Paper:
Value iteration networks are an approximation of the value iteration (VI) algorithm implemented with convolutional neural networks to make VI fully differentiable. In this work, we study these networks in the context of robot motion planning, with a focus on applications to planetary rovers. The key challenging task in learningbased motion planning is to learn a transformation from terrain observations to a suitable navigation reward function. In order to deal with complex terrain observations and policy learning, we propose a value iteration recurrence, referred to as the soft value iteration network (SVIN). SVIN is designed to produce more effective training gradients through the value iteration network. It relies on a soft policy model, where the policy is represented with a probability distribution over all possible actions, rather than a deterministic policy that returns only the best action. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in robot motion planning scenarios. In particular, we study the application of SVIN to very challenging problems in planetary rover navigation and present early training results on data gathered by the Curiosity rover that is currently operating on Mars.

Review:
Summary:
The submission proposes a simple modification to the Value Iteration Networks (VIN) method of Tamar et al., basically consisting of assuming a stochastic policy and replacing the max-over-actions in value iteration with an expectation that weights actions proportional to their exponentiated Q-values. Since this change removes the main nondifferentiability of VINs, it is hypothesized that the resulting method will be easier to train than VINs, and experiments seem to support this hypothesis.
Pros:
+ The proposed modification to VIN is simple, well-motivated, and addresses the nondifferentiability of VIN
+ Experiments on synthetic data demonstrate a significant improvement over the standard VIN method
Cons:
+ Some important references are missing (e.g., MaxEnt IOC with deep-learned features)
+ Although intuitive, more detailed justification could be provided for replacing the max-over-actions with an exponentially-weighted average
+ No baselines are provided for the experiments with real data
+ All the experimental scenarios are fairly simple (2D grid-worlds with discrete actions, 1-channel input features)
The proposed method is simple, well-motivated, and addresses a real concern in VINs, which is their nondifferentiability. Although many of the nonlinearities used in CNNs for computer vision applications are nondifferentiable, the theoretical grounds for using these in conjunction with gradient-based optimization is obviously questionable. Despite this, they are widely used for such applications because of strong empirical results showing that such nonlinearities are beneficial in image-processing applications. However, it would be incorrect to assume that because such nonlinearities work for image processing, they are also beneficial in the context of unrolling value iteration.
Replacing the max-over-actions with an exponentially-weighted average is an intuitively well-motivated alternative because, as the authors note, it incorporates the values of suboptimal actions during the training procedure. We would therefore expect better or faster training, as the values of these suboptimal actions can be updated more frequently. The (admittedly limited) experiments bear out this hypothesis.
Perhaps the most significant downside of this work is that it fails to acknowledge prior work in the RL and IOC literature that result in similar  “smoothed” or “softmax" Bellman updates: in particular, MaxEnt IOC [A] and linearly-solvable MDPs [B] both fall in this category. Both of those papers clearly derive approximate Bellman equations from modified optimal control principles; although I believe this is also possible for the proposed update (Eq. 11), along the lines of the sentence after Eq. 11, this should be made more explicit/rigorous, and the result compared to [A,B].
Another important missing reference is [C], which learned cost maps with deep neural networks in a MaxEnt IOC framework. As far as I can tell, the application is identical to that of the present paper, and [C] may have some advantages: for instance, [C] features a principled, fully-differentiable training objective while also avoiding having to backprop through the inference procedure, as in VIN. Again, this raises the question of how the proposed method compares to MaxEnt IOC, both theoretically and experimentally.
The experiments are also a bit lacking in a few ways. First, a baseline is only provided for the experiments with synthetic data. Although that experiment shows a promising, significant advantage over VIN, the lack of baselines for the experiment with real data is disappointing. Furthermore, the setting for the experiments is fairly simple, consisting of a grid-world with 1-channel input features. The setting is simple enough that even shallow IOC methods (e.g., [D]) would probably perform well; however, the deep IOC methods of [C] is also applicable and should probably also be evaluated as a baseline.
In summary, although the method proposes an intuitively reasonable modification to VIN that seems to outperform it in limited experiments, the submission fails to acknowledge important related work (especially the MaxEnt IOC methods of [A,D]) that may have significant theoretical and practical advantages. Unfortunately, I believe the original VIN paper also failed to articulate the precise advantages of VIN over this prior work—which is not to say there are none, but it is clear that VINs applied to problems as simple as the one considered here have real competitors in prior work. Clarifying this connection, both theoretically and experimentally, would make this work much stronger and would be a valuable contribution to the literature.
[A] Ziebart, Brian D. Modeling purposeful adaptive behavior with the principle of maximum causal entropy. Carnegie Mellon University, 2010.
[B] Todorov, Emanuel. "Linearly-solvable Markov decision problems." Advances in neural information processing systems. 2007.
[C] Wulfmeier et al. Watch This: Scalable Cost-Function Learning for Path Planning in Urban Environments. IROS 2016
[D] Ratliff, Nathan D., David Silver, and J. Andrew Bagnell. "Learning to search: Functional gradient techniques for imitation learning." Autonomous Robots 27.1 (2009): 25-53.