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1. Knowledge-infused Learning for Entity Prediction in Driving Scenes

   https://doi.org/10.3389/fdata.2021.759110  

   Wickramarachchi, Ruwan; Henson, Cory; Sheth, Amit (November 2021, Frontiers in Big Data)

   Scene understanding is a key technical challenge within the autonomous driving domain. It requires a deep semantic understanding of the entities and relations found within complex physical and social environments that is both accurate and complete. In practice, this can be accomplished by representing entities in a scene and their relations as a knowledge graph (KG). This scene knowledge graph may then be utilized for the task of entity prediction, leading to improved scene understanding. In this paper, we will define and formalize this problem as Knowledge-based Entity Prediction (KEP). KEP aims to improve scene understanding by predicting potentially unrecognized entities by leveraging heterogeneous, high-level semantic knowledge of driving scenes. An innovative neuro-symbolic solution for KEP is presented, based on knowledge-infused learning, which 1) introduces a dataset agnostic ontology to describe driving scenes, 2) uses an expressive, holistic representation of scenes with knowledge graphs, and 3) proposes an effective, non-standard mapping of the KEP problem to the problem of link prediction (LP) using knowledge-graph embeddings (KGE). Using real, complex and high-quality data from urban driving scenes, we demonstrate its effectiveness by showing that the missing entities may be predicted with high precision (0.87 Hits@1) while significantly outperforming the non-semantic/rule-based baselines. 

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2. A Survey of Collaborative Machine Learning Using 5G Vehicular Communications

   https://doi.org/10.1109/COMST.2022.3149714  

   Balkus, S. V.; Wang, H.; Cornet, B. D.; Mahabal, C.; Ngo H.; Fang, H. (April 2022, IEEE Communications surveys and tutorials)

   By enabling autonomous vehicles (AVs) to share data while driving, 5G vehicular communications allow AVs to collaborate on solving common autonomous driving tasks. AVs often rely on machine learning models to perform such tasks; as such, collaboration requires leveraging vehicular communications to improve the performance of machine learning algorithms. This paper provides a comprehensive literature survey of the intersection between machine learning for autonomous driving and vehicular communications. Throughout the paper, we explain how vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communications are used to improve machine learning in AVs, answering five major questions regarding such systems. These questions include: 1) How can AVs effectively transmit data wirelessly on the road? 2) How do AVs manage the shared data? 3) How do AVs use shared data to improve their perception of the environment? 4) How do AVs use shared data to drive more safely and efficiently? and 5) How can AVs protect the privacy of shared data and prevent cyberattacks? We also summarize data sources that may support research in this area and discuss the future research potential surrounding these five questions. 

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3. Task-Aware Novelty Detection for Visual-based Deep Learning in Autonomous Systems

   Chen, Valerie; Yoon, Man-Ki; Shao, Zhong (May 2020, 2020 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA))

   Deep-learning driven safety-critical autonomous systems, such as self-driving cars, must be able to detect situations where its trained model is not able to make a trustworthy prediction. This ability to determine the novelty of a new input with respect to a trained model is critical for such systems because novel inputs due to changes in the environment, adversarial attacks, or even unintentional noise can potentially lead to erroneous, perhaps life-threatening decisions. This paper proposes a learning framework that leverages information learned by the prediction model in a task-aware manner to detect novel scenarios. We use network saliency to provide the learning architecture with knowledge of the input areas that are most relevant to the decision-making and learn an association between the saliency map and the predicted output to determine the novelty of the input. We demonstrate the efficacy of this method through experiments on real-world driving datasets as well as through driving scenarios in our in-house indoor driving environment where the novel image can be sampled from another similar driving dataset with similar features or from adversarial attacked images from the training dataset. We find that our method is able to systematically detect novel inputs and quantify the deviation from the target prediction through this task-aware approach. 

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4. Safeauto: Knowledge-enhanced safe autonomous driving with multimodal foundation models

   Zhang, J; Yang, X; Wang, T; Yao, Y; Petiushko, A; Li, B (July 2025, Proceedings of the Forty-Second International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML 2025))

   Traditional autonomous driving systems often struggle to connect high-level reasoning with low-level control, leading to suboptimal and sometimes unsafe behaviors. Recent advances in multimodal large language models (MLLMs), which process both visual and textual data, offer an opportunity to unify perception and reasoning. However, effectively embedding precise safety knowledge into MLLMs for autonomous driving remains a significant challenge. To address this, we propose SafeAuto, a framework that enhances MLLM-based autonomous driving by incorporating both unstructured and structured knowledge. First, we introduce a Position-Dependent Cross-Entropy (PDCE) loss to improve low-level control signal predictions when values are represented as text. Second, to explicitly integrate safety knowledge, we develop a reasoning component that translates traffic rules into first-order logic (e.g., "red light ⟹ stop") and embeds them into a probabilistic graphical model (e.g., Markov Logic Network) to verify predicted actions using recognized environmental attributes. Additionally, our Multimodal Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) model leverages video, control signals, and environmental attributes to learn from past driving experiences. Integrating PDCE, MLN, and Multimodal RAG, SafeAuto outperforms existing baselines across multiple datasets, enabling more accurate, reliable, and safer autonomous driving. 

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5. A Comparative Study on Machine Learning Algorithms for Smart Manufacturing: Tool Wear Prediction Using Random Forests

   https://doi.org/10.1115/1.4036350  

   Wu, Dazhong; Jennings, Connor; Terpenny, Janis; Gao, Robert X.; Kumara, Soundar (July 2017, Journal of Manufacturing Science and Engineering)

   Manufacturers have faced an increasing need for the development of predictive models that predict mechanical failures and the remaining useful life (RUL) of manufacturing systems or components. Classical model-based or physics-based prognostics often require an in-depth physical understanding of the system of interest to develop closed-form mathematical models. However, prior knowledge of system behavior is not always available, especially for complex manufacturing systems and processes. To complement model-based prognostics, data-driven methods have been increasingly applied to machinery prognostics and maintenance management, transforming legacy manufacturing systems into smart manufacturing systems with artificial intelligence. While previous research has demonstrated the effectiveness of data-driven methods, most of these prognostic methods are based on classical machine learning techniques, such as artificial neural networks (ANNs) and support vector regression (SVR). With the rapid advancement in artificial intelligence, various machine learning algorithms have been developed and widely applied in many engineering fields. The objective of this research is to introduce a random forests (RFs)-based prognostic method for tool wear prediction as well as compare the performance of RFs with feed-forward back propagation (FFBP) ANNs and SVR. Specifically, the performance of FFBP ANNs, SVR, and RFs are compared using an experimental data collected from 315 milling tests. Experimental results have shown that RFs can generate more accurate predictions than FFBP ANNs with a single hidden layer and SVR. 

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