We examine the problem of joint top-down active search of multiple objects under interaction, e.g., person riding a bicycle, cups held by the table, etc.. Such objects under interaction often can provide contextual cues to each other to facilitate more efficient search. By treating each detector as an agent, we present the first collaborative multi-agent deep reinforcement learning algorithm to learn the optimal policy for joint active object localization, which effectively exploits such beneficial contextual information. We learn inter-agent communication through cross connections with gates between the Q-networks, which is facilitated by a novel multi-agent deep Q-learning algorithm with joint exploitation sampling. We verify our proposed method on multiple object detection benchmarks. Not only does our model help to improve the performance of state-of-the-art active localization models, it also reveals interesting co-detection patterns that are intuitively interpretable.
Our proposal share the idea of utilizing back-propagation or designing differentiable communication channels but have different cross network structure with gates and a novel joint sampling Q-learning method. Specifically, our cross network structure used explicit gating mechanism to allow a specific agent to be responsible for certain actions. This is motivated by the problem of object search where one agent usually has primary contribution to the policy. Also different from the training of the unfolded RNNs as in @cite_5 , where long range back-propagation may be less effective, our joint sampling design facilitates immediate updates of the parameters and could be easily incorporated into the deep Q-learning algorithm by introducing an auxiliary concept of virtual agent implementation.
@cite_5
2507592741 2395575420 2963000099 2765977864
When rewards are sparse and action spaces large, Q-learning with @math -greedy exploration can be inefficient. This poses problems for otherwise promising applications such as task-oriented dialogue systems, where the primary reward signal, indicating successful completion of a task, requires a complex sequence of appropriate actions. Under these circumstances, a randomly exploring agent might never stumble upon a successful outcome in reasonable time. We present two techniques that significantly improve the efficiency of exploration for deep Q-learning agents in dialogue systems. First, we introduce an exploration technique based on Thompson sampling, drawing Monte Carlo samples from a Bayes-by-backprop neural network, demonstrating marked improvement over common approaches such as @math -greedy and Boltzmann exploration. Second, we show that spiking the replay buffer with experiences from a small number of successful episodes, as are easy to harvest for dialogue tasks, can make Q-learning feasible when it might otherwise fail. We consider the problem of multiple agents sensing and acting in environments with the goal of maximising their shared utility. In these environments, agents must learn communication protocols in order to share information that is needed to solve the tasks. By embracing deep neural networks, we are able to demonstrate end-to-end learning of protocols in complex environments inspired by communication riddles and multi-agent computer vision problems with partial observability. We propose two approaches for learning in these domains: Reinforced Inter-Agent Learning (RIAL) and Differentiable Inter-Agent Learning (DIAL). The former uses deep Q-learning, while the latter exploits the fact that, during learning, agents can backpropagate error derivatives through (noisy) communication channels. Hence, this approach uses centralised learning but decentralised execution. Our experiments introduce new environments for studying the learning of communication protocols and present a set of engineering innovations that are essential for success in these domains. We consider the problem of multiple agents sensing and acting in environments with the goal of maximising their shared utility. In these environments, agents must learn communication protocols in order to share information that is needed to solve the tasks. By embracing deep neural networks, we are able to demonstrate end-to-end learning of protocols in complex environments inspired by communication riddles and multi-agent computer vision problems with partial observability. We propose two approaches for learning in these domains: Reinforced Inter-Agent Learning (RIAL) and Differentiable Inter-Agent Learning (DIAL). The former uses deep Q-learning, while the latter exploits the fact that, during learning, agents can backpropagate error derivatives through (noisy) communication channels. Hence, this approach uses centralised learning but decentralised execution. Our experiments introduce new environments for studying the learning of communication protocols and present a set of engineering innovations that are essential for success in these domains. This paper proposes a novel deep framework of multi-networks joint learning for large-scale cross-modal retrieval. For most existing cross-modal methods, the processes of training and testing don't care about the problem of memory requirement. Hence, they are generally implemented on small-scale data. Moreover, they take feature learning and latent space embedding as two separate steps which cannot generate specific features to accord with the cross-modal task. To alleviate the problems, we first disintegrate the multiplication and inverse of some big matrices, usually involved in existing methods, into that of many sub-matrices. Each sub-matrix is targeted to dispose one pair of image-sentence, for which we further design a novel sampling strategy to select the most representative samples to construct the cross-modal ranking loss and within-modal discriminant loss functions. By this way, the proposed model consumes less memory each time such that it can scale to large-scale data. Furthermore, we apply the proposed discriminative ranking loss to effectively unify two heterogenous networks, deep residual network for images and long short-term memory for sentences, into an end-to-end deep learning architecture. Finally, we can simultaneously achieve specific features adapting to cross-modal task and learn a shared latent space for images and sentences. Extensive evaluations on two large-scale cross-modal datasets show that the proposed method brings substantial improvements over other state-of-the-art ranking methods.