State-of-the-art offline handwriting text recognition systems tend to use neural networks and therefore require a large amount of annotated data to be trained. In order to partially satisfy this requirement, we propose a system based on Generative Adversarial Networks (GAN) to produce synthetic images of handwritten words. We use bidirectional LSTM recurrent layers to get an embedding of the word to be rendered, and we feed it to the generator network. We also modify the standard GAN by adding an auxiliary network for text recognition. The system is then trained with a balanced combination of an adversarial loss and a CTC loss. Together, these extensions to GAN enable to control the textual content of the generated word images. We obtain realistic images on both French and Arabic datasets, and we show that integrating these synthetic images into the existing training data of a text recognition system can slightly enhance its performance.

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In video games, \non-player characters (NPCs) are used to enhance the players' experience in a variety of ways, e.g., as enemies, allies, or innocent bystanders. A crucial component of NPCs is navigation, which allows them to move from one point to another on the map. The most popular approach for NPC navigation in the video game industry is to use a navigation mesh (NavMesh), which is a graph representation of the map, with nodes and edges indicating traversable areas. Unfortunately, complex navigation abilities that extend the character's capacity for movement, e.g., grappling hooks, jetpacks, teleportation, or double-jumps, increase the complexity of the NavMesh, making it intractable in many practical scenarios. Game designers are thus constrained to only add abilities that can be handled by a NavMesh. As an alternative to the NavMesh, we propose to use Deep Reinforcement Learning (Deep RL) to learn how to navigate 3D maps in video games using any navigation ability. We test our approach on complex 3D environments that are notably an order of magnitude larger than maps typically used in the Deep RL literature. One of these environments is from a recently released AAA video game called Hyper Scape. We find that our approach performs surprisingly well, achieving at least 90% success rate in a variety of scenarios using complex navigation abilities.

In video games, non-player characters (NPCs) are used to enhance the players' experience in a variety of ways, e.g., as enemies, allies, or innocent bystanders. A crucial component of NPCs is navigation, which allows them to move from one point to another on the map. The most popular approach for NPC navigation in the video game industry is to use a navigation mesh (NavMesh), which is a graph representation of the map, with nodes and edges indicating traversable areas. Unfortunately, complex navigation abilities that extend the character's capacity for movement, e.g., grappling hooks, jetpacks, teleportation, or double-jumps, increases the complexity of the NavMesh, making it intractable in many practical scenarios. Game designers are thus constrained to only add abilities that can be handled by a NavMesh if they want to have NPC navigation. As an alternative, we propose to use Deep Reinforcement Learning (Deep RL) to learn how to navigate 3D maps using any navigation ability. We test our approach on complex 3D environments in the Unity game engine that are notably an order of magnitude larger than maps typically used in the Deep RL literature. One of these maps is directly modeled after a Ubisoft AAA game. We find that our approach performs surprisingly well, achieving at least 90% success rate on all tested scenarios. A video of our results is available at https://youtu.be/WFIf9Wwlq8M. * equal contribution Preprint. Under review.