arXiv subjects

Vladlen Koltun

Publications and source records attributed to Vladlen Koltun.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2022

Improving information retention in large scale online continual learning

Given a stream of data sampled from non-stationary distributions, online continual learning (OCL) aims to adapt efficiently to new data while retaining existing knowledge. The typical approach to address information retention (the ability to retain previous knowledge) is keeping a replay buffer of a fixed size and computing gradients using a mixture of new data and the replay buffer. Surprisingly, the recent work (Cai et al., 2021) suggests that information retention remains a problem in large scale OCL even when the replay buffer is unlimited, i.e., the gradients are computed using all past data. This paper focuses on this peculiarity to understand and address information retention. To pinpoint the source of this problem, we theoretically show that, given limited computation budgets at each time step, even without strict storage limit, naively applying SGD with constant or constantly decreasing learning rates fails to optimize information retention in the long term. We propose using a moving average family of methods to improve optimization for non-stationary objectives. Specifically, we design an adaptive moving average (AMA) optimizer and a moving-average-based learning rate schedule (MALR). We demonstrate the effectiveness of AMA+MALR on large-scale benchmarks, including Continual Localization (CLOC), Google Landmarks, and ImageNet. Code will be released upon publication.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Habitat 2.0: Training Home Assistants to Rearrange their Habitat

We introduce Habitat 2.0 (H2.0), a simulation platform for training virtual robots in interactive 3D environments and complex physics-enabled scenarios. We make comprehensive contributions to all levels of the embodied AI stack - data, simulation, and benchmark tasks. Specifically, we present: (i) ReplicaCAD: an artist-authored, annotated, reconfigurable 3D dataset of apartments (matching real spaces) with articulated objects (e.g. cabinets and drawers that can open/close); (ii) H2.0: a high-performance physics-enabled 3D simulator with speeds exceeding 25,000 simulation steps per second (850x real-time) on an 8-GPU node, representing 100x speed-ups over prior work; and, (iii) Home Assistant Benchmark (HAB): a suite of common tasks for assistive robots (tidy the house, prepare groceries, set the table) that test a range of mobile manipulation capabilities. These large-scale engineering contributions allow us to systematically compare deep reinforcement learning (RL) at scale and classical sense-plan-act (SPA) pipelines in long-horizon structured tasks, with an emphasis on generalization to new objects, receptacles, and layouts. We find that (1) flat RL policies struggle on HAB compared to hierarchical ones; (2) a hierarchy with independent skills suffers from 'hand-off problems', and (3) SPA pipelines are more brittle than RL policies.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Differentiable Simulation of Soft Multi-body Systems

We present a method for differentiable simulation of soft articulated bodies. Our work enables the integration of differentiable physical dynamics into gradient-based pipelines. We develop a top-down matrix assembly algorithm within Projective Dynamics and derive a generalized dry friction model for soft continuum using a new matrix splitting strategy. We derive a differentiable control framework for soft articulated bodies driven by muscles, joint torques, or pneumatic tubes. The experiments demonstrate that our designs make soft body simulation more stable and realistic compared to other frameworks. Our method accelerates the solution of system identification problems by more than an order of magnitude, and enables efficient gradient-based learning of motion control with soft robots.

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arXiv2022

Simple multi-dataset detection

How do we build a general and broad object detection system? We use all labels of all concepts ever annotated. These labels span diverse datasets with potentially inconsistent taxonomies. In this paper, we present a simple method for training a unified detector on multiple large-scale datasets. We use dataset-specific training protocols and losses, but share a common detection architecture with dataset-specific outputs. We show how to automatically integrate these dataset-specific outputs into a common semantic taxonomy. In contrast to prior work, our approach does not require manual taxonomy reconciliation. Experiments show our learned taxonomy outperforms a expert-designed taxonomy in all datasets. Our multi-dataset detector performs as well as dataset-specific models on each training domain, and can generalize to new unseen dataset without fine-tuning on them. Code is available at https://github.com/xingyizhou/UniDet.

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arXiv2022

Global Tracking Transformers

We present a novel transformer-based architecture for global multi-object tracking. Our network takes a short sequence of frames as input and produces global trajectories for all objects. The core component is a global tracking transformer that operates on objects from all frames in the sequence. The transformer encodes object features from all frames, and uses trajectory queries to group them into trajectories. The trajectory queries are object features from a single frame and naturally produce unique trajectories. Our global tracking transformer does not require intermediate pairwise grouping or combinatorial association, and can be jointly trained with an object detector. It achieves competitive performance on the popular MOT17 benchmark, with 75.3 MOTA and 59.1 HOTA. More importantly, our framework seamlessly integrates into state-of-the-art large-vocabulary detectors to track any objects. Experiments on the challenging TAO dataset show that our framework consistently improves upon baselines that are based on pairwise association, outperforming published works by a significant 7.7 tracking mAP. Code is available at https://github.com/xingyizhou/GTR.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Shape from Polarization for Complex Scenes in the Wild

We present a new data-driven approach with physics-based priors to scene-level normal estimation from a single polarization image. Existing shape from polarization (SfP) works mainly focus on estimating the normal of a single object rather than complex scenes in the wild. A key barrier to high-quality scene-level SfP is the lack of real-world SfP data in complex scenes. Hence, we contribute the first real-world scene-level SfP dataset with paired input polarization images and ground-truth normal maps. Then we propose a learning-based framework with a multi-head self-attention module and viewing encoding, which is designed to handle increasing polarization ambiguities caused by complex materials and non-orthographic projection in scene-level SfP. Our trained model can be generalized to far-field outdoor scenes as the relationship between polarized light and surface normals is not affected by distance. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing SfP models on two datasets. Our dataset and source code will be publicly available at https://github.com/ChenyangLEI/sfp-wild

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arXiv2022

Unsupervised Contrastive Domain Adaptation for Semantic Segmentation

Semantic segmentation models struggle to generalize in the presence of domain shift. In this paper, we introduce contrastive learning for feature alignment in cross-domain adaptation. We assemble both in-domain contrastive pairs and cross-domain contrastive pairs to learn discriminative features that align across domains. Based on the resulting well-aligned feature representations we introduce a label expansion approach that is able to discover samples from hard classes during the adaptation process to further boost performance. The proposed approach consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods for domain adaptation. It achieves 60.2% mIoU on the Cityscapes dataset when training on the synthetic GTA5 dataset together with unlabeled Cityscapes images.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Training Graph Neural Networks with 1000 Layers

Deep graph neural networks (GNNs) have achieved excellent results on various tasks on increasingly large graph datasets with millions of nodes and edges. However, memory complexity has become a major obstacle when training deep GNNs for practical applications due to the immense number of nodes, edges, and intermediate activations. To improve the scalability of GNNs, prior works propose smart graph sampling or partitioning strategies to train GNNs with a smaller set of nodes or sub-graphs. In this work, we study reversible connections, group convolutions, weight tying, and equilibrium models to advance the memory and parameter efficiency of GNNs. We find that reversible connections in combination with deep network architectures enable the training of overparameterized GNNs that significantly outperform existing methods on multiple datasets. Our models RevGNN-Deep (1001 layers with 80 channels each) and RevGNN-Wide (448 layers with 224 channels each) were both trained on a single commodity GPU and achieve an ROC-AUC of $87.74 \pm 0.13$ and $88.24 \pm 0.15$ on the ogbn-proteins dataset. To the best of our knowledge, RevGNN-Deep is the deepest GNN in the literature by one order of magnitude. Please visit our project website https://www.deepgcns.org/arch/gnn1000 for more information.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2022

Dancing under the stars: video denoising in starlight

Imaging in low light is extremely challenging due to low photon counts. Using sensitive CMOS cameras, it is currently possible to take videos at night under moonlight (0.05-0.3 lux illumination). In this paper, we demonstrate photorealistic video under starlight (no moon present, $<$0.001 lux) for the first time. To enable this, we develop a GAN-tuned physics-based noise model to more accurately represent camera noise at the lowest light levels. Using this noise model, we train a video denoiser using a combination of simulated noisy video clips and real noisy still images. We capture a 5-10 fps video dataset with significant motion at approximately 0.6-0.7 millilux with no active illumination. Comparing against alternative methods, we achieve improved video quality at the lowest light levels, demonstrating photorealistic video denoising in starlight for the first time.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2022

Language-driven Semantic Segmentation

We present LSeg, a novel model for language-driven semantic image segmentation. LSeg uses a text encoder to compute embeddings of descriptive input labels (e.g., "grass" or "building") together with a transformer-based image encoder that computes dense per-pixel embeddings of the input image. The image encoder is trained with a contrastive objective to align pixel embeddings to the text embedding of the corresponding semantic class. The text embeddings provide a flexible label representation in which semantically similar labels map to similar regions in the embedding space (e.g., "cat" and "furry"). This allows LSeg to generalize to previously unseen categories at test time, without retraining or even requiring a single additional training sample. We demonstrate that our approach achieves highly competitive zero-shot performance compared to existing zero- and few-shot semantic segmentation methods, and even matches the accuracy of traditional segmentation algorithms when a fixed label set is provided. Code and demo are available at https://github.com/isl-org/lang-seg.

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arXiv2022

Learning robust perceptive locomotion for quadrupedal robots in the wild

Legged robots that can operate autonomously in remote and hazardous environments will greatly increase opportunities for exploration into under-explored areas. Exteroceptive perception is crucial for fast and energy-efficient locomotion: perceiving the terrain before making contact with it enables planning and adaptation of the gait ahead of time to maintain speed and stability. However, utilizing exteroceptive perception robustly for locomotion has remained a grand challenge in robotics. Snow, vegetation, and water visually appear as obstacles on which the robot cannot step~-- or are missing altogether due to high reflectance. Additionally, depth perception can degrade due to difficult lighting, dust, fog, reflective or transparent surfaces, sensor occlusion, and more. For this reason, the most robust and general solutions to legged locomotion to date rely solely on proprioception. This severely limits locomotion speed, because the robot has to physically feel out the terrain before adapting its gait accordingly. Here we present a robust and general solution to integrating exteroceptive and proprioceptive perception for legged locomotion. We leverage an attention-based recurrent encoder that integrates proprioceptive and exteroceptive input. The encoder is trained end-to-end and learns to seamlessly combine the different perception modalities without resorting to heuristics. The result is a legged locomotion controller with high robustness and speed. The controller was tested in a variety of challenging natural and urban environments over multiple seasons and completed an hour-long hike in the Alps in the time recommended for human hikers.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2021

MSeg: A Composite Dataset for Multi-domain Semantic Segmentation

We present MSeg, a composite dataset that unifies semantic segmentation datasets from different domains. A naive merge of the constituent datasets yields poor performance due to inconsistent taxonomies and annotation practices. We reconcile the taxonomies and bring the pixel-level annotations into alignment by relabeling more than 220,000 object masks in more than 80,000 images, requiring more than 1.34 years of collective annotator effort. The resulting composite dataset enables training a single semantic segmentation model that functions effectively across domains and generalizes to datasets that were not seen during training. We adopt zero-shot cross-dataset transfer as a benchmark to systematically evaluate a model's robustness and show that MSeg training yields substantially more robust models in comparison to training on individual datasets or naive mixing of datasets without the presented contributions. A model trained on MSeg ranks first on the WildDash-v1 leaderboard for robust semantic segmentation, with no exposure to WildDash data during training. We evaluate our models in the 2020 Robust Vision Challenge (RVC) as an extreme generalization experiment. MSeg training sets include only three of the seven datasets in the RVC; more importantly, the evaluation taxonomy of RVC is different and more detailed. Surprisingly, our model shows competitive performance and ranks second. To evaluate how close we are to the grand aim of robust, efficient, and complete scene understanding, we go beyond semantic segmentation by training instance segmentation and panoptic segmentation models using our dataset. Moreover, we also evaluate various engineering design decisions and metrics, including resolution and computational efficiency. Although our models are far from this grand aim, our comprehensive evaluation is crucial for progress. We share all the models and code with the community.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Non-deep Networks

Depth is the hallmark of deep neural networks. But more depth means more sequential computation and higher latency. This begs the question -- is it possible to build high-performing "non-deep" neural networks? We show that it is. To do so, we use parallel subnetworks instead of stacking one layer after another. This helps effectively reduce depth while maintaining high performance. By utilizing parallel substructures, we show, for the first time, that a network with a depth of just 12 can achieve top-1 accuracy over 80% on ImageNet, 96% on CIFAR10, and 81% on CIFAR100. We also show that a network with a low-depth (12) backbone can achieve an AP of 48% on MS-COCO. We analyze the scaling rules for our design and show how to increase performance without changing the network's depth. Finally, we provide a proof of concept for how non-deep networks could be used to build low-latency recognition systems. Code is available at https://github.com/imankgoyal/NonDeepNetworks.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Learning High-Speed Flight in the Wild

Quadrotors are agile. Unlike most other machines, they can traverse extremely complex environments at high speeds. To date, only expert human pilots have been able to fully exploit their capabilities. Autonomous operation with on-board sensing and computation has been limited to low speeds. State-of-the-art methods generally separate the navigation problem into subtasks: sensing, mapping, and planning. While this approach has proven successful at low speeds, the separation it builds upon can be problematic for high-speed navigation in cluttered environments. Indeed, the subtasks are executed sequentially, leading to increased processing latency and a compounding of errors through the pipeline. Here we propose an end-to-end approach that can autonomously fly quadrotors through complex natural and man-made environments at high speeds, with purely onboard sensing and computation. The key principle is to directly map noisy sensory observations to collision-free trajectories in a receding-horizon fashion. This direct mapping drastically reduces processing latency and increases robustness to noisy and incomplete perception. The sensorimotor mapping is performed by a convolutional network that is trained exclusively in simulation via privileged learning: imitating an expert with access to privileged information. By simulating realistic sensor noise, our approach achieves zero-shot transfer from simulation to challenging real-world environments that were never experienced during training: dense forests, snow-covered terrain, derailed trains, and collapsed buildings. Our work demonstrates that end-to-end policies trained in simulation enable high-speed autonomous flight through challenging environments, outperforming traditional obstacle avoidance pipelines.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2021

Learning to drive from a world on rails

We learn an interactive vision-based driving policy from pre-recorded driving logs via a model-based approach. A forward model of the world supervises a driving policy that predicts the outcome of any potential driving trajectory. To support learning from pre-recorded logs, we assume that the world is on rails, meaning neither the agent nor its actions influence the environment. This assumption greatly simplifies the learning problem, factorizing the dynamics into a nonreactive world model and a low-dimensional and compact forward model of the ego-vehicle. Our approach computes action-values for each training trajectory using a tabular dynamic-programming evaluation of the Bellman equations; these action-values in turn supervise the final vision-based driving policy. Despite the world-on-rails assumption, the final driving policy acts well in a dynamic and reactive world. At the time of writing, our method ranks first on the CARLA leaderboard, attaining a 25% higher driving score while using 40 times less data. Our method is also an order of magnitude more sample-efficient than state-of-the-art model-free reinforcement learning techniques on navigational tasks in the ProcGen benchmark.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2021

Point Transformer

Self-attention networks have revolutionized natural language processing and are making impressive strides in image analysis tasks such as image classification and object detection. Inspired by this success, we investigate the application of self-attention networks to 3D point cloud processing. We design self-attention layers for point clouds and use these to construct self-attention networks for tasks such as semantic scene segmentation, object part segmentation, and object classification. Our Point Transformer design improves upon prior work across domains and tasks. For example, on the challenging S3DIS dataset for large-scale semantic scene segmentation, the Point Transformer attains an mIoU of 70.4% on Area 5, outperforming the strongest prior model by 3.3 absolute percentage points and crossing the 70% mIoU threshold for the first time.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2021

Online Continual Learning with Natural Distribution Shifts: An Empirical Study with Visual Data

Continual learning is the problem of learning and retaining knowledge through time over multiple tasks and environments. Research has primarily focused on the incremental classification setting, where new tasks/classes are added at discrete time intervals. Such an "offline" setting does not evaluate the ability of agents to learn effectively and efficiently, since an agent can perform multiple learning epochs without any time limitation when a task is added. We argue that "online" continual learning, where data is a single continuous stream without task boundaries, enables evaluating both information retention and online learning efficacy. In online continual learning, each incoming small batch of data is first used for testing and then added to the training set, making the problem truly online. Trained models are later evaluated on historical data to assess information retention. We introduce a new benchmark for online continual visual learning that exhibits large scale and natural distribution shifts. Through a large-scale analysis, we identify critical and previously unobserved phenomena of gradient-based optimization in continual learning, and propose effective strategies for improving gradient-based online continual learning with real data. The source code and dataset are available in: https://github.com/IntelLabs/continuallearning.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2021

Efficient Differentiable Simulation of Articulated Bodies

We present a method for efficient differentiable simulation of articulated bodies. This enables integration of articulated body dynamics into deep learning frameworks, and gradient-based optimization of neural networks that operate on articulated bodies. We derive the gradients of the forward dynamics using spatial algebra and the adjoint method. Our approach is an order of magnitude faster than autodiff tools. By only saving the initial states throughout the simulation process, our method reduces memory requirements by two orders of magnitude. We demonstrate the utility of efficient differentiable dynamics for articulated bodies in a variety of applications. We show that reinforcement learning with articulated systems can be accelerated using gradients provided by our method. In applications to control and inverse problems, gradient-based optimization enabled by our work accelerates convergence by more than an order of magnitude.

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