46,035 research outputs found
Generative Temporal Models with Spatial Memory for Partially Observed Environments
In model-based reinforcement learning, generative and temporal models of
environments can be leveraged to boost agent performance, either by tuning the
agent's representations during training or via use as part of an explicit
planning mechanism. However, their application in practice has been limited to
simplistic environments, due to the difficulty of training such models in
larger, potentially partially-observed and 3D environments. In this work we
introduce a novel action-conditioned generative model of such challenging
environments. The model features a non-parametric spatial memory system in
which we store learned, disentangled representations of the environment.
Low-dimensional spatial updates are computed using a state-space model that
makes use of knowledge on the prior dynamics of the moving agent, and
high-dimensional visual observations are modelled with a Variational
Auto-Encoder. The result is a scalable architecture capable of performing
coherent predictions over hundreds of time steps across a range of partially
observed 2D and 3D environments.Comment: ICML 201
DRLViz: Understanding Decisions and Memory in Deep Reinforcement Learning
We present DRLViz, a visual analytics interface to interpret the internal
memory of an agent (e.g. a robot) trained using deep reinforcement learning.
This memory is composed of large temporal vectors updated when the agent moves
in an environment and is not trivial to understand due to the number of
dimensions, dependencies to past vectors, spatial/temporal correlations, and
co-correlation between dimensions. It is often referred to as a black box as
only inputs (images) and outputs (actions) are intelligible for humans. Using
DRLViz, experts are assisted to interpret decisions using memory reduction
interactions, and to investigate the role of parts of the memory when errors
have been made (e.g. wrong direction). We report on DRLViz applied in the
context of video games simulators (ViZDoom) for a navigation scenario with item
gathering tasks. We also report on experts evaluation using DRLViz, and
applicability of DRLViz to other scenarios and navigation problems beyond
simulation games, as well as its contribution to black box models
interpretability and explainability in the field of visual analytics
Embodied Question Answering
We present a new AI task -- Embodied Question Answering (EmbodiedQA) -- where
an agent is spawned at a random location in a 3D environment and asked a
question ("What color is the car?"). In order to answer, the agent must first
intelligently navigate to explore the environment, gather information through
first-person (egocentric) vision, and then answer the question ("orange").
This challenging task requires a range of AI skills -- active perception,
language understanding, goal-driven navigation, commonsense reasoning, and
grounding of language into actions. In this work, we develop the environments,
end-to-end-trained reinforcement learning agents, and evaluation protocols for
EmbodiedQA.Comment: 20 pages, 13 figures, Webpage: https://embodiedqa.org
SkiMap: An Efficient Mapping Framework for Robot Navigation
We present a novel mapping framework for robot navigation which features a
multi-level querying system capable to obtain rapidly representations as
diverse as a 3D voxel grid, a 2.5D height map and a 2D occupancy grid. These
are inherently embedded into a memory and time efficient core data structure
organized as a Tree of SkipLists. Compared to the well-known Octree
representation, our approach exhibits a better time efficiency, thanks to its
simple and highly parallelizable computational structure, and a similar memory
footprint when mapping large workspaces. Peculiarly within the realm of mapping
for robot navigation, our framework supports realtime erosion and
re-integration of measurements upon reception of optimized poses from the
sensor tracker, so as to improve continuously the accuracy of the map.Comment: Accepted by International Conference on Robotics and Automation
(ICRA) 2017. This is the submitted version. The final published version may
be slightly differen
An adaptive spherical view representation for navigation in changing environments
Real-world environments such as houses and offices change over time, meaning that a mobile robot’s map will become out of date. In previous work we introduced a method to update the reference views in a topological map so that a mobile robot could continue to localize itself in a changing environment using omni-directional vision. In this work we extend this longterm updating mechanism to incorporate a spherical metric representation of the observed visual features for each node in the topological map. Using multi-view geometry we are then able to estimate the heading of the robot, in order to enable navigation between the nodes of the map, and to simultaneously adapt the spherical view representation in response to environmental changes. The results demonstrate the persistent performance of the proposed system in a long-term experiment
View-based modelling of human visual navigation errors
View-based and Cartesian representations provide rival accounts of
visual navigation in humans, and here we explore possible models
for the view-based case. A visual “homing” experiment was undertaken
by human participants in immersive virtual reality. The distributions
of end-point errors on the ground plane differed significantly
in shape and extent depending on visual landmark configuration and
relative goal location. A model based on simple visual cues captures
important characteristics of these distributions. Augmenting visual
features to include 3D elements such as stereo and motion parallax
result in a set of models that describe the data accurately, demonstrating
the effectiveness of a view-based approach
- …