Biological agents have adopted the principle of attention to limit the rate of incoming information from the environment. One question that arises is if an artificial agent has access to only a limited view of its surroundings, how can it control its attention to effectively solve tasks? We propose an approach for learning how to control a hard attention window by maximizing the mutual information between the environment state and the attention location at each step. The agent employs an internal world model to make predictions about its state and focuses attention towards where the predictions may be wrong. Attention is trained jointly with a dynamic memory architecture that stores partial observations and keeps track of the unobserved state. We demonstrate that our approach is effective in predicting the full state from a sequence of partial observations. We also show that the agent's internal representation of the surroundings, a live mental map, can be used for control in two partially observable reinforcement learning tasks. Videos of the trained agent can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/hard-attention-control.
Bipartite Graph Embedding via Mutual Information Maximization
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学网络空间安全学院）；National Computer Network Emergency Response Technical Team/Coordination Center of China（国家计算机网络应急技术处理协调中心）；Xiaomi AI Lab, Xiaomi Inc.（小米公司小米人工智能实验室）
InfoGraph: Unsupervised and Semi-supervised Graph-Level Representation Learning via Mutual Information Maximization
National Taiwan University（国立台湾大学）；Mila-Quebec Institute for Learning Algorithms（米拉-魁北克学习算法研究所）；Harvard University（哈佛大学）；Aalto University（阿尔托大学）；HEC Montreal（蒙特利尔高等商学院）
Towards Dynamic Feature Acquisition on Medical Time Series by Maximizing Conditional Mutual Information
ETH Zurich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）；ETH AI Center（苏黎世联邦理工学院人工智能中心）；Helmholtz AI（亥姆霍兹人工智能研究所）；Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Munich Center for Machine Learning（慕尼黑机器学习中心）
