In Marius von Senden's Space and Sight, a newly sighted blind patient describes the experience of a corner as lemon-like, because corners "prick" sight like lemons prick the tongue. Prickliness, here, is a dimension in the feature space of sensory experience, an effect of the perceived on the perceiver that arises where the two interact. In the account of the newly sighted, an effect familiar from one interaction translates to a novel context. Perception serves as the vehicle for generalization, in that an effect shared across different experiences produces a concrete abstraction grounded in those experiences. Cezanne and the post-impressionists, fluent in the language of experience translation, realized that the way to paint a concrete form that best reflected reality was to paint not what they saw, but what it was like to see. We envision a future of creation using AI where what it is like to see is replicable, transferrable, manipulable - part of the artist's palette that is both grounded in a particular context, and generalizable beyond it.
An active line of research maps human-interpretable features onto directions in GAN latent space. Supervised and self-supervised approaches that search for anticipated directions or use off-the-shelf classifiers to drive image manipulation in embedding space are limited in the variety of features they can uncover. Unsupervised approaches that discover useful new directions show that the space of perceptually meaningful directions is nowhere close to being fully mapped. As this space is broad and full of creative potential, we want tools for direction discovery that capture the richness and generalizability of human perception. Our approach puts creators in the discovery loop during real-time tool use, in order to identify directions that are perceptually meaningful to them, and generate interpretable image translations along those directions.
Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；U.S. Army Research Laboratory（美国陆军研究实验室）
We present a robot navigation system that uses an imitation learning framework to successfully navigate in complex environments. Our framework takes a pre-built 3D scan of a real environment and trains an agent from pre-generated expert trajectories to navigate to any position given a panoramic view of the goal and the current visual input without relying on map, compass, odometry, or relative position of the target at runtime. Our end-to-end trained agent uses RGB and depth (RGBD) information and can handle large environments (up to $1031m^2$) across multiple rooms (up to $40$) and generalize…
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-尚佩恩分校）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Facebook AI Research（Facebook AI研究院）
It is fundamental for personal robots to reliably navigate to a specified goal. To study this task, PointGoal navigation has been introduced in simulated Embodied AI environments. Recent advances solve this PointGoal navigation task with near-perfect accuracy (99.6% success) in photo-realistically simulated environments, assuming noiseless egocentric vision, noiseless actuation, and most importantly, perfect localization. However, under realistic noise models for visual sensors and actuation, and without access to a "GPS and Compass sensor," the 99.6%-success agents for PointGoal navigation on…
Ukrainian Catholic University（乌克兰天主教大学）；Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Meta AI
Can an autonomous agent navigate in a new environment without building an explicit map? For the task of PointGoal navigation ('Go to $Δx$, $Δy$') under idealized settings (no RGB-D and actuation noise, perfect GPS+Compass), the answer is a clear 'yes' - map-less neural models composed of task-agnostic components (CNNs and RNNs) trained with large-scale reinforcement learning achieve 100% Success on a standard dataset (Gibson). However, for PointNav in a realistic setting (RGB-D and actuation noise, no GPS+Compass), this is an open question; one we tackle in this paper. The strongest published …
University of Padova（帕多瓦大学）；Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK)（布鲁诺·凯斯勒基金会（FBK））；Simon Fraser University（西蒙弗雷泽大学）
Learning how to navigate among humans in an occluded and spatially constrained indoor environment, is a key ability required to embodied agent to be integrated into our society. In this paper, we propose an end-to-end architecture that exploits Proximity-Aware Tasks (referred as to Risk and Proximity Compass) to inject into a reinforcement learning navigation policy the ability to infer common-sense social behaviors. To this end, our tasks exploit the notion of immediate and future dangers of collision. Furthermore, we propose an evaluation protocol specifically designed for the Social Navigat…
SpatialNav: Leveraging Spatial Scene Graphs for Zero-Shot Vision-and-Language Navigation
Fudan University, Shanghai, China（复旦大学）；University of Southern California, Los Angeles, USA（南加州大学）；Australian Institute for Machine Learning, Adelaide University, Australia（澳大利亚机器学习研究所）；Shanghai Innovation Institute, Shanghai, China（上海创新研究院）
We present SGoLAM, short for simultaneous goal localization and mapping, which is a simple and efficient algorithm for Multi-Object Goal navigation. Given an agent equipped with an RGB-D camera and a GPS/Compass sensor, our objective is to have the agent navigate to a sequence of target objects in realistic 3D environments. Our pipeline fully leverages the strength of classical approaches for visual navigation, by decomposing the problem into two key components: mapping and goal localization. The mapping module converts the depth observations into an occupancy map, and the goal localization mo…
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Facebook AI Research（Facebook人工智能研究院）；Oregon State University（俄勒冈州立大学）；Simon Fraser University（西蒙弗雷泽大学）
We present Decentralized Distributed Proximal Policy Optimization (DD-PPO), a method for distributed reinforcement learning in resource-intensive simulated environments. DD-PPO is distributed (uses multiple machines), decentralized (lacks a centralized server), and synchronous (no computation is ever stale), making it conceptually simple and easy to implement. In our experiments on training virtual robots to navigate in Habitat-Sim, DD-PPO exhibits near-linear scaling -- achieving a speedup of 107x on 128 GPUs over a serial implementation. We leverage this scaling to train an agent for 2.5 Bil…
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；Facebook AI Research（Facebook人工智能研究院）
We propose a novel architecture and training paradigm for training realistic PointGoal Navigation -- navigating to a target coordinate in an unseen environment under actuation and sensor noise without access to ground-truth localization. Specifically, we find that the primary challenge under this setting is learning localization -- when stripped of idealized localization, agents fail to stop precisely at the goal despite reliably making progress towards it. To address this we introduce a set of auxiliary losses to help the agent learn localization. Further, we explore the idea of treating the …
East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；University of Guelph（圭尔夫大学）；Ryerson University（瑞尔森大学）
For people who ardently love painting but unfortunately have visual impairments, holding a paintbrush to create a work is a very difficult task. People in this special group are eager to pick up the paintbrush, like Leonardo da Vinci, to create and make full use of their own talents. Therefore, to maximally bridge this gap, we propose a painting navigation system to assist blind people in painting and artistic creation. The proposed system is composed of cognitive system and guidance system. The system adopts drawing board positioning based on QR code, brush navigation based on target detectio…
The role of robots in society keeps expanding, bringing with it the necessity of interacting and communicating with humans. In order to keep such interaction intuitive, we provide automatic wayfinding based on verbal navigational instructions. Our first contribution is the creation of a large-scale dataset with verbal navigation instructions. To this end, we have developed an interactive visual navigation environment based on Google Street View; we further design an annotation method to highlight mined anchor landmarks and local directions between them in order to help annotators formulate typ…
Real-Time Metric-Semantic Mapping for Autonomous Navigation in Outdoor Environments
University College London（伦敦大学学院）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Shanghai Research Institute for Intelligent Autonomous Systems（上海智能自主系统研究院）；Frontiers Science Center for Intelligent Autonomous Systems, Tongji University（同济大学智能自主系统前沿科学中心）
University of Michigan（密歇根大学）；U.S. Army Research Laboratory（美国陆军研究实验室）
In the real world, autonomous driving agents navigate in highly dynamic environments full of unexpected situations where pre-trained models are unreliable. In these situations, what is immediately available to vehicles is often only human operators. Empowering autonomous driving agents with the ability to navigate in a continuous and dynamic environment and to communicate with humans through sensorimotor-grounded dialogue becomes critical. To this end, we introduce Dialogue On the ROad To Handle Irregular Events (DOROTHIE), a novel interactive simulation platform that enables the creation of u…
MolmoSpaces: A Large-Scale Open Ecosystem for Robot Navigation and Manipulation
Allen Institute for AI（艾伦人工智能研究所）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；University of California, Los Angeles（加州大学洛杉矶分校）；University of California, Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）
MetaScenes: Towards Automated Replica Creation for Real-world 3D Scans
State Key Laboratory of General Artificial Intelligence, BIGAI（通用人工智能国家重点实验室，BIGAI）；Beijing Institute of Technology（北京理工大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；University of Science and Technology of China（中国科学技术大学）
Safe and Efficient Social Navigation through Explainable Safety Regions Based on Topological Features
Department of Applied Mathematics I, University of Seville（应用数学系，塞维利亚大学）；CNR-IEIIT Genoa, Italy（意大利热那亚CNR-IEIIT）；SUPSI, IDSIA Lugano, Switzerland（瑞士卢加诺SUPSI，IDSIA）
