Embodied Artificial Intelligence through Distributed Adaptive Control: An Integrated Framework

In this paper, we argue that the future of Artificial Intelligence research resides in two keywords: integration and embodiment. We support this claim by analyzing the recent advances of the field. Regarding integration, we note that the most impactful recent contributions have been made possible through the integration of recent Machine Learning methods (based in particular on Deep Learning and Recurrent Neural Networks) with more traditional ones (e.g. Monte-Carlo tree search, goal babbling exploration or addressable memory systems). Regarding embodiment, we note that the traditional benchmark tasks (e.g. visual classification or board games) are becoming obsolete as state-of-the-art learning algorithms approach or even surpass human performance in most of them, having recently encouraged the development of first-person 3D game platforms embedding realistic physics. Building upon this analysis, we first propose an embodied cognitive architecture integrating heterogenous sub-fields of Artificial Intelligence into a unified framework. We demonstrate the utility of our approach by showing how major contributions of the field can be expressed within the proposed framework. We then claim that benchmarking environments need to reproduce ecologically-valid conditions for bootstrapping the acquisition of increasingly complex cognitive skills through the concept of a cognitive arms race between embodied agents.Comment: Updated version of the paper accepted to the ICDL-Epirob 2017 conference (Lisbon, Portugal

LPN: Language-guided Prototypical Network for few-shot classification

Few-shot classification aims to adapt to new tasks with limited labeled examples. To fully use the accessible data, recent methods explore suitable measures for the similarity between the query and support images and better high-dimensional features with meta-training and pre-training strategies. However, the potential of multi-modality information has barely been explored, which may bring promising improvement for few-shot classification. In this paper, we propose a Language-guided Prototypical Network (LPN) for few-shot classification, which leverages the complementarity of vision and language modalities via two parallel branches. Concretely, to introduce language modality with limited samples in the visual task, we leverage a pre-trained text encoder to extract class-level text features directly from class names while processing images with a conventional image encoder. Then, a language-guided decoder is introduced to obtain text features corresponding to each image by aligning class-level features with visual features. In addition, to take advantage of class-level features and prototypes, we build a refined prototypical head that generates robust prototypes in the text branch for follow-up measurement. Finally, we aggregate the visual and text logits to calibrate the deviation of a single modality. Extensive experiments demonstrate the competitiveness of LPN against state-of-the-art methods on benchmark datasets