When Autonomous Systems Meet Accuracy and Transferability through AI: A Survey

With widespread applications of artificial intelligence (AI), the capabilities of the perception, understanding, decision-making, and control for autonomous systems have improved significantly in recent years. When autonomous systems consider the performance of accuracy and transferability, several AI methods, such as adversarial learning, reinforcement learning (RL), and meta-learning, show their powerful performance. Here, we review the learning-based approaches in autonomous systems from the perspectives of accuracy and transferability. Accuracy means that a well-trained model shows good results during the testing phase, in which the testing set shares a same task or a data distribution with the training set. Transferability means that when a well-trained model is transferred to other testing domains, the accuracy is still good. Firstly, we introduce some basic concepts of transfer learning and then present some preliminaries of adversarial learning, RL, and meta-learning. Secondly, we focus on reviewing the accuracy or transferability or both of these approaches to show the advantages of adversarial learning, such as generative adversarial networks, in typical computer vision tasks in autonomous systems, including image style transfer, image super-resolution, image deblurring/dehazing/rain removal, semantic segmentation, depth estimation, pedestrian detection, and person re-identification. We furthermore review the performance of RL and meta-learning from the aspects of accuracy or transferability or both of them in autonomous systems, involving pedestrian tracking, robot navigation, and robotic manipulation. Finally, we discuss several challenges and future topics for the use of adversarial learning, RL, and meta-learning in autonomous systems.