Double Graph Attention Networks for Visual Semantic Navigation

Artificial Intelligence (AI) based on knowledge graphs has been invested in realizing human intelligence like thinking, learning, and logical reasoning. It is a great promise to make AI-based systems not only intelligent but also knowledgeable. In this paper, we investigate knowledge graph based visual semantic navigation using deep reinforcement learning, where an agent reasons actions against targets specified by text words in indoor scenes. The agent perceives its surroundings through egocentric RGB views and learns via trial-and-error. The fundamental problem of visual navigation is efficient learning across different targets and scenes. To obtain an empirical model, we propose a spatial attention model with knowledge graphs, DGVN, which combines both semantic information about observed objects and spatial information about their locations. Our spatial attention model is constructed based on interactions between a 3D global graph and local graphs. The two graphs we adopted encode the spatial relationships between objects and are expected to guide policy search effectively. With the knowledge graph and its robust feature representation using graph convolutional networks, we demonstrate that our agent is able to infer a more plausible attention mechanism for decision-making. Under several experimental metrics, our attention model is shown to achieve superior navigation performance in the AI2-THOR environment.