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Generalized Value Iteration Networks: Life Beyond Lattices

Machine Learning 2017-10-27 v2 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a generalized value iteration network (GVIN), which is an end-to-end neural network planning module. GVIN emulates the value iteration algorithm by using a novel graph convolution operator, which enables GVIN to learn and plan on irregular spatial graphs. We propose three novel differentiable kernels as graph convolution operators and show that the embedding based kernel achieves the best performance. We further propose episodic Q-learning, an improvement upon traditional n-step Q-learning that stabilizes training for networks that contain a planning module. Lastly, we evaluate GVIN on planning problems in 2D mazes, irregular graphs, and real-world street networks, showing that GVIN generalizes well for both arbitrary graphs and unseen graphs of larger scale and outperforms a naive generalization of VIN (discretizing a spatial graph into a 2D image).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1706.02416,
  title  = {Generalized Value Iteration Networks: Life Beyond Lattices},
  author = {Sufeng Niu and Siheng Chen and Hanyu Guo and Colin Targonski and Melissa C. Smith and Jelena Kovačević},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1706.02416},
  year   = {2017}
}

Comments

14 pages, conference

R2 v1 2026-06-22T20:12:30.777Z