arXiv subjects

Punarjay Chakravarty

Publications and source records attributed to Punarjay Chakravarty.

27 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2021

An A* Curriculum Approach to Reinforcement Learning for RGBD Indoor Robot Navigation

Training robots to navigate diverse environments is a challenging problem as it involves the confluence of several different perception tasks such as mapping and localization, followed by optimal path-planning and control. Recently released photo-realistic simulators such as Habitat allow for the training of networks that output control actions directly from perception: agents use Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) to regress directly from the camera image to a control output in an end-to-end fashion. This is data-inefficient and can take several days to train on a GPU. Our paper tries to overcome this problem by separating the training of the perception and control neural nets and increasing the path complexity gradually using a curriculum approach. Specifically, a pre-trained twin Variational AutoEncoder (VAE) is used to compress RGBD (RGB & depth) sensing from an environment into a latent embedding, which is then used to train a DRL-based control policy. A*, a traditional path-planner is used as a guide for the policy and the distance between start and target locations is incrementally increased along the A* route, as training progresses. We demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed approach, both in terms of increased performance and decreased training times for the PointNav task in the Habitat simulation environment. This strategy of improving the training of direct-perception based DRL navigation policies is expected to hasten the deployment of robots of particular interest to industry such as co-bots on the factory floor and last-mile delivery robots.

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arXiv2020

Sim2Real for Self-Supervised Monocular Depth and Segmentation

Image-based learning methods for autonomous vehicle perception tasks require large quantities of labelled, real data in order to properly train without overfitting, which can often be incredibly costly. While leveraging the power of simulated data can potentially aid in mitigating these costs, networks trained in the simulation domain usually fail to perform adequately when applied to images in the real domain. Recent advances in domain adaptation have indicated that a shared latent space assumption can help to bridge the gap between the simulation and real domains, allowing the transference of the predictive capabilities of a network from the simulation domain to the real domain. We demonstrate that a twin VAE-based architecture with a shared latent space and auxiliary decoders is able to bridge the sim2real gap without requiring any paired, ground-truth data in the real domain. Using only paired, ground-truth data in the simulation domain, this architecture has the potential to generate perception tasks such as depth and segmentation maps. We compare this method to networks trained in a supervised manner to indicate the merit of these results.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2020

Deflating Dataset Bias Using Synthetic Data Augmentation

Deep Learning has seen an unprecedented increase in vision applications since the publication of large-scale object recognition datasets and introduction of scalable compute hardware. State-of-the-art methods for most vision tasks for Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) rely on supervised learning and often fail to generalize to domain shifts and/or outliers. Dataset diversity is thus key to successful real-world deployment. No matter how big the size of the dataset, capturing long tails of the distribution pertaining to task-specific environmental factors is impractical. The goal of this paper is to investigate the use of targeted synthetic data augmentation - combining the benefits of gaming engine simulations and sim2real style transfer techniques - for filling gaps in real datasets for vision tasks. Empirical studies on three different computer vision tasks of practical use to AVs - parking slot detection, lane detection and monocular depth estimation - consistently show that having synthetic data in the training mix provides a significant boost in cross-dataset generalization performance as compared to training on real data only, for the same size of the training set.

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arXiv2020

Deep-Geometric 6 DoF Localization from a Single Image in Topo-metric Maps

We describe a Deep-Geometric Localizer that is able to estimate the full 6 Degree of Freedom (DoF) global pose of the camera from a single image in a previously mapped environment. Our map is a topo-metric one, with discrete topological nodes whose 6 DoF poses are known. Each topo-node in our map also comprises of a set of points, whose 2D features and 3D locations are stored as part of the mapping process. For the mapping phase, we utilise a stereo camera and a regular stereo visual SLAM pipeline. During the localization phase, we take a single camera image, localize it to a topological node using Deep Learning, and use a geometric algorithm (PnP) on the matched 2D features (and their 3D positions in the topo map) to determine the full 6 DoF globally consistent pose of the camera. Our method divorces the mapping and the localization algorithms and sensors (stereo and mono), and allows accurate 6 DoF pose estimation in a previously mapped environment using a single camera. With potential VR/AR and localization applications in single camera devices such as mobile phones and drones, our hybrid algorithm compares favourably with the fully Deep-Learning based Pose-Net that regresses pose from a single image in simulated as well as real environments.

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arXiv2019

Hierarchical Sequence to Sequence Voice Conversion with Limited Data

We present a voice conversion solution using recurrent sequence to sequence modeling for DNNs. Our solution takes advantage of recent advances in attention based modeling in the fields of Neural Machine Translation (NMT), Text-to-Speech (TTS) and Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). The problem consists of converting between voices in a parallel setting when {\it $<$source,target$>$} audio pairs are available. Our seq2seq architecture makes use of a hierarchical encoder to summarize input audio frames. On the decoder side, we use an attention based architecture used in recent TTS works. Since there is a dearth of large multispeaker voice conversion databases needed for training DNNs, we resort to training the network with a large single speaker dataset as an autoencoder. This is then adapted for the smaller multispeaker voice conversion datasets available for voice conversion. In contrast with other voice conversion works that use $F_0$, duration and linguistic features, our system uses mel spectrograms as the audio representation. Output mel frames are converted back to audio using a wavenet vocoder.

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arXiv2019

GEN-SLAM: Generative Modeling for Monocular Simultaneous Localization and Mapping

We present a Deep Learning based system for the twin tasks of localization and obstacle avoidance essential to any mobile robot. Our system learns from conventional geometric SLAM, and outputs, using a single camera, the topological pose of the camera in an environment, and the depth map of obstacles around it. We use a CNN to localize in a topological map, and a conditional VAE to output depth for a camera image, conditional on this topological location estimation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our monocular localization and depth estimation system on simulated and real datasets.

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arXiv2017

Expert Gate: Lifelong Learning with a Network of Experts

In this paper we introduce a model of lifelong learning, based on a Network of Experts. New tasks / experts are learned and added to the model sequentially, building on what was learned before. To ensure scalability of this process,data from previous tasks cannot be stored and hence is not available when learning a new task. A critical issue in such context, not addressed in the literature so far, relates to the decision which expert to deploy at test time. We introduce a set of gating autoencoders that learn a representation for the task at hand, and, at test time, automatically forward the test sample to the relevant expert. This also brings memory efficiency as only one expert network has to be loaded into memory at any given time. Further, the autoencoders inherently capture the relatedness of one task to another, based on which the most relevant prior model to be used for training a new expert, with finetuning or learning without-forgetting, can be selected. We evaluate our method on image classification and video prediction problems.

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arXiv2016

Who's that Actor? Automatic Labelling of Actors in TV series starting from IMDB Images

In this work, we aim at automatically labeling actors in a TV series. Rather than relying on transcripts and subtitles, as has been demonstrated in the past, we show how to achieve this goal starting from a set of example images of each of the main actors involved, collected from the Internet Movie Database (IMDB). The problem then becomes one of domain adaptation: actors' IMDB photos are typically taken at awards ceremonies and are quite different from their appearances in TV series. In each series as well, there is considerable change in actor appearance due to makeup, lighting, ageing, etc. To bridge this gap, we propose a graph-matching based self-labelling algorithm, which we coin HSL (Hungarian Self Labeling). Further, we propose a new edge cost to be used in this context, as well as an extension that is more robust to outliers, where prototypical faces for each of the actors are selected based on a hierarchical clustering procedure. We conduct experiments with 15 episodes from 3 different TV series and demonstrate automatic annotation with an accuracy of 90% and up.

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arXiv2016

Cross-modal Supervision for Learning Active Speaker Detection in Video

In this paper, we show how to use audio to supervise the learning of active speaker detection in video. Voice Activity Detection (VAD) guides the learning of the vision-based classifier in a weakly supervised manner. The classifier uses spatio-temporal features to encode upper body motion - facial expressions and gesticulations associated with speaking. We further improve a generic model for active speaker detection by learning person specific models. Finally, we demonstrate the online adaptation of generic models learnt on one dataset, to previously unseen people in a new dataset, again using audio (VAD) for weak supervision. The use of temporal continuity overcomes the lack of clean training data. We are the first to present an active speaker detection system that learns on one audio-visual dataset and automatically adapts to speakers in a new dataset. This work can be seen as an example of how the availability of multi-modal data allows us to learn a model without the need for supervision, by transferring knowledge from one modality to another.

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