instruction:
In this task, you are given the abstract of a research paper. Your task is to generate a summary of this abstract. Your summary should not be very short, but it's better if it's not more than 30 words.
question:
We present Value Propagation (VProp), a set of parameter-efficient differentiable planning modules built on Value Iteration which can successfully be trained using reinforcement learning to solve unseen tasks, has the capability to generalize to larger map sizes, and can learn to navigate in dynamic environments. We show that the modules enable learning to plan when the environment also includes stochastic elements, providing a cost-efficient learning system to build low-level size-invariant planners for a variety of interactive navigation problems. We evaluate on static and dynamic configurations of MazeBase grid-worlds, with randomly generated environments of several different sizes, and on a StarCraft navigation scenario, with more complex dynamics, and pixels as input.
answer:
We present planners based on convnets that are sample-efficient and that generalize to larger instances of navigation and pathfinding problems.


question:
We develop a reinforcement learning based search assistant which can assist users through a set of actions and sequence of interactions to enable them realize their intent. Our approach caters to subjective search where the user is seeking digital assets such as images which is fundamentally different from the tasks which have objective and limited search modalities. Labeled conversational data is generally not available in such search tasks and training the agent through human interactions can be time consuming. We propose a stochastic virtual user which impersonates a real user and can be used to sample user behavior efficiently to train the agent which accelerates the bootstrapping of the agent. We develop A3C algorithm based context preserving architecture which enables the agent to provide contextual assistance to the user. We compare the A3C agent with Q-learning and evaluate its performance on average rewards and state values it obtains with the virtual user in validation episodes. Our experiments show that the agent learns to achieve higher rewards and better states.
answer:
A Reinforcement Learning based conversational search assistant which provides contextual assistance in subjective search (like digital assets).


question:
Many practical reinforcement learning problems contain catastrophic states that the optimal policy visits infrequently or never. Even on toy problems, deep reinforcement learners periodically revisit these states, once they are forgotten under a new policy. In this paper, we introduce intrinsic fear, a learned reward shaping that accelerates deep reinforcement learning and guards oscillating policies against periodic catastrophes. Our approach incorporates a second model trained via supervised learning to predict the probability of imminent catastrophe. This score acts as a penalty on the Q-learning objective. Our theoretical analysis demonstrates that the perturbed objective yields the same average return under strong assumptions and an $\epsilon$-close average return under weaker assumptions. Our analysis also shows robustness to classification errors. Equipped with intrinsic fear, our DQNs solve the toy environments and improve on the Atari games Seaquest, Asteroids, and Freeway.
answer:

Shape reward with intrinsic motivation to avoid catastrophic states and mitigate catastrophic forgetting.