We introduce a theory-driven mechanism for learning a neural network model that performs generative topology design in one shot given a problem setting, circumventing the conventional iterative process that computational design tasks usually entail. The proposed mechanism can lead to machines that quickly response to new design requirements based on its knowledge accumulated through past experiences of design generation. Achieving such a mechanism through supervised learning would require an impractically large amount of problem-solution pairs for training, due to the known limitation of deep neural networks in knowledge generalization. To this end, we introduce an interaction between a student (the neural network) and a teacher (the optimality conditions underlying topology optimization): The student learns from existing data and is tested on unseen problems. Deviation of the student's solutions from the optimality conditions is quantified, and used for choosing new data points to learn from. We call this learning mechanism "theory-driven", as it explicitly uses domain-specific theories to guide the learning, thus distinguishing itself from purely data-driven supervised learning. We show through a compliance minimization problem that the proposed learning mechanism leads to topology generation with near-optimal structural compliance, much improved from standard supervised learning under the same computational budget.
Lastly, the proposed learning method is aligned with the recent surge of machine learning techniques with integrated physics knowledge. Among this body of work, @cite_34 proposes to learn a neural network for predicting intrinsic physical properties of objects with the assistance of a physical simulator that computes object interactions based on the predicted properties. @cite_44 developed an encoder that computes object positions and velocities from images of objects, by enforcing these properties to be compliant with common sense. Similarly, @cite_16 proposed a physics-based regularization to learn object trajectories and human movements from videos. Instead of being taught physics, @cite_1 demonstrated a grounded way for machines to acquire an intuition of the physical world through reinforcement learning. Our paper is similar to those learning mechanisms with injected physics constraints, while employing adaptive sampling rather than batch-mode training to avoid expensive simulations. In addition, the use of theory-driven constraints for learning also aligns our method with Q learning, where values are learned to satisfy Bellman's equation.
@cite_44 @cite_34 @cite_1 @cite_16
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This paper presents a novel learning framework for training boosting cascade based object detector from large scale dataset. The framework is derived from the well-known Viola-Jones (VJ) framework but distinguished by three key differences. First, the proposed framework adopts multi-dimensional SURF features instead of single dimensional Haar features to describe local patches. In this way, the number of used local patches can be reduced from hundreds of thousands to several hundreds. Second, it adopts logistic regression as weak classifier for each local patch instead of decision trees in the VJ framework. Third, we adopt AUC as a single criterion for the convergence test during cascade training rather than the two trade-off criteria (false-positive-rate and hit-rate) in the VJ framework. The benefit is that the false-positive-rate can be adaptive among different cascade stages, and thus yields much faster convergence speed of SURF cascade. Combining these points together, the proposed approach has three good properties. First, the boosting cascade can be trained very efficiently. Experiments show that the proposed approach can train object detectors from billions of negative samples within one hour even on personal computers. Second, the built detector is comparable to the state-of-the-art algorithm not only on the accuracy but also on the processing speed. Third, the built detector is small in model-size due to short cascade stages. In this paper, we study the problem of learning vision-based dynamic manipulation skills using a scalable reinforcement learning approach. We study this problem in the context of grasping, a longstanding challenge in robotic manipulation. In contrast to static learning behaviors that choose a grasp point and then execute the desired grasp, our method enables closed-loop vision-based control, whereby the robot continuously updates its grasp strategy based on the most recent observations to optimize long-horizon grasp success. To that end, we introduce QT-Opt, a scalable self-supervised vision-based reinforcement learning framework that can leverage over 580k real-world grasp attempts to train a deep neural network Q-function with over 1.2M parameters to perform closed-loop, real-world grasping that generalizes to 96 grasp success on unseen objects. Aside from attaining a very high success rate, our method exhibits behaviors that are quite distinct from more standard grasping systems: using only RGB vision-based perception from an over-the-shoulder camera, our method automatically learns regrasping strategies, probes objects to find the most effective grasps, learns to reposition objects and perform other non-prehensile pre-grasp manipulations, and responds dynamically to disturbances and perturbations. Many state-of-the-art approaches for object recognition reduce the problem to a 0-1 classification task. This allows one to leverage sophisticated machine learning techniques for training classifiers from labeled examples. However, these models are typically trained independently for each class using positive and negative examples cropped from images. At test-time, various post-processing heuristics such as non-maxima suppression (NMS) are required to reconcile multiple detections within and between different classes for each image. Though crucial to good performance on benchmarks, this post-processing is usually defined heuristically. We introduce a unified model for multi-class object recognition that casts the problem as a structured prediction task. Rather than predicting a binary label for each image window independently, our model simultaneously predicts a structured labeling of the entire image (Fig. 1). Our model learns statistics that capture the spatial arrangements of various object classes in real images, both in terms of which arrangements to suppress through NMS and which arrangements to favor through spatial co-occurrence statistics. We formulate parameter estimation in our model as a max-margin learning problem. Given training images with ground-truth object locations, we show how to formulate learning as a convex optimization problem. We employ the cutting plane algorithm of (Mach. Learn. 2009) to efficiently learn a model from thousands of training images. We show state-of-the-art results on the PASCAL VOC benchmark that indicate the benefits of learning a global model encapsulating the spatial layout of multiple object classes (a preliminary version of this work appeared in ICCV 2009, , IEEE international conference on computer vision, 2009). Two less addressed issues of deep reinforcement learning are (1) lack of generalization capability to new target goals, and (2) data inefficiency i.e., the model requires several (and often costly) episodes of trial and error to converge, which makes it impractical to be applied to real-world scenarios. In this paper, we address these two issues and apply our model to the task of target-driven visual navigation. To address the first issue, we propose an actor-critic model whose policy is a function of the goal as well as the current state, which allows to better generalize. To address the second issue, we propose AI2-THOR framework, which provides an environment with high-quality 3D scenes and physics engine. Our framework enables agents to take actions and interact with objects. Hence, we can collect a huge number of training samples efficiently. We show that our proposed method (1) converges faster than the state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning methods, (2) generalizes across targets and across scenes, (3) generalizes to a real robot scenario with a small amount of fine-tuning (although the model is trained in simulation), (4) is end-to-end trainable and does not need feature engineering, feature matching between frames or 3D reconstruction of the environment. The supplementary video can be accessed at the following link: this https URL