Title
MGRL: Graph neural network based inference in a Markov network with reinforcement learning for visual navigation
Abstract
Visual navigation is an essential task for indoor robots and usually uses the map as assistance to providing global information for the agent. Because the traditional maps match the environments, the map-based and map-building-based navigation methods are limited in the new environments for obtaining maps. Although the deep reinforcement learning navigation method, utilizing the non-map-based navigation technique, achieves satisfactory performance, it lacks the interpretability and the global view of the environment. Therefore, we propose a novel abstract map for the deep reinforcement learning navigation method with better global relative position information and more reasonable interpretability. The abstract map is modeled as a Markov network which is used for explicitly representing the regularity of objects arrangement, influenced by people activities in different environments. Besides, a knowledge graph is utilized to initialize the structure of the Markov network, as providing the prior structure for the model and reducing the difficulty of model learning. Then, a graph neural network is adopted for probability inference in the Markov network. Furthermore, the update of the abstract map, including the knowledge graph structure and the parameters of the graph neural network, are combined into an end-to-end learning process trained by a reinforcement learning method. Finally, experiments in the AI2THOR framework and the physical environment indicate that our algorithm greatly improves the success rate of navigation in case of new environments, thus confirming the good generalization.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1016/j.neucom.2020.07.091
Neurocomputing
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Visual navigation,Graph neural network,Markov network,Reinforcement learning,Probabilistic graph model,Knowledge graph
Journal
421
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
0925-2312
0
0.34
References 
Authors
11
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Yi Lu1812.85
Yaran Chen2526.66
Dongbin Zhao3102582.21
Dong Li411548.55