RRM: Relightable assets using Radiance guided Material extraction

Synthesizing NeRFs under arbitrary lighting has become a seminal problem in the last few years. Recent efforts tackle the problem via the extraction of physically-based parameters that can then be rendered under arbitrary lighting, but they are limited in the range of scenes they can handle, usually mishandling glossy scenes. We propose RRM, a method that can extract the materials, geometry, and environment lighting of a scene even in the presence of highly reflective objects. Our method consists of a physically-aware radiance field representation that informs physically-based parameters, and an expressive environment light structure based on a Laplacian Pyramid. We demonstrate that our contributions outperform the state-of-the-art on parameter retrieval tasks, leading to high-fidelity relighting and novel view synthesis on surfacic scenes.

Proper Laplacian Representation Learning

The ability to learn good representations of states is essential for solving large reinforcement learning problems, where exploration, generalization, and transfer are particularly challenging. The Laplacian representation is a promising approach to address these problems by inducing intrinsic rewards for temporally-extended action discovery and reward shaping, and informative state encoding. To obtain the Laplacian representation one needs to compute the eigensystem of the graph Laplacian, which is often approximated through optimization objectives compatible with deep learning approaches. These approximations, however, depend on hyperparameters that are impossible to tune efficiently, converge to arbitrary rotations of the desired eigenvectors, and are unable to accurately recover the corresponding eigenvalues. In this paper we introduce a theoretically sound objective and corresponding optimization algorithm for approximating the Laplacian representation. Our approach naturally recovers both the true eigenvectors and eigenvalues while eliminating the hyperparameter dependence of previous approximations. We provide theoretical guarantees for our method and we show that those results translate empirically into robust learning across multiple environments.

Concept Learning in Deep Reinforcement Learning

Deep reinforcement learning techniques have shown to be a promising path to solve very complex tasks that once were thought to be out of the realm of machines. However, while humans and animals learn incrementally during their lifetimes and exploit their experience to solve new tasks, standard deep learning methods specialize to solve only one task at a time and whatever information they acquire is hardly reusable in new situations. Given that any artificial agent would need such a generalization ability to deal with the complexities of the world, it is critical to understand what mechanisms give rise to this ability. We argue that one of the mechanisms humans rely on is the use of discrete conceptual representations to encode their sensory inputs. These representations group similar inputs in such a way that combined they provide a level of abstraction that is transverse to a wide variety of tasks, filtering out irrelevant information for their solution. Here, we show that it is possible to learn such concept-like representations by self-supervision, following an information-bottleneck approach, and that these representations accelerate the transference of skills by providing a prior that guides the policy optimization process. Our method is able to learn useful concepts in locomotive tasks that significantly reduce the number of optimization steps required, opening a new path to endow artificial agents with generalization abilities.