Vision-Based Deep Reinforcement Learning of UAV Autonomous Navigation Using Privileged Information

The capability of UAVs for efficient autonomous navigation and obstacle avoidance in complex and unknown environments is critical for applications in agricultural irrigation, disaster relief and logistics. In this paper, we propose the DPRL (Distributed Privileged Reinforcement Learning) navigation algorithm, an end-to-end policy designed to address the challenge of high-speed autonomous UAV navigation under partially observable environmental conditions. Our approach combines deep reinforcement learning with privileged learning to overcome the impact of observation data corruption caused by partial observability. We leverage an asymmetric Actor-Critic architecture to provide the agent with privileged information during training, which enhances the model's perceptual capabilities. Additionally, we present a multi-agent exploration strategy across diverse environments to accelerate experience collection, which in turn expedites model convergence. We conducted extensive simulations across various scenarios, benchmarking our DPRL algorithm against the state-of-the-art navigation algorithms. The results consistently demonstrate the superior performance of our algorithm in terms of flight efficiency, robustness and overall success rate.

Multi-View Collaborative Network Embedding

Real-world networks often exist with multiple views, where each view describes one type of interaction among a common set of nodes. For example, on a video-sharing network, while two user nodes are linked if they have common favorite videos in one view, they can also be linked in another view if they share common subscribers. Unlike traditional single-view networks, multiple views maintain different semantics to complement each other. In this paper, we propose MANE, a multi-view network embedding approach to learn low-dimensional representations. Similar to existing studies, MANE hinges on diversity and collaboration - while diversity enables views to maintain their individual semantics, collaboration enables views to work together. However, we also discover a novel form of second-order collaboration that has not been explored previously, and further unify it into our framework to attain superior node representations. Furthermore, as each view often has varying importance w.r.t. different nodes, we propose MANE+, an attention-based extension of MANE to model node-wise view importance. Finally, we conduct comprehensive experiments on three public, real-world multi-view networks, and the results demonstrate that our models consistently outperform state-of-the-art approaches.