Patents by Inventor Ethan Miller Pronovost

Ethan Miller Pronovost has filed for patents to protect the following inventions. This listing includes patent applications that are pending as well as patents that have already been granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

  • Publication number: 20240104934
    Abstract: Techniques for training a codebook usable by a machine learned model to predict an object trajectory or scene data are described herein. For example, the techniques may include generating tokens representing discrete object behavior into a machine learned model that outputs a sequence of tokens that is usable by another machine learned model to generate the object trajectory (e.g., position data, velocity data, acceleration data, etc.) or the scene data associated with the environment. The object trajectory can be sent to a vehicle computing device for consideration during vehicle planning, which may include simulation.
    Type: Application
    Filed: June 30, 2022
    Publication date: March 28, 2024
    Inventor: Ethan Miller Pronovost
  • Publication number: 20240101150
    Abstract: Techniques for predicting an object trajectory or scene information are described herein. For example, the techniques may include inputting tokens representing discrete behavior into a machine learned model. The machine learned model may output a sequence of tokens that is usable by another machine learned model to generate an object trajectory (e.g., position data, velocity data, acceleration data, etc.) for one or more objects in the environment. The object trajectory can be sent to a vehicle computing device for consideration during vehicle planning, which may include simulation.
    Type: Application
    Filed: June 30, 2022
    Publication date: March 28, 2024
    Inventor: Ethan Miller Pronovost
  • Publication number: 20240101157
    Abstract: Techniques for predicting an object trajectory or scene information are described herein. For example, the techniques may include inputting latent variable data into a machine learned model. The machine learned model may output an object trajectory (e.g., position data, velocity data, acceleration data, etc.) for one or more objects in the environment based on the latent variable data. The object trajectory can be sent to a vehicle computing device for consideration during vehicle planning, which may include simulation.
    Type: Application
    Filed: December 22, 2022
    Publication date: March 28, 2024
    Inventor: Ethan Miller Pronovost
  • Patent number: 11884282
    Abstract: Techniques for increasing performance of machine-learned models while conserving computational resources generally required by ensemble machine-learning methods are described herein. The techniques may include determining multiple views of a scene that is to be input into a machine-learned model. In some examples, a scene data input may be rotated by 90, 180, and 270 degrees to generate four scene inputs (e.g., 0-, 90-, 180-, and 270-degree rotated inputs) that can be passed through the machine-learned model and the results per scene can be aggregated to determine a final prediction/decision. Similarly, scene inputs may be shifted, reflected, translated, and/or the like before being input into the machine-learned model. The predictions may be associated with one or more objects in the environment that are represented in the scenes.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: August 4, 2021
    Date of Patent: January 30, 2024
    Assignee: ZOOX, INC.
    Inventor: Ethan Miller Pronovost
  • Publication number: 20240001958
    Abstract: Techniques for improving operational decisions of an autonomous vehicle are discussed herein. In some cases, a system may generate reference graphs associated with a route of the autonomous vehicle. Such reference graphs can comprise precomputed feature vectors based on grid regions and/or lane segments. The feature vectors are usable to determine scene context data associated with static objects to reduce computational expenses and compute time.
    Type: Application
    Filed: June 30, 2022
    Publication date: January 4, 2024
    Inventors: Gowtham Garimella, Gary Linscott, Ethan Miller Pronovost
  • Patent number: 11704572
    Abstract: Techniques for selectively offloading data that is computed by a first processing unit during training of an artificial neural network onto memory associated with a second processing unit and transferring the data back to the first processing unit when the data is needed for further processing are described herein. For example, the first processing unit may compute activations for operations associated with forward propagation. During the forward propagation, one or more of the activations may be transferred to a second processing unit for storage. Then, during backpropagation for the artificial neural network, the activations may be transferred back to the first processing unit as needed to compute gradients.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: October 17, 2018
    Date of Patent: July 18, 2023
    Assignee: Zoox, Inc.
    Inventors: Ethan Miller Pronovost, Ethan Petrick Dreyfuss
  • Publication number: 20230159059
    Abstract: Techniques for determining unified futures of objects in an environment are discussed herein. Techniques may include determining a first feature associated with an object in an environment and a second feature associated with the environment and based on a position of the object in the environment, updating a graph neural network (GNN) to encode the first feature and second feature into a graph node representing the object and encode relative positions of additional objects in the environment into one or more edges attached to the node. The GNN may be decoded to determine a predicted position of the object at a subsequent timestep. Further, a predicted trajectory of the object may be determined using predicted positions of the object at various timesteps.
    Type: Application
    Filed: November 24, 2021
    Publication date: May 25, 2023
    Inventors: Gowtham Garimella, Marin Kobilarov, Andres Guillermo Morales Morales, Ethan Miller Pronovost, Kai Zhenyu Wang, Xiaosi Zeng
  • Publication number: 20230159027
    Abstract: Techniques for determining unified futures of objects in an environment are discussed herein. Techniques may include determining a first feature associated with an object in an environment and a second feature associated with the environment and based on a position of the object in the environment, updating a graph neural network (GNN) to encode the first feature and second feature into a graph node representing the object and encode relative positions of additional objects in the environment into one or more edges attached to the node. The GNN may be decoded to determine a first predicted position of the object. The first predicted position may be determined to be outside of a bounded area of the environment. Based on this determination, a second predicted position of the object may be determined using map data associated with the object.
    Type: Application
    Filed: November 24, 2021
    Publication date: May 25, 2023
    Inventor: Ethan Miller Pronovost
  • Publication number: 20230159060
    Abstract: Techniques for determining unified futures of objects in an environment are discussed herein. Techniques may include determining a first feature associated with an object in an environment and a second feature associated with the environment and based on a position of the object in the environment, updating a graph neural network (GNN) to encode the first feature and second feature into a graph node representing the object and encode relative positions of additional objects in the environment into one or more edges attached to the node. The GNN may be decoded to determine a distribution of predicted positions for the object in the future that meet a criterion, allowing for more efficient sampling. A predicted position of the object in the future may be determined by sampling from the distribution.
    Type: Application
    Filed: November 24, 2021
    Publication date: May 25, 2023
    Inventors: Gowtham Garimella, Marin Kobilarov, Andres Guillermo Morales Morales, Ethan Miller Pronovost, Kai Zhenyu Wang, Xiaosi Zeng
  • Patent number: 11568259
    Abstract: Techniques for training a machine learning model are described herein. For example, the techniques may include implementing a cross batch normalization layer that generates a cross batch normalization layer output based on a first layer output during training of the neural network. The training may be based on a local batch of training examples of a global batch including the local batch and at least one remote batch of training examples. The cross batch normalization layer output may include normalized components of the first layer output determined based on global normalization statistics for the global batch. Such techniques may be used to train a neural network over distributed machines by synchronizing batches between such machines.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: October 15, 2019
    Date of Patent: January 31, 2023
    Assignee: Zoox, Inc.
    Inventors: Shimin Guo, Ethan Miller Pronovost, Connor Jonathan Soohoo, Qijun Tan
  • Publication number: 20210110272
    Abstract: Techniques for training a machine learning model are described herein. For example, the techniques may include implementing a cross batch normalization layer that generates a cross batch normalization layer output based on a first layer output during training of the neural network. The training may be based on a local batch of training examples of a global batch including the local batch and at least one remote batch of training examples. The cross batch normalization layer output may include normalized components of the first layer output determined based on global normalization statistics for the global batch. Such techniques may be used to train a neural network over distributed machines by synchronizing batches between such machines.
    Type: Application
    Filed: October 15, 2019
    Publication date: April 15, 2021
    Inventors: Shimin Guo, Ethan Miller Pronovost, Connor Jonathan Soohoo, Qijun Tan