Continual Reinforcement Learning in 3D Non-stationary Environments

High-dimensional always-changing environments constitute a hard challenge for current reinforcement learning techniques. Artificial agents, nowadays, are often trained off-line in very static and controlled conditions in simulation such that training observations can be thought as sampled i.i.d. from the entire observations space. However, in real world settings, the environment is often non-stationary and subject to unpredictable, frequent changes. In this paper we propose and openly release CRLMaze, a new benchmark for learning continually through reinforcement in a complex 3D non-stationary task based on ViZDoom and subject to several environmental changes. Then, we introduce an end-to-end model-free continual reinforcement learning strategy showing competitive results with respect to four different baselines and not requiring any access to additional supervised signals, previously encountered environmental conditions or observations.Comment: Accepted in the CLVision Workshop at CVPR2020: 13 pages, 4 figures, 5 table

An Analysis of the Connections Between Layers of Deep Neural Networks

We present an analysis of different techniques for selecting the connection be- tween layers of deep neural networks. Traditional deep neural networks use ran- dom connection tables between layers to keep the number of connections small and tune to different image features. This kind of connection performs adequately in supervised deep networks because their values are refined during the training. On the other hand, in unsupervised learning, one cannot rely on back-propagation techniques to learn the connections between layers. In this work, we tested four different techniques for connecting the first layer of the network to the second layer on the CIFAR and SVHN datasets and showed that the accuracy can be im- proved up to 3% depending on the technique used. We also showed that learning the connections based on the co-occurrences of the features does not confer an advantage over a random connection table in small networks. This work is helpful to improve the efficiency of connections between the layers of unsupervised deep neural networks

Visual Intelligence and the Terminator

What would it take to replicate the human visual system in synthetic hardware? What software models can we use to implement the mammalian visual system? The goal of our research is a neuromorphic vision system capable of categorizing, tracking and maintaining a visual memory of tens of targets. The application of such system is in smart phones, computers, robotics, autonomous cars, smart appliances, to name a few