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NNs Learning to Navigate in Cities Without a Map (arxiv.org)
2 points by gwern on May 10, 2018 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A computer agent learns to steer through real city streets using only street-level photos, with one brain part holding general skills and another storing city-specific landmarks. It reaches destinations kilometers away and can transfer its skills to new cities.

Abstract · Learning to Navigate in Cities Without a Map

Navigating through unstructured environments is a basic capability of intelligent creatures, and thus is of fundamental interest in the study and development of artificial intelligence. Long-range navigation is a complex cognitive task that relies on developing an internal representation of space, grounded by recognisable landmarks and robust visual processing, that can simultaneously support continuous self-localisation ("I am here") and a representation of the goal ("I am going there"). Building upon recent research that applies deep reinforcement learning to maze navigation problems, we present an end-to-end deep reinforcement learning approach that can be applied on a city scale. Recognising that successful navigation relies on integration of general policies with locale-specific knowledge, we propose a dual pathway architecture that allows locale-specific features to be encapsulated, while still enabling transfer to multiple cities. We present an interactive navigation environment that uses Google StreetView for its photographic content and worldwide coverage, and demonstrate that our learning method allows agents to learn to navigate multiple cities and to traverse to target destinations that may be kilometres away. The project webpage http://streetlearn.cc contains a video summarising our research and showing the trained agent in diverse city environments and on the transfer task, the form to request the StreetLearn dataset and links to further resources. The StreetLearn environment code is available at https://github.com/deepmind/streetlearn

Piotr Mirowski, Matthew Koichi Grimes, Mateusz Malinowski, Karl Moritz Hermann, Keith Anderson, Denis Teplyashin, Karen Simonyan, Koray Kavukcuoglu, Andrew Zisserman, Raia Hadsell
arXiv:1804.00168 · cs.AI · submitted Mar 31, 2018 · updated Jan 10, 2019
abstract · pdf · html · 17 pages, 16 figures, published at NeurIPS 2018

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