We introduce Replica, a dataset of 18 highly photo-realistic 3D indoor scene reconstructions at room and building scale. Each scene consists of a dense mesh, high-resolution high-dynamic-range (HDR) textures, per-primitive semantic class and instance information, and planar mirror and glass reflectors. The goal of Replica is to enable machine learning (ML) research that relies on visually, geometrically, and semantically realistic generative models of the world - for instance, egocentric computer vision, semantic segmentation in 2D and 3D, geometric inference, and the development of embodied agents (virtual robots) performing navigation, instruction following, and question answering. Due to the high level of realism of the renderings from Replica, there is hope that ML systems trained on Replica may transfer directly to real world image and video data. Together with the data, we are releasing a minimal C++ SDK as a starting point for working with the Replica dataset. In addition, Replica is `Habitat-compatible', i.e. can be natively used with AI Habitat for training and testing embodied agents.
We propose SplitNet, a method for decoupling visual perception and policy learning. By incorporating auxiliary tasks and selective learning of portions of the model, we explicitly decompose the learning objectives for visual navigation into perceiving the world and acting on that perception. We show dramatic improvements over baseline models on transferring between simulators, an encouraging step towards Sim2Real. Additionally, SplitNet generalizes better to unseen environments from the same simulator and transfers faster and more effectively to novel embodied navigation tasks. Further, given only a small sample from a target domain, SplitNet can match the performance of traditional end-to-end pipelines which receive the entire dataset. Code and video are available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/splitnet and https://youtu.be/TJkZcsD2vrc
Studies have shown that a dominant class of questions asked by visually impaired users on images of their surroundings involves reading text in the image. But today's VQA models can not read! Our paper takes a first step towards addressing this problem. First, we introduce a new "TextVQA" dataset to facilitate progress on this important problem. Existing datasets either have a small proportion of questions about text (e.g., the VQA dataset) or are too small (e.g., the VizWiz dataset). TextVQA contains 45,336 questions on 28,408 images that require reasoning about text to answer. Second, we introduce a novel model architecture that reads text in the image, reasons about it in the context of the image and the question, and predicts an answer which might be a deduction based on the text and the image or composed of the strings found in the image. Consequently, we call our approach Look, Read, Reason & Answer (LoRRA). We show that LoRRA outperforms existing state-of-the-art VQA models on our TextVQA dataset. We find that the gap between human performance and machine performance is significantly larger on TextVQA than on VQA 2.0, suggesting that TextVQA is well-suited to benchmark progress along directions complementary to VQA 2.0.
Consider a collaborative task that requires communication. Two agents are placed in an environment and must create a language from scratch in order to coordinate. Recent work has been interested in what kinds of languages emerge when deep reinforcement learning agents are put in such a situation, and in particular in the factors that cause language to be compositional-i.e. meaning is expressed by combining words which themselves have meaning. Evolutionary linguists have also studied the emergence of compositional language for decades, and they find that in addition to structural priors like those already studied in deep learning, the dynamics of transmitting language from generation to generation contribute significantly to the emergence of compositionality. In this paper, we introduce these cultural evolutionary dynamics into language emergence by periodically replacing agents in a population to create a knowledge gap, implicitly inducing cultural transmission of language. We show that this implicit cultural transmission encourages the resulting languages to exhibit better compositional generalization and suggest how elements of cultural dynamics can be further integrated into populations of deep agents.
A counterfactual query is typically of the form 'For situation X, why was the outcome Y and not Z?'. A counterfactual explanation (or response to such a query) is of the form "If X was X*, then the outcome would have been Z rather than Y." In this work, we develop a technique to produce counterfactual visual explanations. Given a 'query' image $I$ for which a vision system predicts class $c$, a counterfactual visual explanation identifies how $I$ could change such that the system would output a different specified class $c'$. To do this, we select a 'distractor' image $I'$ that the system predicts as class $c'$ and identify spatial regions in $I$ and $I'$ such that replacing the identified region in $I$ with the identified region in $I'$ would push the system towards classifying $I$ as $c'$. We apply our approach to multiple image classification datasets generating qualitative results showcasing the interpretability and discriminativeness of our counterfactual explanations. To explore the effectiveness of our explanations in teaching humans, we present machine teaching experiments for the task of fine-grained bird classification. We find that users trained to distinguish bird species fare better when given access to counterfactual explanations in addition to training examples.
Embodied Question Answering (EQA) is a relatively new task where an agent is asked to answer questions about its environment from egocentric perception. EQA makes the fundamental assumption that every question, e.g., "what color is the car?", has exactly one target ("car") being inquired about. This assumption puts a direct limitation on the abilities of the agent. We present a generalization of EQA - Multi-Target EQA (MT-EQA). Specifically, we study questions that have multiple targets in them, such as "Is the dresser in the bedroom bigger than the oven in the kitchen?", where the agent has to navigate to multiple locations ("dresser in bedroom", "oven in kitchen") and perform comparative reasoning ("dresser" bigger than "oven") before it can answer a question. Such questions require the development of entirely new modules or components in the agent. To address this, we propose a modular architecture composed of a program generator, a controller, a navigator, and a VQA module. The program generator converts the given question into sequential executable sub-programs; the navigator guides the agent to multiple locations pertinent to the navigation-related sub-programs; and the controller learns to select relevant observations along its path. These observations are then fed to the VQA module to predict the answer. We perform detailed analysis for each of the model components and show that our joint model can outperform previous methods and strong baselines by a significant margin.
Passive visual systems typically fail to recognize objects in the amodal setting where they are heavily occluded. In contrast, humans and other embodied agents have the ability to move in the environment, and actively control the viewing angle to better understand object shapes and semantics. In this work, we introduce the task of Embodied Visual Recognition (EVR): An agent is instantiated in a 3D environment close to an occluded target object, and is free to move in the environment to perform object classification, amodal object localization, and amodal object segmentation. To address this, we develop a new model called Embodied Mask R-CNN, for agents to learn to move strategically to improve their visual recognition abilities. We conduct experiments using the House3D environment. Experimental results show that: 1) agents with embodiment (movement) achieve better visual recognition performance than passive ones; 2) in order to improve visual recognition abilities, agents can learn strategical moving paths that are different from shortest paths.
To help bridge the gap between internet vision-style problems and the goal of vision for embodied perception we instantiate a large-scale navigation task -- Embodied Question Answering [1] in photo-realistic environments (Matterport 3D). We thoroughly study navigation policies that utilize 3D point clouds, RGB images, or their combination. Our analysis of these models reveals several key findings. We find that two seemingly naive navigation baselines, forward-only and random, are strong navigators and challenging to outperform, due to the specific choice of the evaluation setting presented by [1]. We find a novel loss-weighting scheme we call Inflection Weighting to be important when training recurrent models for navigation with behavior cloning and are able to out perform the baselines with this technique. We find that point clouds provide a richer signal than RGB images for learning obstacle avoidance, motivating the use (and continued study) of 3D deep learning models for embodied navigation.
We present Habitat, a new platform for research in embodied artificial intelligence (AI). Habitat enables training embodied agents (virtual robots) in highly efficient photorealistic 3D simulation, before transferring the learned skills to reality. Specifically, Habitat consists of the following: 1. Habitat-Sim: a flexible, high-performance 3D simulator with configurable agents, multiple sensors, and generic 3D dataset handling (with built-in support for SUNCG, Matterport3D, Gibson datasets). Habitat-Sim is fast -- when rendering a scene from the Matterport3D dataset, Habitat-Sim achieves several thousand frames per second (fps) running single-threaded, and can reach over 10,000 fps multi-process on a single GPU, which is orders of magnitude faster than the closest simulator. 2. Habitat-API: a modular high-level library for end-to-end development of embodied AI algorithms -- defining embodied AI tasks (e.g. navigation, instruction following, question answering), configuring and training embodied agents (via imitation or reinforcement learning, or via classic SLAM), and benchmarking using standard metrics. These large-scale engineering contributions enable us to answer scientific questions requiring experiments that were till now impracticable or `merely' impractical. Specifically, in the context of point-goal navigation (1) we revisit the comparison between learning and SLAM approaches from two recent works and find evidence for the opposite conclusion -- that learning outperforms SLAM, if scaled to total experience far surpassing that of previous investigations, and (2) we conduct the first cross-dataset generalization experiments {train, test} x {Matterport3D, Gibson} for multiple sensors {blind, RGB, RGBD, D} and find that only agents with depth (D) sensors generalize across datasets. We hope that our open-source platform and these findings will advance research in embodied AI.
In model-based reinforcement learning, the agent interleaves between model learning and planning. These two components are inextricably intertwined. If the model is not able to provide sensible long-term prediction, the executed planner would exploit model flaws, which can yield catastrophic failures. This paper focuses on building a model that reasons about the long-term future and demonstrates how to use this for efficient planning and exploration. To this end, we build a latent-variable autoregressive model by leveraging recent ideas in variational inference. We argue that forcing latent variables to carry future information through an auxiliary task substantially improves long-term predictions. Moreover, by planning in the latent space, the planner's solution is ensured to be within regions where the model is valid. An exploration strategy can be devised by searching for unlikely trajectories under the model. Our method achieves higher reward faster compared to baselines on a variety of tasks and environments in both the imitation learning and model-based reinforcement learning settings.