Progressive Convolutional Neural Network for Incremental Learning

In this paper, we present a novel incremental learning technique to solve the catastrophic forgetting problem observed in the CNN architectures. We used a progressive deep neural network to incrementally learn new classes while keeping the performance of the network unchanged on old classes. The incremental training requires us to train the network only for new classes and fine-tune the final fully connected layer, without needing to train the entire network again, which significantly reduces the training time. We evaluate the proposed architecture extensively on image classification task using Fashion MNIST, CIFAR-100 and ImageNet-1000 datasets. Experimental results show that the proposed network architecture not only alleviates catastrophic forgetting but can also leverages prior knowledge via lateral connections to previously learned classes and their features. In addition, the proposed scheme is easily scalable and does not require structural changes on the network trained on the old task, which are highly required properties in embedded systems.

Deep Reinforcement Learning for Indoor Mobile Robot Path Planning

This paper proposes a novel incremental training mode to address the problem of Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) based path planning for a mobile robot. Firstly, we evaluate the related graphic search algorithms and Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms in a lightweight 2D environment. Then, we design the algorithm based on DRL, including observation states, reward function, network structure as well as parameters optimization, in a 2D environment to circumvent the time-consuming works for a 3D environment. We transfer the designed algorithm to a simple 3D environment for retraining to obtain the converged network parameters, including the weights and biases of deep neural network (DNN), etc. Using these parameters as initial values, we continue to train the model in a complex 3D environment. To improve the generalization of the model in different scenes, we propose to combine the DRL algorithm Twin Delayed Deep Deterministic policy gradients (TD3) with the traditional global path planning algorithm Probabilistic Roadmap (PRM) as a novel path planner (PRM+TD3). Experimental results show that the incremental training mode can notably improve the development efficiency. Moreover, the PRM+TD3 path planner can effectively improve the generalization of the model.