improving the…

    Robot perception systems need to perform reliable image segmentation in real-time on noisy, raw perception data. State-of-the-art segmentation approaches use large CNN models and carefully constructed datasets; however, these models focus on accuracy at the cost of real-time inference. Furthermore, the standard semantic segmentation datasets are not large enough for training CNNs without augmentation and are not representative of noisy, uncurated robot perception data. We propose improving the performance of real-time segmentation frameworks on robot perception data by transferring features learned from synthetic segmentation data. We show that pretraining real-time segmentation architectures with synthetic segmentation data instead of ImageNet improves fine-tuning performance by reducing the bias learned in pretraining and closing the \textit{transfer gap} as a result. Our experiments show that our real-time robot perception models pretrained on synthetic data outperform those pretrained on ImageNet for every scale of fine-tuning data examined. Moreover, the degree to which synthetic pretraining outperforms ImageNet pretraining increases as the availability of robot data decreases, making our approach attractive for robotics domains where dataset collection is hard and/or expensive.

  • The Evolution of Titan's detached haze layer near equinox in 2009

    Geophysical Research Letters

    In modeling radiative transfer in Titan’s upper atmosphere, notably the "detached haze" layer beyond the stratosphere, it was observed that the atmosphere appeared to "collapse" over a course of approximately 4 weeks. The altitude of the detached haze layer and the outer atmosphere was found to have decreased approximately 200 kilometers in this short period of time.

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Courses

  • Aerodynamics

    MEAM-545

  • Control Theory

    ESE-505

  • Electricity and Magnetism

    PHYS-252

  • Intro to Optimization

    ESE-504

  • Machine Learning

    CIS-520

  • Machine Perception

    CIS-580

  • Mechatronic Design

    MEAM-510

  • Newtonian Mechanics

    PHYS-251

  • Quantum Mechanics

    PHYS-253

  • Real-Time Embedded Systems

    ESE-519

  • Robotics

    MEAM-520

  • Statistical Mechanics

    PHYS-254

Languages

  • Spanish

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