In this paper, we study the task of embodied interactive learning for object detection. Given a set of environments (and some labeling budget), our goal is to learn an object detector by having an agent select what data to obtain labels for. How should an exploration policy decide which trajectory should be labeled? One possibility is to use a trained object detector's failure cases as an external reward. However, this will require labeling millions of frames required for training RL policies, which is infeasible. Instead, we explore a self-supervised approach for training our exploration policy by introducing a notion of semantic curiosity. Our semantic curiosity policy is based on a simple observation -- the detection outputs should be consistent. Therefore, our semantic curiosity rewards trajectories with inconsistent labeling behavior and encourages the exploration policy to explore such areas. The exploration policy trained via semantic curiosity generalizes to novel scenes and helps train an object detector that outperforms baselines trained with other possible alternatives such as random exploration, prediction-error curiosity, and coverage-maximizing exploration.
Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；Facebook AI Research（脸书人工智能研究院）
Exploration is one of the core challenges in reinforcement learning. A common formulation of curiosity-driven exploration uses the difference between the real future and the future predicted by a learned model. However, predicting the future is an inherently difficult task which can be ill-posed in the face of stochasticity. In this paper, we introduce an alternative form of curiosity that rewards novel associations between different senses. Our approach exploits multiple modalities to provide a stronger signal for more efficient exploration. Our method is inspired by the fact that, for humans…
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Facebook AI Research（Facebook人工智能研究院）
In an open-world setting, it is inevitable that an intelligent agent (e.g., a robot) will encounter visual objects, attributes or relationships it does not recognize. In this work, we develop an agent empowered with visual curiosity, i.e. the ability to ask questions to an Oracle (e.g., human) about the contents in images (e.g., What is the object on the left side of the red cube?) and build visual recognition model based on the answers received (e.g., Cylinder). In order to do this, the agent must (1) understand what it recognizes and what it does not, (2) formulate a valid, unambiguous and i…
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；German Aerospace Center（德国航空航天中心）
Vision-based reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach to solve control tasks involving images as the main observation. State-of-the-art RL algorithms still struggle in terms of sample efficiency, especially when using image observations. This has led to increased attention on integrating state representation learning (SRL) techniques into the RL pipeline. Work in this field demonstrates a substantial improvement in sample efficiency among other benefits. However, to take full advantage of this paradigm, the quality of samples used for training plays a crucial role. More importantly,…
In many real-world scenarios, rewards extrinsic to the agent are extremely sparse, or absent altogether. In such cases, curiosity can serve as an intrinsic reward signal to enable the agent to explore its environment and learn skills that might be useful later in its life. We formulate curiosity as the error in an agent's ability to predict the consequence of its own actions in a visual feature space learned by a self-supervised inverse dynamics model. Our formulation scales to high-dimensional continuous state spaces like images, bypasses the difficulties of directly predicting pixels, and, c…
Google Brain（谷歌大脑）；DeepMind（深度思维）；ETH Zürich（苏黎世联邦理工学院）
Rewards are sparse in the real world and most of today's reinforcement learning algorithms struggle with such sparsity. One solution to this problem is to allow the agent to create rewards for itself - thus making rewards dense and more suitable for learning. In particular, inspired by curious behaviour in animals, observing something novel could be rewarded with a bonus. Such bonus is summed up with the real task reward - making it possible for RL algorithms to learn from the combined reward. We propose a new curiosity method which uses episodic memory to form the novelty bonus. To determine …
In this paper we set out to solve the task of 6-DOF 3D object detection from 2D images, where the only supervision is a geometric representation of the objects we aim to find. In doing so, we remove the need for 6-DOF labels (i.e., position, orientation etc.), allowing our network to be trained on unlabeled images in a self-supervised manner. We achieve this through a neural network which learns an explicit scene parameterization which is subsequently passed into a differentiable renderer. We analyze why analysis-by-synthesis-like losses for supervision of 3D scene structure using differentiab…
Zhejiang Lab（之江实验室）；National Research Centre of Parallel Computer Engineering and Technology（国家并行计算机工程技术研究中心）
Penetration Testing plays a critical role in evaluating the security of a target network by emulating real active adversaries. Deep Reinforcement Learning (RL) is seen as a promising solution to automating the process of penetration tests by reducing human effort and improving reliability. Existing RL solutions focus on finding a specific attack path to impact the target hosts. However, in reality, a diverse range of attack variations are needed to provide comprehensive assessments of the target network's security level. Hence, the attack agents must consider multiple objectives when penetrati…
As modern games continue growing both in size and complexity, it has become more challenging to ensure that all the relevant content is tested and that any potential issue is properly identified and fixed. Attempting to maximize testing coverage using only human participants, however, results in a tedious and hard to orchestrate process which normally slows down the development cycle. Complementing playtesting via autonomous agents has shown great promise accelerating and simplifying this process. This paper addresses the problem of automatically exploring and testing a given scenario using re…
Technische Universität Darmstadt（达姆施塔特工业大学）；Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems（马克斯·普朗克智能系统研究所）
Sample-efficient exploration is crucial not only for discovering rewarding experiences but also for adapting to environment changes in a task-agnostic fashion. A principled treatment of the problem of optimal input synthesis for system identification is provided within the framework of sequential Bayesian experimental design. In this paper, we present an effective trajectory-optimization-based approximate solution of this otherwise intractable problem that models optimal exploration in an unknown Markov decision process (MDP). By interleaving episodic exploration with Bayesian nonlinear system…
Autonomous reinforcement learning agents, like children, do not have access to predefined goals and reward functions. They must discover potential goals, learn their own reward functions and engage in their own learning trajectory. Children, however, benefit from exposure to language, helping to organize and mediate their thought. We propose LE2 (Language Enhanced Exploration), a learning algorithm leveraging intrinsic motivations and natural language (NL) interactions with a descriptive social partner (SP). Using NL descriptions from the SP, it can learn an NL-conditioned reward function to f…
VANDERER: Map-Free Exploration using Future-Aware and Visual-Curiosity-Guided Diffusion Policy
Control/Robotics Research Laboratory (CRRL), Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, NYU Tandon School of Engineering（纽约大学坦登工程学院电气与计算机工程系控制/机器人研究实验室（CRRL））；New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) Center for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (CAIR)（纽约大学阿布扎比分校人工智能与机器人中心（CAIR））
Model-based curiosity combines active learning approaches to optimal sampling with the information gain based incentives for exploration presented in the curiosity literature. Existing model-based curiosity methods look to approximate prediction uncertainty with approaches which struggle to scale to many prediction-planning pipelines used in robotics tasks. We address these scalability issues with an adversarial curiosity method minimizing a score given by a discriminator network. This discriminator is optimized jointly with a prediction model and enables our active learning approach to sample…
Baby Sophia: A Developmental Approach to Self-Exploration through Self-Touch and Hand Regard
Robotics Institute, Athena Research Center（机器人研究所，阿提卡研究中心）；HERON – Hellenic Robotics Center of Excellence（HERON – 希腊机器人 excellence 中心）；Institute for Language and Speech Processing, Athena Research Center（语言和语音处理研究所，阿提卡研究中心）
University of Maryland, College Park（马里兰大学帕克分校）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）
Mobile agents that can leverage help from humans can potentially accomplish more complex tasks than they could entirely on their own. We develop "Help, Anna!" (HANNA), an interactive photo-realistic simulator in which an agent fulfills object-finding tasks by requesting and interpreting natural language-and-vision assistance. An agent solving tasks in a HANNA environment can leverage simulated human assistants, called ANNA (Automatic Natural Navigation Assistants), which, upon request, provide natural language and visual instructions to direct the agent towards the goals. To address the HANNA …
We address the problem of active visual exploration of large 360° inputs. In our setting an active agent with a limited camera bandwidth explores its 360° environment by changing its viewing direction at limited discrete time steps. As such, it observes the world as a sequence of narrow field-of-view 'glimpses', deciding for itself where to look next. Our proposed method exceeds previous works' performance by a significant margin without the need for deep reinforcement learning or training separate networks as sidekicks. A key component of our system are the spatial memory maps that make the s…
Annotating the right data for training deep neural networks is an important challenge. Active learning using uncertainty estimates from Bayesian Neural Networks (BNNs) could provide an effective solution to this. Despite being theoretically principled, BNNs require approximations to be applied to large-scale problems, where both performance and uncertainty estimation are crucial. In this paper, we introduce Deep Probabilistic Ensembles (DPEs), a scalable technique that uses a regularized ensemble to approximate a deep BNN. We conduct a series of large-scale visual active learning experiments t…
The University of Queensland（昆士兰大学）；University of Electronic Science and Technology of China（电子科技大学）
Visual paragraph generation aims to automatically describe a given image from different perspectives and organize sentences in a coherent way. In this paper, we address three critical challenges for this task in a reinforcement learning setting: the mode collapse, the delayed feedback, and the time-consuming warm-up for policy networks. Generally, we propose a novel Curiosity-driven Reinforcement Learning (CRL) framework to jointly enhance the diversity and accuracy of the generated paragraphs. First, by modeling the paragraph captioning as a long-term decision-making process and measuring the…
The problem of object localization and recognition on autonomous mobile robots is still an active topic. In this context, we tackle the problem of learning a model of visual saliency directly on a robot. This model, learned and improved on-the-fly during the robot's exploration provides an efficient tool for localizing relevant objects within their environment. The proposed approach includes two intertwined components. On the one hand, we describe a method for learning and incrementally updating a model of visual saliency from a depth-based object detector. This model of saliency can also be e…
We study the task of embodied visual active learning, where an agent is set to explore a 3d environment with the goal to acquire visual scene understanding by actively selecting views for which to request annotation. While accurate on some benchmarks, today's deep visual recognition pipelines tend to not generalize well in certain real-world scenarios, or for unusual viewpoints. Robotic perception, in turn, requires the capability to refine the recognition capabilities for the conditions where the mobile system operates, including cluttered indoor environments or poor illumination. This motiva…
Portland State University（波特兰州立大学）；Santa Fe Institute（圣塔菲研究所）
We describe a method for performing active localization of objects in instances of visual situations. A visual situation is an abstract concept---e.g., "a boxing match", "a birthday party", "walking the dog", "waiting for a bus"---whose image instantiations are linked more by their common spatial and semantic structure than by low-level visual similarity. Our system combines given and learned knowledge of the structure of a particular situation, and adapts that knowledge to a new situation instance as it actively searches for objects. More specifically, the system learns a set of probability d…
Pixel Reasoner: Incentivizing Pixel-Space Reasoning with Curiosity-Driven Reinforcement Learning
University of Waterloo（多伦多大学）；Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）；Vector Institute（向量研究所）
UT Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Facebook AI Research（脸书人工智能研究院）
We explore active audio-visual separation for dynamic sound sources, where an embodied agent moves intelligently in a 3D environment to continuously isolate the time-varying audio stream being emitted by an object of interest. The agent hears a mixed stream of multiple audio sources (e.g., multiple people conversing and a band playing music at a noisy party). Given a limited time budget, it needs to extract the target sound accurately at every step using egocentric audio-visual observations. We propose a reinforcement learning agent equipped with a novel transformer memory that learns motion p…
The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Facebook AI Research（Facebook AI研究院）
We introduce the active audio-visual source separation problem, where an agent must move intelligently in order to better isolate the sounds coming from an object of interest in its environment. The agent hears multiple audio sources simultaneously (e.g., a person speaking down the hall in a noisy household) and it must use its eyes and ears to automatically separate out the sounds originating from a target object within a limited time budget. Towards this goal, we introduce a reinforcement learning approach that trains movement policies controlling the agent's camera and microphone placement …
Boston University（波士顿大学）；MIT Lincoln Laboratory（麻省理工学院林肯实验室）
We present a novel efficient object detection and localization framework based on the probabilistic bisection algorithm. A Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is trained and used as a noisy oracle that provides answers to input query images. The responses along with error probability estimates obtained from the CNN are used to update beliefs on the object location along each dimension. We show that querying along each dimension achieves the same lower bound on localization error as the joint query design. Finally, we compare our approach to the traditional sliding window technique on a real wor…
University of Ljubljana（卢布尔雅那大学）；Jožef Stefan International Postgraduate School（约热夫·斯特凡国际研究生院）；Philips Consumer Lifestyle BV（飞利浦消费生活方式有限公司）；Qlector d.o.o.（Qlector有限责任公司）；Jožef Stefan Institute（约热夫·斯特凡研究所）
Quality control is a key activity performed by manufacturing enterprises to ensure products meet quality standards and avoid potential damage to the brand's reputation. The decreased cost of sensors and connectivity enabled an increasing digitalization of manufacturing. In addition, artificial intelligence enables higher degrees of automation, reducing overall costs and time required for defect inspection. In this research, we compare three active learning approaches and five machine learning algorithms applied to visual defect inspection with real-world data provided by Philips Consumer Lifes…
We present an empirical study of active learning for Visual Question Answering, where a deep VQA model selects informative question-image pairs from a pool and queries an oracle for answers to maximally improve its performance under a limited query budget. Drawing analogies from human learning, we explore cramming (entropy), curiosity-driven (expected model change), and goal-driven (expected error reduction) active learning approaches, and propose a fast and effective goal-driven active learning scoring function to pick question-image pairs for deep VQA models under the Bayesian Neural Network…
Active learning promises to alleviate the massive data needs of supervised machine learning: it has successfully improved sample efficiency by an order of magnitude on traditional tasks like topic classification and object recognition. However, we uncover a striking contrast to this promise: across 5 models and 4 datasets on the task of visual question answering, a wide variety of active learning approaches fail to outperform random selection. To understand this discrepancy, we profile 8 active learning methods on a per-example basis, and identify the problem as collective outliers -- groups o…
University of Torontoland（多伦多兰大学）；University of Edenborrow（伊登伯勒大学）
Constructing a large-scale labeled dataset in the real world, especially for high-level tasks (eg, Visual Question Answering), can be expensive and time-consuming. In addition, with the ever-growing amounts of data and architecture complexity, Active Learning has become an important aspect of computer vision research. In this work, we address Active Learning in the multi-modal setting of Visual Question Answering (VQA). In light of the multi-modal inputs, image and question, we propose a novel method for effective sample acquisition through the use of ad hoc single-modal branches for each inpu…
Pool-based sampling in active learning (AL) represents a key framework for an-notating informative data when dealing with deep learning models. In this paper, we present a novel pipeline for pool-based Active Learning. Unlike most previous works, our method exploits accessible unlabelled examples during training to estimate their co-relation with the labelled examples. Another contribution of this paper is to adapt Visual Transformer as a sampler in the AL pipeline. Visual Transformer models non-local visual concept dependency between labelled and unlabelled examples, which is crucial to ident…
We introduce the Self-Adaptive Goal Generation - Robust Intelligent Adaptive Curiosity (SAGG-RIAC) architecture as an intrinsi- cally motivated goal exploration mechanism which allows active learning of inverse models in high-dimensional redundant robots. This allows a robot to efficiently and actively learn distributions of parameterized motor skills/policies that solve a corresponding distribution of parameterized tasks/goals. The architecture makes the robot sample actively novel parameterized tasks in the task space, based on a measure of competence progress, each of which triggers low-lev…
Contrastive learning has been shown to produce generalizable representations of audio and visual data by maximizing the lower bound on the mutual information (MI) between different views of an instance. However, obtaining a tight lower bound requires a sample size exponential in MI and thus a large set of negative samples. We can incorporate more samples by building a large queue-based dictionary, but there are theoretical limits to performance improvements even with a large number of negative samples. We hypothesize that \textit{random negative sampling} leads to a highly redundant dictionary…
Stanford University（斯坦福大学）；Tencent AI Lab（腾讯人工智能实验室）
Perceiving and manipulating 3D articulated objects (e.g., cabinets, doors) in human environments is an important yet challenging task for future home-assistant robots. The space of 3D articulated objects is exceptionally rich in their myriad semantic categories, diverse shape geometry, and complicated part functionality. Previous works mostly abstract kinematic structure with estimated joint parameters and part poses as the visual representations for manipulating 3D articulated objects. In this paper, we propose object-centric actionable visual priors as a novel perception-interaction handshak…
Technical University of Munich（慕尼黑工业大学）；Microsoft Corporation（微软公司）
Successful active speaker detection requires a three-stage pipeline: (i) audio-visual encoding for all speakers in the clip, (ii) inter-speaker relation modeling between a reference speaker and the background speakers within each frame, and (iii) temporal modeling for the reference speaker. Each stage of this pipeline plays an important role for the final performance of the created architecture. Based on a series of controlled experiments, this work presents several practical guidelines for audio-visual active speaker detection. Correspondingly, we present a new architecture called ASDNet, whi…
The STAR architecture was designed to test the value of the full Selective Tuning model of visual attention for complex real-world visuospatial tasks and behaviors. However, knowledge of how humans solve such tasks in 3D as active observers is lean. We thus devised a novel experimental setup and examined such behavior. We discovered that humans exhibit a variety of problem-solving strategies whose breadth and complexity are surprising and not easily handled by current methodologies. It is apparent that solution methods are dynamically composed by hypothesizing sequences of actions, testing the…
This paper reviews the state of the art in visual privacy protection techniques, with particular attention paid to techniques applicable to the field of active and assisted living (AAL). A novel taxonomy with which state-of-the-art visual privacy protection methods can be classified is introduced. Perceptual obfuscation methods, a category in the taxonomy, is highlighted. These are a category of visual privacy preservation techniques particularly relevant when considering scenarios that come under video-based AAL monitoring. Obfuscation against machine learning models is also explored. A high-…
Under noisy conditions, automatic speech recognition (ASR) can greatly benefit from the addition of visual signals coming from a video of the speaker's face. However, when multiple candidate speakers are visible this traditionally requires solving a separate problem, namely active speaker detection (ASD), which entails selecting at each moment in time which of the visible faces corresponds to the audio. Recent work has shown that we can solve both problems simultaneously by employing an attention mechanism over the competing video tracks of the speakers' faces, at the cost of sacrificing some …
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Institute for Artificial Intelligence, Tsinghua University (THUAI)（清华大学人工智能研究院）；Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology (BNRist)（北京信息科学与技术国家研究中心）；University of Rochester（罗切斯特大学）
Active speaker detection (ASD) systems are important modules for analyzing multi-talker conversations. They aim to detect which speakers or none are talking in a visual scene at any given time. Existing research on ASD does not agree on the definition of active speakers. We clarify the definition in this work and require synchronization between the audio and visual speaking activities. This clarification of definition is motivated by our extensive experiments, through which we discover that existing ASD methods fail in modeling the audio-visual synchronization and often classify unsynchronized…
The University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Facebook AI Research（Facebook人工智能研究院）
We consider an active visual exploration scenario, where an agent must intelligently select its camera motions to efficiently reconstruct the full environment from only a limited set of narrow field-of-view glimpses. While the agent has full observability of the environment during training, it has only partial observability once deployed, being constrained by what portions it has seen and what camera motions are permissible. We introduce sidekick policy learning to capitalize on this imbalance of observability. The main idea is a preparatory learning phase that attempts simplified versions of …
