Iterative Vision-and-Language Navigation

We present Iterative Vision-and-Language Navigation (IVLN), a paradigm for evaluating language-guided agents navigating in a persistent environment over time. Existing Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) benchmarks erase the agent's memory at the beginning of every episode, testing the ability to perform cold-start navigation with no prior information. However, deployed robots occupy the same environment for long periods of time. The IVLN paradigm addresses this disparity by training and evaluating VLN agents that maintain memory across tours of scenes that consist of up to 100 ordered instruction-following Room-to-Room (R2R) episodes, each defined by an individual language instruction and a target path. We present discrete and continuous Iterative Room-to-Room (IR2R) benchmarks comprising about 400 tours each in 80 indoor scenes. We find that extending the implicit memory of high-performing transformer VLN agents is not sufficient for IVLN, but agents that build maps can benefit from environment persistence, motivating a renewed focus on map-building agents in VLN.

Cross-View Exocentric to Egocentric Video Synthesis

Cross-view video synthesis task seeks to generate video sequences of one view from another dramatically different view. In this paper, we investigate the exocentric (third-person) view to egocentric (first-person) view video generation task. This is challenging because egocentric view sometimes is remarkably different from the exocentric view. Thus, transforming the appearances across the two different views is a non-trivial task. Particularly, we propose a novel Bi-directional Spatial Temporal Attention Fusion Generative Adversarial Network (STA-GAN) to learn both spatial and temporal information to generate egocentric video sequences from the exocentric view. The proposed STA-GAN consists of three parts: temporal branch, spatial branch, and attention fusion. First, the temporal and spatial branches generate a sequence of fake frames and their corresponding features. The fake frames are generated in both downstream and upstream directions for both temporal and spatial branches. Next, the generated four different fake frames and their corresponding features (spatial and temporal branches in two directions) are fed into a novel multi-generation attention fusion module to produce the final video sequence. Meanwhile, we also propose a novel temporal and spatial dual-discriminator for more robust network optimization. Extensive experiments on the Side2Ego and Top2Ego datasets show that the proposed STA-GAN significantly outperforms the existing methods.

ViP: Video Platform for PyTorch

This work presents the Video Platform for PyTorch (ViP), a deep learning-based framework designed to handle and extend to any problem domain based on videos. ViP supports (1) a single unified interface applicable to all video problem domains, (2) quick prototyping of video models, (3) executing large-batch operations with reduced memory consumption, and (4) easy and reproducible experimental setups. ViP's core functionality is built with flexibility and modularity in mind to allow for smooth data flow between different parts of the platform and benchmarking against existing methods. In providing a software platform that supports multiple video-based problem domains, we allow for more cross-pollination of models, ideas and stronger generalization in the video understanding research community.

Greedy Multiple Instance Learning via Codebook Learning and Nearest Neighbor Voting

Multiple instance learning (MIL) has attracted great attention recently in machine learning community. However, most MIL algorithms are very slow and cannot be applied to large datasets. In this paper, we propose a greedy strategy to speed up the multiple instance learning process. Our contribution is two fold. First, we propose a density ratio model, and show that maximizing a density ratio function is the low bound of the DD model under certain conditions. Secondly, we make use of a histogram ratio between positive bags and negative bags to represent the density ratio function and find codebooks separately for positive bags and negative bags by a greedy strategy. For testing, we make use of a nearest neighbor strategy to classify new bags. We test our method on both small benchmark datasets and the large TRECVID MED11 dataset. The experimental results show that our method yields comparable accuracy to the current state of the art, while being up to at least one order of magnitude faster.