CommNets: Communicating Neural Network Architectures for Resource Constrained Systems

Applications that require heterogeneous sensor deployments continue to face practical challenges owing to resource constraints within their operating environments (i.e. energy efficiency, computational power and reliability). This has motivated the need for effective ways of selecting a sensing strategy that maximizes detection accuracy for events of interest using available resources and data-driven approaches. Inspired by those limitations, we ask a fundamental question: whether state-of-the-art Recurrent Neural Networks can observe different series of data and communicate their hidden states to collectively solve an objective in a distributed fashion. We realize our answer by conducting a series of systematic analyses of a Communicating Recurrent Neural Network architecture on varying time-steps, objective functions and number of nodes. The experimental setup we employ models tasks synonymous with those in Wireless Sensor Networks. Our contributions show that Recurrent Neural Networks can communicate through their hidden states and we achieve promising results.