Mapping the Unseen: Unified Promptable Panoptic Mapping with Dynamic Labeling using Foundation Models

In the field of robotics and computer vision, efficient and accurate semantic mapping remains a significant challenge due to the growing demand for intelligent machines that can comprehend and interact with complex environments. Conventional panoptic mapping methods, however, are limited by predefined semantic classes, thus making them ineffective for handling novel or unforeseen objects. In response to this limitation, we introduce the Unified Promptable Panoptic Mapping (UPPM) method. UPPM utilizes recent advances in foundation models to enable real-time, on-demand label generation using natural language prompts. By incorporating a dynamic labeling strategy into traditional panoptic mapping techniques, UPPM provides significant improvements in adaptability and versatility while maintaining high performance levels in map reconstruction. We demonstrate our approach on real-world and simulated datasets. Results show that UPPM can accurately reconstruct scenes and segment objects while generating rich semantic labels through natural language interactions. A series of ablation experiments validated the advantages of foundation model-based labeling over fixed label sets.

Standing Between Past and Future: Spatio-Temporal Modeling for Multi-Camera 3D Multi-Object Tracking

This work proposes an end-to-end multi-camera 3D multi-object tracking (MOT) framework. It emphasizes spatio-temporal continuity and integrates both past and future reasoning for tracked objects. Thus, we name it "Past-and-Future reasoning for Tracking" (PF-Track). Specifically, our method adapts the "tracking by attention" framework and represents tracked instances coherently over time with object queries. To explicitly use historical cues, our "Past Reasoning" module learns to refine the tracks and enhance the object features by cross-attending to queries from previous frames and other objects. The "Future Reasoning" module digests historical information and predicts robust future trajectories. In the case of long-term occlusions, our method maintains the object positions and enables re-association by integrating motion predictions. On the nuScenes dataset, our method improves AMOTA by a large margin and remarkably reduces ID-Switches by 90% compared to prior approaches, which is an order of magnitude less. The code and models are made available at https://github.com/TRI-ML/PF-Track.

Safe Real-World Autonomous Driving by Learning to Predict and Plan with a Mixture of Experts

The goal of autonomous vehicles is to navigate public roads safely and comfortably. To enforce safety, traditional planning approaches rely on handcrafted rules to generate trajectories. Machine learning-based systems, on the other hand, scale with data and are able to learn more complex behaviors. However, they often ignore that agents and self-driving vehicle trajectory distributions can be leveraged to improve safety. In this paper, we propose modeling a distribution over multiple future trajectories for both the self-driving vehicle and other road agents, using a unified neural network architecture for prediction and planning. During inference, we select the planning trajectory that minimizes a cost taking into account safety and the predicted probabilities. Our approach does not depend on any rule-based planners for trajectory generation or optimization, improves with more training data and is simple to implement. We extensively evaluate our method through a realistic simulator and show that the predicted trajectory distribution corresponds to different driving profiles. We also successfully deploy it on a self-driving vehicle on urban public roads, confirming that it drives safely without compromising comfort. The code for training and testing our model on a public prediction dataset and the video of the road test are available at https://woven.mobi/safepathnet

CW-ERM: Improving Autonomous Driving Planning with Closed-loop Weighted Empirical Risk Minimization

The imitation learning of self-driving vehicle policies through behavioral cloning is often carried out in an open-loop fashion, ignoring the effect of actions to future states. Training such policies purely with Empirical Risk Minimization (ERM) can be detrimental to real-world performance, as it biases policy networks towards matching only open-loop behavior, showing poor results when evaluated in closed-loop. In this work, we develop an efficient and simple-to-implement principle called Closed-loop Weighted Empirical Risk Minimization (CW-ERM), in which a closed-loop evaluation procedure is first used to identify training data samples that are important for practical driving performance and then we these samples to help debias the policy network. We evaluate CW-ERM in a challenging urban driving dataset and show that this procedure yields a significant reduction in collisions as well as other non-differentiable closed-loop metrics.

End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers

We present a new method that views object detection as a direct set prediction problem. Our approach streamlines the detection pipeline, effectively removing the need for many hand-designed components like a non-maximum suppression procedure or anchor generation that explicitly encode our prior knowledge about the task. The main ingredients of the new framework, called DEtection TRansformer or DETR, are a set-based global loss that forces unique predictions via bipartite matching, and a transformer encoder-decoder architecture. Given a fixed small set of learned object queries, DETR reasons about the relations of the objects and the global image context to directly output the final set of predictions in parallel. The new model is conceptually simple and does not require a specialized library, unlike many other modern detectors. DETR demonstrates accuracy and run-time performance on par with the well-established and highly-optimized Faster RCNN baseline on the challenging COCO object detection dataset. Moreover, DETR can be easily generalized to produce panoptic segmentation in a unified manner. We show that it significantly outperforms competitive baselines. Training code and pretrained models are available at https://github.com/facebookresearch/detr.

Polygames: Improved Zero Learning

Since DeepMind's AlphaZero, Zero learning quickly became the state-of-the-art method for many board games. It can be improved using a fully convolutional structure (no fully connected layer). Using such an architecture plus global pooling, we can create bots independent of the board size. The training can be made more robust by keeping track of the best checkpoints during the training and by training against them. Using these features, we release Polygames, our framework for Zero learning, with its library of games and its checkpoints. We won against strong humans at the game of Hex in 19x19, which was often said to be untractable for zero learning; and in Havannah. We also won several first places at the TAAI competitions.

Monte-Carlo Tree Search for Efficient Visually Guided Rearrangement Planning

In this paper, we address the problem of visually guided rearrangement planning with many movable objects, i.e., finding a sequence of actions to move a set of objects from an initial arrangement to a desired one, while relying directly on visual inputs coming from a camera. We introduce an efficient and scalable rearrangement planning method, addressing a fundamental limitation of most existing approaches that do not scale well with the number of objects. This increased efficiency allows us to use planning in a closed loop with visual workspace analysis to build a robust rearrangement framework that can recover from errors and external perturbations. The contributions of this work are threefold. First, we develop an AlphaGo-like strategy for rearrangement planning, improving the efficiency of Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) using a policy trained from rearrangement planning examples. We show empirically that the proposed approach scales well with the number of objects. Second, in order to demonstrate the efficiency of the planner on a real robot, we adopt a state-of-the-art calibration-free visual recognition system that outputs position of a single object and extend it to estimate the state of a workspace containing multiple objects. Third, we validate the complete pipeline with several experiments on a real UR-5 robotic arm solving rearrangement planning problems with multiple movable objects and only requiring few seconds of computation to compute the plan. We also show empirically that the robot can successfully recover from errors and perturbations in the workspace. Source code and pretrained models for our work are available at https://github.com/ylabbe/rearrangement-planning

Exploring Weight Symmetry in Deep Neural Networks

We propose to impose symmetry in neural network parameters to improve parameter usage and make use of dedicated convolution and matrix multiplication routines. Due to significant reduction in the number of parameters as a result of the symmetry constraints, one would expect a dramatic drop in accuracy. Surprisingly, we show that this is not the case, and, depending on network size, symmetry can have little or no negative effect on network accuracy, especially in deep overparameterized networks. We propose several ways to impose local symmetry in recurrent and convolutional neural networks, and show that our symmetry parameterizations satisfy universal approximation property for single hidden layer networks. We extensively evaluate these parameterizations on CIFAR, ImageNet and language modeling datasets, showing significant benefits from the use of symmetry. For instance, our ResNet-101 with channel-wise symmetry has almost 25% less parameters and only 0.2% accuracy loss on ImageNet. Code for our experiments is available at https://github.com/hushell/deep-symmetry

Compressing the Input for CNNs with the First-Order Scattering Transform

We study the first-order scattering transform as a candidate for reducing the signal processed by a convolutional neural network (CNN). We show theoretical and empirical evidence that in the case of natural images and sufficiently small translation invariance, this transform preserves most of the signal information needed for classification while substantially reducing the spatial resolution and total signal size. We demonstrate that cascading a CNN with this representation performs on par with ImageNet classification models, commonly used in downstream tasks, such as the ResNet-50. We subsequently apply our trained hybrid ImageNet model as a base model on a detection system, which has typically larger image inputs. On Pascal VOC and COCO detection tasks we demonstrate improvements in the inference speed and training memory consumption compared to models trained directly on the input image.

Scattering Networks for Hybrid Representation Learning

Scattering networks are a class of designed Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) with fixed weights. We argue they can serve as generic representations for modelling images. In particular, by working in scattering space, we achieve competitive results both for supervised and unsupervised learning tasks, while making progress towards constructing more interpretable CNNs. For supervised learning, we demonstrate that the early layers of CNNs do not necessarily need to be learned, and can be replaced with a scattering network instead. Indeed, using hybrid architectures, we achieve the best results with predefined representations to-date, while being competitive with end-to-end learned CNNs. Specifically, even applying a shallow cascade of small-windowed scattering coefficients followed by 1$\times$1-convolutions results in AlexNet accuracy on the ILSVRC2012 classification task. Moreover, by combining scattering networks with deep residual networks, we achieve a single-crop top-5 error of 11.4% on ILSVRC2012. Also, we show they can yield excellent performance in the small sample regime on CIFAR-10 and STL-10 datasets, exceeding their end-to-end counterparts, through their ability to incorporate geometrical priors. For unsupervised learning, scattering coefficients can be a competitive representation that permits image recovery. We use this fact to train hybrid GANs to generate images. Finally, we empirically analyze several properties related to stability and reconstruction of images from scattering coefficients.