Human navigation in built environments depends on symbolic spatial information which has unrealised potential to enhance robot navigation capabilities. Information sources such as labels, signs, maps, planners, spoken directions, and navigational gestures communicate a wealth of spatial information to the navigators of built environments; a wealth of information that robots typically ignore. We present a robot navigation system that uses the same symbolic spatial information employed by humans to purposefully navigate in unseen built environments with a level of performance comparable to humans. The navigation system uses a novel data structure called the abstract map to imagine malleable spatial models for unseen spaces from spatial symbols. Sensorimotor perceptions from a robot are then employed to provide purposeful navigation to symbolic goal locations in the unseen environment. We show how a dynamic system can be used to create malleable spatial models for the abstract map, and provide an open source implementation to encourage future work in the area of symbolic navigation. Symbolic navigation performance of humans and a robot is evaluated in a real-world built environment. The paper concludes with a qualitative analysis of human navigation strategies, providing further insights into how the symbolic navigation capabilities of robots in unseen built environments can be improved in the future.
InnoPeak Technology, Inc.（InnoPeak科技公司）；Monash University（莫纳什大学）；The University of Adelaide（阿德莱德大学）
We propose a robotic learning system for autonomous exploration and navigation in unexplored environments. We are motivated by the idea that even an unseen environment may be familiar from previous experiences in similar environments. The core of our method, therefore, is a process for building, predicting, and using probabilistic layout graphs for assisting goal-based visual navigation. We describe a navigation system that uses the layout predictions to satisfy high-level goals (e.g. "go to the kitchen") more rapidly and accurately than the prior art. Our proposed navigation framework compris…
University of California, Santa Cruz（加州大学圣克鲁兹分校）；University of California, Santa Barbara（加州大学圣塔芭芭拉分校）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）；Amazon（亚马逊）
Recent research efforts enable study for natural language grounded navigation in photo-realistic environments, e.g., following natural language instructions or dialog. However, existing methods tend to overfit training data in seen environments and fail to generalize well in previously unseen environments. To close the gap between seen and unseen environments, we aim at learning a generalized navigation model from two novel perspectives: (1) we introduce a multitask navigation model that can be seamlessly trained on both Vision-Language Navigation (VLN) and Navigation from Dialog History (NDH)…
Vision and language navigation (VLN) is a challenging visually-grounded language understanding task. Given a natural language navigation instruction, a visual agent interacts with a graph-based environment equipped with panorama images and tries to follow the described route. Most prior work has been conducted in indoor scenarios where best results were obtained for navigation on routes that are similar to the training routes, with sharp drops in performance when testing on unseen environments. We focus on VLN in outdoor scenarios and find that in contrast to indoor VLN, most of the gain in ou…
UC Santa Barbara（加州大学圣巴巴拉分校）；McGill University（麦吉尔大学）；Peking University（北京大学）；UC Santa Cruz（加州大学圣克鲁兹分校）
Vision-Language Navigation requires the agent to follow natural language instructions to reach a specific target. The large discrepancy between seen and unseen environments makes it challenging for the agent to generalize well. Previous studies propose data augmentation methods to mitigate the data bias explicitly or implicitly and provide improvements in generalization. However, they try to memorize augmented trajectories and ignore the distribution shifts under unseen environments at test time. In this paper, we propose an Unseen Discrepancy Anticipating Vision and Language Navigation (DAVIS…
In the Vision-and-Language Navigation task, the embodied agent follows linguistic instructions and navigates to a specific goal. It is important in many practical scenarios and has attracted extensive attention from both computer vision and robotics communities. However, most existing works only use RGB images but neglect the 3D semantic information of the scene. To this end, we develop a novel self-supervised training framework to encode the voxel-level 3D semantic reconstruction into a 3D semantic representation. Specifically, a region query task is designed as the pretext task, which predic…
Tufts University（塔夫茨大学）；Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence（博世人工智能中心）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）
Generalisation to unseen contexts remains a challenge for embodied navigation agents. In the context of semantic audio-visual navigation (SAVi) tasks, the notion of generalisation should include both generalising to unseen indoor visual scenes as well as generalising to unheard sounding objects. However, previous SAVi task definitions do not include evaluation conditions on truly novel sounding objects, resorting instead to evaluating agents on unheard sound clips of known objects; meanwhile, previous SAVi methods do not include explicit mechanisms for incorporating domain knowledge about obje…
UC Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Facebook AI Research（Facebook人工智能研究院）；Technion（以色列理工学院）；OpenAI
We introduce a new memory architecture, Bayesian Relational Memory (BRM), to improve the generalization ability for semantic visual navigation agents in unseen environments, where an agent is given a semantic target to navigate towards. BRM takes the form of a probabilistic relation graph over semantic entities (e.g., room types), which allows (1) capturing the layout prior from training environments, i.e., prior knowledge, (2) estimating posterior layout at test time, i.e., memory update, and (3) efficient planning for navigation, altogether. We develop a BRM agent consisting of a BRM module …
The ability to navigate from visual observations in unfamiliar environments is a core component of intelligent agents and an ongoing challenge for Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL). Street View can be a sensible testbed for such RL agents, because it provides real-world photographic imagery at ground level, with diverse street appearances; it has been made into an interactive environment called StreetLearn and used for research on navigation. However, goal-driven street navigation agents have not so far been able to transfer to unseen areas without extensive retraining, and relying on simulatio…
Recent work in Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) has presented two environmental paradigms with differing realism -- the standard VLN setting built on topological environments where navigation is abstracted away, and the VLN-CE setting where agents must navigate continuous 3D environments using low-level actions. Despite sharing the high-level task and even the underlying instruction-path data, performance on VLN-CE lags behind VLN significantly. In this work, we explore this gap by transferring an agent from the abstract environment of VLN to the continuous environment of VLN-CE. We find t…
Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington（保罗·G·艾伦计算机科学与工程学院，华盛顿大学）；NVIDIA（英伟达）
End-to-end learning for autonomous navigation has received substantial attention recently as a promising method for reducing modeling error. However, its data complexity, especially around generalization to unseen environments, is high. We introduce a novel image-based autonomous navigation technique that leverages in policy structure using the Riemannian Motion Policy (RMP) framework for deep learning of vehicular control. We design a deep neural network to predict control point RMPs of the vehicle from visual images, from which the optimal control commands can be computed analytically. We sh…
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 desi…
We introduce a new memory architecture for navigation in previously unseen environments, inspired by landmark-based navigation in animals. The proposed semi-parametric topological memory (SPTM) consists of a (non-parametric) graph with nodes corresponding to locations in the environment and a (parametric) deep network capable of retrieving nodes from the graph based on observations. The graph stores no metric information, only connectivity of locations corresponding to the nodes. We use SPTM as a planning module in a navigation system. Given only 5 minutes of footage of a previously unseen maz…
Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) requires an agent to follow natural-language instructions, explore the given environments, and reach the desired target locations. These step-by-step navigational instructions are crucial when the agent is navigating new environments about which it has no prior knowledge. Most recent works that study VLN observe a significant performance drop when tested on unseen environments (i.e., environments not used in training), indicating that the neural agent models are highly biased towards training environments. Although this issue is considered as one of the maj…
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；SRI International（SRI国际）
This paper presents a novel approach for the Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) task in continuous 3D environments, which requires an autonomous agent to follow natural language instructions in unseen environments. Existing end-to-end learning-based VLN methods struggle at this task as they focus mostly on utilizing raw visual observations and lack the semantic spatio-temporal reasoning capabilities which is crucial in generalizing to new environments. In this regard, we present a hybrid transformer-recurrence model which focuses on combining classical semantic mapping techniques with a lear…
Distilling LLM Prior to Flow Model for Generalizable Agent's Imagination in Object Goal Navigation
Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Key Laboratory of Machine Intelligence and Advanced Computing, Ministry of Education（教育部机器智能与高级计算重点实验室）
Australian National University（澳大利亚国立大学）；University of Technology Sydney（悉尼科技大学）
Target-driven visual navigation aims at navigating an agent towards a given target based on the observation of the agent. In this task, it is critical to learn informative visual representation and robust navigation policy. Aiming to improve these two components, this paper proposes three complementary techniques, object relation graph (ORG), trial-driven imitation learning (IL), and a memory-augmented tentative policy network (TPN). ORG improves visual representation learning by integrating object relationships, including category closeness and spatial correlations, e.g., a TV usually co-occu…
Unseen from Seen: Rewriting Observation-Instruction Using Foundation Models for Augmenting Vision-Language Navigation
Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学深圳校区）；Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Hunan Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Institute Company Ltd.（湖南人工智能与机器人研究院有限公司）；Huawei Noah’s Ark Lab（华为诺亚实验室）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）
We consider the problem of object goal navigation in unseen environments. Solving this problem requires learning of contextual semantic priors, a challenging endeavour given the spatial and semantic variability of indoor environments. Current methods learn to implicitly encode these priors through goal-oriented navigation policy functions operating on spatial representations that are limited to the agent's observable areas. In this work, we propose a novel framework that actively learns to generate semantic maps outside the field of view of the agent and leverages the uncertainty over the sema…
LookStep: Efficient Vision-Language Navigation with Linguistic Foresight and Event Driven Memory
National Key Laboratory for Novel Software Technology, Nanjing University（南京大学计算机软件新技术国家重点实验室）；School of Artificial Intelligence, Nanjing University（南京大学人工智能学院）；TermiTech（TermiTech公司）；School of Intelligence Science and Technology, Nanjing University（南京大学智能科学与技术学院）
University of Pennsylvania（宾夕法尼亚大学）；The University of Chicago（芝加哥大学）
We consider the problems of exploration and point-goal navigation in previously unseen environments, where the spatial complexity of indoor scenes and partial observability constitute these tasks challenging. We argue that learning occupancy priors over indoor maps provides significant advantages towards addressing these problems. To this end, we present a novel planning framework that first learns to generate occupancy maps beyond the field-of-view of the agent, and second leverages the model uncertainty over the generated areas to formulate path selection policies for each task of interest. …
Robots moving safely and in a socially compliant manner in dynamic human environments is an essential benchmark for long-term robot autonomy. However, it is not feasible to learn and benchmark social navigation behaviors entirely in the real world, as learning is data-intensive, and it is challenging to make safety guarantees during training. Therefore, simulation-based benchmarks that provide abstractions for social navigation are required. A framework for these benchmarks would need to support a wide variety of learning approaches, be extensible to the broad range of social navigation scenar…
We propose a light-weight, self-supervised adaptation for a visual navigation agent to generalize to unseen environment. Given an embodied agent trained in a noiseless environment, our objective is to transfer the agent to a noisy environment where actuation and odometry sensor noise is present. Our method encourages the agent to maximize the consistency between the global maps generated at different time steps in a round-trip trajectory. The proposed task is completely self-supervised, not requiring any supervision from ground-truth pose data or explicit noise model. In addition, optimization…
Contextual Robotics Institute（情境机器人研究所）；University of California, San Diego（加州大学圣地亚哥分校）
In recent years, there has been a rapid increase in the number of service robots deployed for aiding people in their daily activities. Unfortunately, most of these robots require human input for training in order to do tasks in indoor environments. Successful domestic navigation often requires access to semantic information about the environment, which can be learned without human guidance. In this paper, we propose a set of DEDUCE - Diverse scEne Detection methods in Unseen Challenging Environments algorithms which incorporate deep fusion models derived from scene recognition systems and obje…
When searching for an object humans navigate through a scene using semantic information and spatial relationships. We look for an object using our knowledge of its attributes and relationships with other objects to infer the probable location. In this paper, we propose to tackle the visual navigation problem using rich semantic representations of the observed scene and object-oriented targets to train an agent. We show that both allows the agent to generalize to new targets and unseen scene in a short amount of training time.
Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) is a natural language grounding task where agents have to interpret natural language instructions in the context of visual scenes in a dynamic environment to achieve prescribed navigation goals. Successful agents must have the ability to parse natural language of varying linguistic styles, ground them in potentially unfamiliar scenes, plan and react with ambiguous environmental feedback. Generalization ability is limited by the amount of human annotated data. In particular, \emph{paired} vision-language sequence data is expensive to collect. We develop a di…
Queensland University of Technology (QUT)（昆士兰科技大学（QUT））
Emerging object-based SLAM algorithms can build a graph representation of an environment comprising nodes for robot poses and object landmarks. However, while this map will contain static objects such as furniture or appliances, many moveable objects (e.g. the car keys, the glasses, or a magazine), are not suitable as landmarks and will not be part of the map due to their non-static nature. We show that Graph Convolutional Networks can learn navigation policies to find such unmapped objects by learning to exploit the hidden probabilistic model that governs where these objects appear in the env…
Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院软件研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Monash University（莫纳什大学）；RMIT University（皇家墨尔本理工大学）；Sun Yat-sen University（中山大学）
Vision-language Navigation (VLN) tasks require an agent to navigate step-by-step while perceiving the visual observations and comprehending a natural language instruction. Large data bias, which is caused by the disparity ratio between the small data scale and large navigation space, makes the VLN task challenging. Previous works have proposed various data augmentation methods to reduce data bias. However, these works do not explicitly reduce the data bias across different house scenes. Therefore, the agent would overfit to the seen scenes and achieve poor navigation performance in the unseen …
Inria（法国国家信息与自动化研究所）；École normale supérieure（巴黎高等师范学院）；CNRS（法国国家科学研究中心）；PSL Research University（巴黎文理研究大学）；IIIT Hyderabad（印度海得拉巴国际信息技术学院）
In vision-and-language navigation (VLN), an embodied agent is required to navigate in realistic 3D environments following natural language instructions. One major bottleneck for existing VLN approaches is the lack of sufficient training data, resulting in unsatisfactory generalization to unseen environments. While VLN data is typically collected manually, such an approach is expensive and prevents scalability. In this work, we address the data scarcity issue by proposing to automatically create a large-scale VLN dataset from 900 unlabeled 3D buildings from HM3D. We generate a navigation graph …
Toshiba Europe Limited（东芝欧洲有限公司）；University of Cambridge（剑桥大学）
We present NavACL, a method of automatic curriculum learning tailored to the navigation task. NavACL is simple to train and efficiently selects relevant tasks using geometric features. In our experiments, deep reinforcement learning agents trained using NavACL significantly outperform state-of-the-art agents trained with uniform sampling -- the current standard. Furthermore, our agents can navigate through unknown cluttered indoor environments to semantically-specified targets using only RGB images. Obstacle-avoiding policies and frozen feature networks support transfer to unseen real-world en…
UC Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Facebook AI Research（Facebook人工智能研究院）；UIUC（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
Planning at a higher level of abstraction instead of low level torques improves the sample efficiency in reinforcement learning, and computational efficiency in classical planning. We propose a method to learn such hierarchical abstractions, or subroutines from egocentric video data of experts performing tasks. We learn a self-supervised inverse model on small amounts of random interaction data to pseudo-label the expert egocentric videos with agent actions. Visuomotor subroutines are acquired from these pseudo-labeled videos by learning a latent intent-conditioned policy that predicts the inf…
University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Facebook AI Research（脸书人工智能研究院）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）
We propose SplitNet, a method for decoupling visual perception and policy learning. By incorporating auxiliary tasks and selective learning of portions of the model, we explicitly decompose the learning objectives for visual navigation into perceiving the world and acting on that perception. We show dramatic improvements over baseline models on transferring between simulators, an encouraging step towards Sim2Real. Additionally, SplitNet generalizes better to unseen environments from the same simulator and transfers faster and more effectively to novel embodied navigation tasks. Further, given …
Microsoft Research AI（微软研究院AI）；Peking University（北京大学）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence（艾伦人工智能研究所）
Core to the vision-and-language navigation (VLN) challenge is building robust instruction representations and action decoding schemes, which can generalize well to previously unseen instructions and environments. In this paper, we report two simple but highly effective methods to address these challenges and lead to a new state-of-the-art performance. First, we adapt large-scale pretrained language models to learn text representations that generalize better to previously unseen instructions. Second, we propose a stochastic sampling scheme to reduce the considerable gap between the expert actio…
In Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN), an agent needs to navigate through the environment based on natural language instructions. Due to limited available data for agent training and finite diversity in navigation environments, it is challenging for the agent to generalize to new, unseen environments. To address this problem, we propose EnvEdit, a data augmentation method that creates new environments by editing existing environments, which are used to train a more generalizable agent. Our augmented environments can differ from the seen environments in three diverse aspects: style, object ap…
Navigating fluently around pedestrians is a necessary capability for mobile robots deployed in human environments, such as buildings and homes. While research on social navigation has focused mainly on the scalability with the number of pedestrians in open spaces, typical indoor environments present the additional challenge of constrained spaces such as corridors and doorways that limit maneuverability and influence patterns of pedestrian interaction. We present an approach based on reinforcement learning (RL) to learn policies capable of dynamic adaptation to the presence of moving pedestrian…
University of California, Santa Barbara（加州大学圣巴巴拉分校）；Microsoft Research, Redmond（微软研究院雷德蒙德分院）；Duke University（杜克大学）
Vision-language navigation (VLN) is the task of navigating an embodied agent to carry out natural language instructions inside real 3D environments. In this paper, we study how to address three critical challenges for this task: the cross-modal grounding, the ill-posed feedback, and the generalization problems. First, we propose a novel Reinforced Cross-Modal Matching (RCM) approach that enforces cross-modal grounding both locally and globally via reinforcement learning (RL). Particularly, a matching critic is used to provide an intrinsic reward to encourage global matching between instruction…
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile（智利天主教大学）；Yale University（耶鲁大学）
Inspired by research in psychology, we introduce a behavioral approach for visual navigation using topological maps. Our goal is to enable a robot to navigate from one location to another, relying only on its visual input and the topological map of the environment. We propose using graph neural networks for localizing the agent in the map, and decompose the action space into primitive behaviors implemented as convolutional or recurrent neural networks. Using the Gibson simulator, we verify that our approach outperforms relevant baselines and is able to navigate in both seen and unseen environm…
Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) demonstrates its potential in learning a model-free navigation policy for robot visual navigation. However, the data-demanding algorithm relies on a large number of navigation trajectories in training. Existing datasets supporting training such robot navigation algorithms consist of either 3D synthetic scenes or reconstructed scenes. Synthetic data suffers from domain gap to the real-world scenes while visual inputs rendered from 3D reconstructed scenes have undesired holes and artifacts. In this paper, we present a new dataset collected in real-world to facil…
CeRLP: A Cross-embodiment Robot Local Planning Framework for Visual Navigation
School of Computer Science, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, P. R. China（上海交通大学计算机科学学院，上海，中华人民共和国）；College of Information Science and Technology, Eastern Institute of Technology, Ningbo, P. R. China（信息科学与技术学院，东部技术研究所，宁波，中华人民共和国）
Data privacy is a central problem for embodied agents that can perceive the environment, communicate with humans, and act in the real world. While helping humans complete tasks, the agent may observe and process sensitive information of users, such as house environments, human activities, etc. In this work, we introduce privacy-preserving embodied agent learning for the task of Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN), where an embodied agent navigates house environments by following natural language instructions. We view each house environment as a local client, which shares nothing other than lo…
LaViRA: Language-Vision-Robot Actions Translation for Zero-Shot Vision Language Navigation in Continuous Environments
School of Computer Science, Nanjing University（南京大学计算机科学学院）；School of Intelligence Science and Technology, Nanjing University（南京大学智能科学与技术学院）；Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院自动化研究所）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）
Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile（智利天主教大学）；Millennium Institute for Foundational Research on Data（千年基础数据研究所）
We propose a multi-head attention mechanism as a blending layer in a neural network model that translates natural language to a high level behavioral language for indoor robot navigation. We follow the framework established by (Zang et al., 2018a) that proposes the use of a navigation graph as a knowledge base for the task. Our results show significant performance gains when translating instructions on previously unseen environments, therefore, improving the generalization capabilities of the model.
Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington（华盛顿大学保罗 G. 艾伦计算机科学与工程学院）；NVIDIA（英伟达）
Learning high-level navigation behaviors has important implications: it enables robots to build compact visual memory for repeating demonstrations and to build sparse topological maps for planning in novel environments. Existing approaches only learn discrete, short-horizon behaviors. These standalone behaviors usually assume a discrete action space with simple robot dynamics, thus they cannot capture the intricacy and complexity of real-world trajectories. To this end, we propose Composable Behavior Embedding (CBE), a continuous behavior representation for long-horizon visual navigation. CBE …
Fine-Grained Instruction-Guided Graph Reasoning for Vision-and-Language Navigation
Guangdong Institute of Intelligence Science and Technology（广东智能科学与技术研究院）；Department of Computer Science, Emory University（埃默里大学计算机科学系）；Department of Computer Science, University of Wisconsin-Madison（威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校计算机科学系）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Innovation and Research and Development Department, BoardWare Information System Company（BoardWare信息系统公司创新与研发部）；School of Mathematics, Peking University（北京大学数学学院）
