Wang Hu

Hu Wang, Qi Wu, Chunhua Shen

Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) requires an agent to find a specified spot in an unseen environment by following natural language instructions. Dominant methods based on supervised learning clone expert's behaviours and thus perform better on seen environments, while showing restricted performance on unseen ones. Reinforcement Learning (RL) based models show better generalisation ability but have issues as well, requiring large amount of manual reward engineering is one of which. In this paper, we introduce a Soft Expert Reward Learning (SERL) model to overcome the reward engineering designing and generalisation problems of the VLN task. Our proposed method consists of two complementary components: Soft Expert Distillation (SED) module encourages agents to behave like an expert as much as possible, but in a soft fashion; Self Perceiving (SP) module targets at pushing the agent towards the final destination as fast as possible. Empirically, we evaluate our model on the VLN seen, unseen and test splits and the model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods on most of the evaluation metrics.

Yuan Fu, Hu Wang, Meng-Zhu Yang

Differential evolution (DE) has competitive performance on constrained optimization problems (COPs), which targets at searching for global optimal solution without violating the constraints. Generally, researchers pay more attention on avoiding violating the constraints than better objective function value. To achieve the aim of searching the feasible solutions accurately, an adaptive population size method and an adaptive mutation strategy are proposed in the paper. The adaptive population method is similar to a state switch which controls the exploring state and exploiting state according to the situation of feasible solution search. The novel mutation strategy is designed to enhance the effect of status switch based on adaptive population size, which is useful to reduce the constraint violations. Moreover, a mechanism based on multipopulation competition and a more precise method of constraint control are adopted in the proposed algorithm. The proposed differential evolution algorithm, APDE-NS, is evaluated on the benchmark problems from CEC2017 constrained real parameter optimization. The experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method is competitive compared to other state-of-the-art algorithms.