MoDA: Map style transfer for self-supervised Domain Adaptation of embodied agents

We propose a domain adaptation method, MoDA, which adapts a pretrained embodied agent to a new, noisy environment without ground-truth supervision. Map-based memory provides important contextual information for visual navigation, and exhibits unique spatial structure mainly composed of flat walls and rectangular obstacles. Our adaptation approach encourages the inherent regularities on the estimated maps to guide the agent to overcome the prevalent domain discrepancy in a novel environment. Specifically, we propose an efficient learning curriculum to handle the visual and dynamics corruptions in an online manner, self-supervised with pseudo clean maps generated by style transfer networks. Because the map-based representation provides spatial knowledge for the agent's policy, our formulation can deploy the pretrained policy networks from simulators in a new setting. We evaluate MoDA in various practical scenarios and show that our proposed method quickly enhances the agent's performance in downstream tasks including localization, mapping, exploration, and point-goal navigation.

Generator Knows What Discriminator Should Learn in Unconditional GANs

Recent methods for conditional image generation benefit from dense supervision such as segmentation label maps to achieve high-fidelity. However, it is rarely explored to employ dense supervision for unconditional image generation. Here we explore the efficacy of dense supervision in unconditional generation and find generator feature maps can be an alternative of cost-expensive semantic label maps. From our empirical evidences, we propose a new generator-guided discriminator regularization(GGDR) in which the generator feature maps supervise the discriminator to have rich semantic representations in unconditional generation. In specific, we employ an U-Net architecture for discriminator, which is trained to predict the generator feature maps given fake images as inputs. Extensive experiments on mulitple datasets show that our GGDR consistently improves the performance of baseline methods in terms of quantitative and qualitative aspects. Code is available at https://github.com/naver-ai/GGDR

CPO: Change Robust Panorama to Point Cloud Localization

We present CPO, a fast and robust algorithm that localizes a 2D panorama with respect to a 3D point cloud of a scene possibly containing changes. To robustly handle scene changes, our approach deviates from conventional feature point matching, and focuses on the spatial context provided from panorama images. Specifically, we propose efficient color histogram generation and subsequent robust localization using score maps. By utilizing the unique equivariance of spherical projections, we propose very fast color histogram generation for a large number of camera poses without explicitly rendering images for all candidate poses. We accumulate the regional consistency of the panorama and point cloud as 2D/3D score maps, and use them to weigh the input color values to further increase robustness. The weighted color distribution quickly finds good initial poses and achieves stable convergence for gradient-based optimization. CPO is lightweight and achieves effective localization in all tested scenarios, showing stable performance despite scene changes, repetitive structures, or featureless regions, which are typical challenges for visual localization with perspective cameras.

Rarity Score : A New Metric to Evaluate the Uncommonness of Synthesized Images

Evaluation metrics in image synthesis play a key role to measure performances of generative models. However, most metrics mainly focus on image fidelity. Existing diversity metrics are derived by comparing distributions, and thus they cannot quantify the diversity or rarity degree of each generated image. In this work, we propose a new evaluation metric, called `rarity score', to measure the individual rarity of each image synthesized by generative models. We first show empirical observation that common samples are close to each other and rare samples are far from each other in nearest-neighbor distances of feature space. We then use our metric to demonstrate that the extent to which different generative models produce rare images can be effectively compared. We also propose a method to compare rarities between datasets that share the same concept such as CelebA-HQ and FFHQ. Finally, we analyze the use of metrics in different designs of feature spaces to better understand the relationship between feature spaces and resulting sparse images. Code will be publicly available online for the research community.

Ev-NeRF: Event Based Neural Radiance Field

We present Ev-NeRF, a Neural Radiance Field derived from event data. While event cameras can measure subtle brightness changes in high frame rates, the measurements in low lighting or extreme motion suffer from significant domain discrepancy with complex noise. As a result, the performance of event-based vision tasks does not transfer to challenging environments, where the event cameras are expected to thrive over normal cameras. We find that the multi-view consistency of NeRF provides a powerful self-supervision signal for eliminating the spurious measurements and extracting the consistent underlying structure despite highly noisy input. Instead of posed images of the original NeRF, the input to Ev-NeRF is the event measurements accompanied by the movements of the sensors. Using the loss function that reflects the measurement model of the sensor, Ev-NeRF creates an integrated neural volume that summarizes the unstructured and sparse data points captured for about 2-4 seconds. The generated neural volume can also produce intensity images from novel views with reasonable depth estimates, which can serve as a high-quality input to various vision-based tasks. Our results show that Ev-NeRF achieves competitive performance for intensity image reconstruction under extreme noise conditions and high-dynamic-range imaging.

Masking Adversarial Damage: Finding Adversarial Saliency for Robust and Sparse Network

Adversarial examples provoke weak reliability and potential security issues in deep neural networks. Although adversarial training has been widely studied to improve adversarial robustness, it works in an over-parameterized regime and requires high computations and large memory budgets. To bridge adversarial robustness and model compression, we propose a novel adversarial pruning method, Masking Adversarial Damage (MAD) that employs second-order information of adversarial loss. By using it, we can accurately estimate adversarial saliency for model parameters and determine which parameters can be pruned without weakening adversarial robustness. Furthermore, we reveal that model parameters of initial layer are highly sensitive to the adversarial examples and show that compressed feature representation retains semantic information for the target objects. Through extensive experiments on three public datasets, we demonstrate that MAD effectively prunes adversarially trained networks without loosing adversarial robustness and shows better performance than previous adversarial pruning methods.

Distilling Robust and Non-Robust Features in Adversarial Examples by Information Bottleneck

Adversarial examples, generated by carefully crafted perturbation, have attracted considerable attention in research fields. Recent works have argued that the existence of the robust and non-robust features is a primary cause of the adversarial examples, and investigated their internal interactions in the feature space. In this paper, we propose a way of explicitly distilling feature representation into the robust and non-robust features, using Information Bottleneck. Specifically, we inject noise variation to each feature unit and evaluate the information flow in the feature representation to dichotomize feature units either robust or non-robust, based on the noise variation magnitude. Through comprehensive experiments, we demonstrate that the distilled features are highly correlated with adversarial prediction, and they have human-perceptible semantic information by themselves. Furthermore, we present an attack mechanism intensifying the gradient of non-robust features that is directly related to the model prediction, and validate its effectiveness of breaking model robustness.

Ev-TTA: Test-Time Adaptation for Event-Based Object Recognition

We introduce Ev-TTA, a simple, effective test-time adaptation algorithm for event-based object recognition. While event cameras are proposed to provide measurements of scenes with fast motions or drastic illumination changes, many existing event-based recognition algorithms suffer from performance deterioration under extreme conditions due to significant domain shifts. Ev-TTA mitigates the severe domain gaps by fine-tuning the pre-trained classifiers during the test phase using loss functions inspired by the spatio-temporal characteristics of events. Since the event data is a temporal stream of measurements, our loss function enforces similar predictions for adjacent events to quickly adapt to the changed environment online. Also, we utilize the spatial correlations between two polarities of events to handle noise under extreme illumination, where different polarities of events exhibit distinctive noise distributions. Ev-TTA demonstrates a large amount of performance gain on a wide range of event-based object recognition tasks without extensive additional training. Our formulation can be successfully applied regardless of input representations and further extended into regression tasks. We expect Ev-TTA to provide the key technique to deploy event-based vision algorithms in challenging real-world applications where significant domain shift is inevitable.

Generating Videos with Dynamics-aware Implicit Generative Adversarial Networks

In the deep learning era, long video generation of high-quality still remains challenging due to the spatio-temporal complexity and continuity of videos. Existing prior works have attempted to model video distribution by representing videos as 3D grids of RGB values, which impedes the scale of generated videos and neglects continuous dynamics. In this paper, we found that the recent emerging paradigm of implicit neural representations (INRs) that encodes a continuous signal into a parameterized neural network effectively mitigates the issue. By utilizing INRs of video, we propose dynamics-aware implicit generative adversarial network (DIGAN), a novel generative adversarial network for video generation. Specifically, we introduce (a) an INR-based video generator that improves the motion dynamics by manipulating the space and time coordinates differently and (b) a motion discriminator that efficiently identifies the unnatural motions without observing the entire long frame sequences. We demonstrate the superiority of DIGAN under various datasets, along with multiple intriguing properties, e.g., long video synthesis, video extrapolation, and non-autoregressive video generation. For example, DIGAN improves the previous state-of-the-art FVD score on UCF-101 by 30.7% and can be trained on 128 frame videos of 128x128 resolution, 80 frames longer than the 48 frames of the previous state-of-the-art method.