arXiv subjects

Julia Berger

Publications and source records attributed to Julia Berger.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Biased Dreams: Limitations to Epistemic Uncertainty Quantification in Latent Dynamics Models

Model-based reinforcement learning distinguishes between dynamics models operating on proprioceptive states and latent dynamics models typically operating on high-dimensional image observations. Among the latter, Dreamer's Recurrent State Space Model (RSSM) has emerged as a dominant architecture. While ensemble-based epistemic uncertainty has proven effective in proprioceptive dynamics for mitigating model exploitation, guiding exploration, or promoting caution, its behavior in latent dynamics remains largely unexplored. Our experiments reveal that although ensemble disagreement captures local epistemic uncertainty, it does not reliably reflect global compounding model error accumulated over prolonged RSSM latent rollouts. We provide evidence for an attractor behavior that draws rollouts toward well-supported latent regions, where uncertainty diminishes despite increasing discrepancies from the true environment dynamics. This can cause the model to overestimate returns when attractor regions correspond to high-reward behaviors. Our findings reveal a structural limitation of epistemic uncertainty estimation in RSSMs and challenge the assumption that epistemic uncertainty estimation transfers directly from proprioceptive to latent dynamics.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Retargeting Visual Data with Deformation Fields

Seam carving is an image editing method that enable content-aware resizing, including operations like removing objects. However, the seam-finding strategy based on dynamic programming or graph-cut limits its applications to broader visual data formats and degrees of freedom for editing. Our observation is that describing the editing and retargeting of images more generally by a displacement field yields a generalisation of content-aware deformations. We propose to learn a deformation with a neural network that keeps the output plausible while trying to deform it only in places with low information content. This technique applies to different kinds of visual data, including images, 3D scenes given as neural radiance fields, or even polygon meshes. Experiments conducted on different visual data show that our method achieves better content-aware retargeting compared to previous methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2023

Adaptive Voronoi NeRFs

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) learn to represent a 3D scene from just a set of registered images. Increasing sizes of a scene demands more complex functions, typically represented by neural networks, to capture all details. Training and inference then involves querying the neural network millions of times per image, which becomes impractically slow. Since such complex functions can be replaced by multiple simpler functions to improve speed, we show that a hierarchy of Voronoi diagrams is a suitable choice to partition the scene. By equipping each Voronoi cell with its own NeRF, our approach is able to quickly learn a scene representation. We propose an intuitive partitioning of the space that increases quality gains during training by distributing information evenly among the networks and avoids artifacts through a top-down adaptive refinement. Our framework is agnostic to the underlying NeRF method and easy to implement, which allows it to be applied to various NeRF variants for improved learning and rendering speeds.

cs.CV↗