171 accepted papers
“Code-as-Policy” considers how executable code can complement data-intensive Vision-LanguageAction (VLA) methods, yet their effectiveness as autonomous controllers for embodied manipulation remains underexplored. We present CaPX, an open-access framework for systematically studying Code-as-Policy ag…
The diversity of robot embodiments and action spaces makes it challenging to build robot world models that generalize across different embodiments. We introduce a Latent Action Conditioned Robot World Model (LAC-WM), which operates within a learned unified latent action space shared across diverse e…
Generative video modeling has emerged as a compelling tool to zero-shot reason about plausible physical interactions for open-world manipulation. Yet, it remains a challenge to translate such human-led motions into the low-level actions demanded by robotic systems. We observe that given an initial i…
Embodied cognition argues that intelligence arises from continuous sensorimotor interaction with the world. It raises an intriguing question: do modern vision-language models (VLMs), trained largely in a disembodied manner, exhibit signs of embodied cognition? To investigate this, we introduce **ENA…
Robotic reproduction of oil paintings using soft brushes and pigments requires force-sensitive control of deformable tools, prediction of brushstroke effects, and multi-step stroke planning, often without human step-by-step demonstrations or faithful simulators. Given only a sequence of target oil p…
Latent diffusion models excel at generating high-quality images but lose the benefits of end-to-end modeling. They discard information during image encoding, require a separately trained decoder, and model an auxiliary distribution to the raw data. In this paper, we propose Latent Forcing, a simple …
We present STACK, a framework for discovering and learning composable manipulation skills from unsegmented demonstrations by leveraging spatial and temporal structure extracted from foundation models. STACK automatically extracts temporal structure by segmenting raw demonstrations into short-horizon…
Imitation learning from large-scale, diverse human demonstrations has been shown to be effective for training robots, but collecting such data is costly and time-consuming. This challenge intensifies for multi-step bimanual mobile manipulation, where humans must teleoperate both the mobile base and…
Humans anticipate, from a glance and a contemplated action of their bodies, how the 3D world will respond, a capability that is equally vital for robotic manipulation. We introduce PointWorld, a large pre-trained 3D world model that unifies state and action in a shared 3D space as 3D point flows: gi
Understanding the physical world is essential for generalist AI agents. However, it remains unclear whether state-of-the-art vision perception models (e.g., large VLMs) can perform quantitative physical reasoning tasks. Existing evaluations are predominantly VQA-based and qualitative, offering limit
Intelligent embodied agents not only need to accomplish preset tasks, but also learn to align with individual human needs and preferences. Extracting reward signals from human language preferences allows an embodied agent to adapt through reinforcement learning. However, human language preferences a…
We address the challenge of learning to manipulate deformable objects with unknown dynamics. In non-rigid objects, the dynamics parameters define how they react to interactions --how they stretch, bend, compress, and move-- and they are critical to determining the optimal actions to perform a manipu…
Robot simulation is a highly efficient approach for scaling data collection for robot learning, but scaling for most household tasks remains bottlenecked by a shortage of simulation-ready 3D assets. While modern robot simulators can model complex phenomena like temperature and fluids, most in-the-wi…
Spatial embodied intelligence often operates under partial observability, where agents must act to acquire missing information rather than passively consume complete observations. In such settings, progress depends on actively selecting informative actions that reduce uncertainty and support the con…
We frame spatial supersensing in video as an overarching goal for multimodal intelligence and argue that progress requires a shift from long-context brute force to predictive sensing. Using a four-level taxonomy: semantic perception, streaming event cognition, implicit 3D spatial cognition, and pred…
In closed-loop multi-turn agent reinforcement learning, LLM agents exhibit reasoning collapse, where reasoning shift toward generic templates, weakly coupled to the inputs. We firstly identify that such collapse is easy to miss with entropy or surface diversity metrics since reasoning text still var…
Can Vision Language Models (VLMs) imagine the full scene from just a few views, like humans do? Humans form spatial mental models, internal representations of unseen space, to reason about layout, perspective, and motion. Our new MindCube benchmark with 21,154 questions across 3,268 images exposes t…
Evaluations of image compression performance which include human preferences have generally found that naive distortion functions such as MSE are insufficiently aligned to human perception.In order to align compression models to human perception, prior work has employed differentiable perceptual los
Task specification for robotic manipulation in open-world environments is challenging, requiring flexible and adaptive objectives that align with human intentions and can evolve through iterative feedback. We introduce Iterative Keypoint Reward (IKER), a visually grounded, Python-based reward functi
Real-world household tasks present significant challenges for mobile manipulation robots. An analysis of existing robotics benchmarks reveals that successful task performance hinges on three key whole-body control capabilities: bimanual coordination, stable and precise navigation, and extensive end-…
Learning to perform manipulation tasks from human videos is a promising approach for teaching robots. However, many manipulation tasks require changing control parameters during task execution, such as force, which visual data alone cannot capture. In this work, we leverage sensing devices such as a
Capturing diversity is crucial in conditional and prompt-based image generation, particularly when conditions contain uncertainty that can lead to multiple plausible outputs. To generate diverse images reflecting this diversity, traditional methods often modify random seeds, making it difficult to d…
Designing model architectures requires decisions such as selecting operators (e.g., attention, convolution) and configurations (e.g., depth, width). However, evaluating the impact of these decisions on model quality requires costly pretraining, limiting architectural investigation. Inspired by how n…
Since the advent of popular visual generation frameworks like VQGAN and Latent Diffusion Models, state-of-the-art image generation systems have generally been two-stage systems that first tokenize or compress visual data into a lower-dimensional latent space before learning a generative model. Token…
The ability to use random objects as tools in a generalizable manner is a missing piece in robots’ intelligence today to boost their versatility and problem-solving capabilities. State-of-the-art robotic tool usage methods focused on procedurally generating or crowd-sourcing datasets of tools for a
Efficient understanding of long-form videos remains a significant challenge in computer vision. In this work, we revisit temporal search paradigms for long-form video understanding, studying a fundamental issue pertaining to all state-of-the-art (SOTA) long-context vision-language models (VLMs). In…
Text-to-image diffusion models have seen significant development recently due to increasing availability of paired 2D data. Although a similar trend is emerging in 3D generation, the limited availability of high-quality 3D data has resulted in less competitive 3D diffusion models compared to their 2…
Human communication is inherently multimodal, involving a combination of verbal and non-verbal cues such as speech, facial expressions, and body gestures. Modeling these behaviors is essential for understanding human interaction and for creating virtual characters that can communicate naturally in a…
Humans possess the visual-spatial intelligence to remember spaces from sequential visual observations. However, can Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) trained on million-scale video datasets also "think in space" from videos? We present a novel video-based visual-spatial intelligence benchmark…
Understanding fine-grained object affordances is imperative for robots to manipulate objects in unstructured environments given open-ended task instructions. However, existing methods of visual affordance predictions often rely on manually annotated data or conditions only on a predefined set of tas
A major challenge in training VLM agents, compared to LLM agents, is that states shift from simple texts to complex visual observations, which introduces partial observability and demands robust world modeling. We ask: can VLM agents build internal world models through explicit visual state reasonin…
We introduce the WorldScore benchmark, the first unified benchmark for world generation. We decompose world generation into a sequence of next-scene generation tasks with explicit camera trajectory-based layout specifications, enabling unified evaluation of diverse approaches from 3D and 4D scene ge…
Test-time scaling is a promising new approach to language modeling that uses extra test-time compute to improve performance. Recently, OpenAI’s o1 model showed this capability but did not publicly share its methodology, leading to many replication efforts. We seek the simplest approach to achieve te
Training robot policies in the real world can be unsafe, costly, and difficult to scale. Simulation serves as an inexpensive and potentially limitless source of training data, but suffers from the semantics and physics disparity between simulated and real-world environments. These discrepancies can…
The systematic evaluation and understanding of computer vision models under varying conditions require large amounts of data with comprehensive and customized labels which real-world vision datasets rarely satisfy. While current synthetic data generators offer a promising alternative particularly fo…
Code provides a general syntactic structure to build complex programs and perform precise computations when paired with a code interpreter – we hypothesize that language models (LMs) can leverage code-writing to improve Chain of Thought reasoning not only for logic and arithmetic tasks, but also for…
Scene representation is a crucial design choice in robotic manipulation systems. An ideal representation is expected to be 3D, dynamic, and semantic to meet the demands of diverse manipulation tasks. However, previous works often lack all three properties simultaneously. In this work, we introduce D…
Imitation learning from human hand motion data presents a promising avenue for imbuing robots with human-like dexterity in real-world manipulation tasks. Despite this potential, substantial challenges persist, particularly with the portability of existing hand motion capture (mocap) systems and the…
We aim to evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) for embodied decision making. While a significant body of work has been leveraging LLMs for decision making in embodied environments, we still lack a systematic understanding of their performance because they are usually applied in different domains, f…
We present **HourVideo**, a benchmark dataset for hour-long video-language understanding. Our dataset consists of a novel task suite comprising summarization, perception (*recall*, *tracking*), visual reasoning (*spatial*, *temporal*, *predictive*, *causal*, *counterfactual*), and navigation (*room-…
Large Foundation Models (LFMs) can perform complex scheduling in a multi-agent system and can coordinate agents to complete sophisticated tasks that require extensive collaboration.However, despite the introduction of numerous gaming frameworks, the community lacks adequate benchmarks that support t…
Existing human rendering methods require every part of the human to be fully visible throughout the input video. However, this assumption does not hold in real-life settings where obstructions are common, resulting in only partial visibility of the human. Considering this, we present OccFusion, an a…
Large, high-capacity models trained on diverse datasets have shown remarkable successes on efficiently tackling downstream applications. In domains from NLP to Computer Vision, this has led to a consolidation of pretrained models, with general pretrained backbones serving as a starting point for man
Large, high-capacity models trained on diverse datasets have shown remarkable successes on efficiently tackling downstream applications. In domains from NLP to Computer Vision, this has led to a consolidation of pretrained models, with general pretrained backbones serving as a starting point for man…
"We present , a diffusion transformer for photorealistic video generation from text prompts. Our approach has two key design decisions. First, we use a causal encoder to jointly compress images and videos within a unified latent space, enabling training and generation across modalities. Second, for…
Representing robotic manipulation tasks as constraints that associate the robot and the environment is a promising way to encode desired robot behaviors. However, it remains unclear how to formulate the constraints such that they are 1) versatile to diverse tasks, 2) free of manual labeling, and 3)…
Learning in simulation and transferring the learned policy to the real world has the potential to enable generalist robots. The key challenge of this approach is to address simulation-to-reality (sim-to-real) gaps. Previous methods often require domain-specific knowledge *a priori*. We argue that a…
We introduce a 3D-aware diffusion model ZeroNVS for single-image novel view synthesis for in-the-wild scenes. While existing methods are designed for single objects with masked backgrounds we propose new techniques to address challenges introduced by in-the-wild multi-object scenes with complex back…
Solving real-world manipulation tasks requires robots to be equipped with a repertoire of skills that can be applied to diverse scenarios. While learning-based methods can enable robots to acquire skills from interaction data, their success relies on collecting training data that covers the diverse…
Dynamics models learned from visual observations have shown to be effective in various robotic manipulation tasks. One of the key questions for learning such dynamics models is what scene representation to use. Prior works typically assume representation at a fixed dimension or resolution, which may…
The stunning qualitative improvement of text-to-image models has led to their widespread attention and adoption. However, we lack a comprehensive quantitative understanding of their capabilities and risks. To fill this gap, we introduce a new benchmark, Holistic Evaluation of Text-to-Image Models (H…
In this paper, we propose a novel method to create visuomotor mobile manipulation solutions to long-horizon activities. We propose to leverage the recent advances in robot simulation to train robust visual solutions in simulation that can transfer to the real world. While previous works have shown s…
The ability to predict future visual observations conditioned on past observations and motor commands can enable embodied agents to plan solutions to a variety of tasks in complex environments. This work shows that we can create good video prediction models by pre-training transformers via masked vi…
Imitation learning from human demonstrations is a promising paradigm for teaching robots manipulation skills in the real world. However, learning complex long-horizon tasks often requires an unattainable amount of demonstrations. To reduce the high data requirement, we resort to human play data - vi…
Learning predictive models from observations using deep neural networks (DNNs) is a promising new approach to many real-world planning and control problems. However, common DNNs are too unstructured for effective planning, and current control methods typically rely on extensive sampling or local gra…
Embodied AI agents that search for objects in large environments such as households often need to make efficient decisions by predicting object locations based on partial information. We pose this as a new type of link prediction problem: link prediction on partially observable dynamic graphs Our gr…
We present Neural Signal Operated Intelligent Robots (NOIR), a general-purpose, intelligent brain-robot interface system that enables humans to command robots to perform everyday activities through brain signals. Through this interface, humans communicate their intended objects of interest and actio…
Reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms face significant challenges when dealing with long-horizon robot manipulation tasks in real-world environments due to sample inefficiency and safety issues. To overcome these challenges, we propose a novel framework, SEED, which leverages two approaches: reinfo…
3D understanding and rendering of moving humans from monocular videos is a challenging task. Although recent progress has enabled this task to some extent, it is still difficult to guarantee satisfactory results in real-world scenarios, where obstacles may block the camera view and cause partial occ…
Many real-world manipulation tasks consist of a series of subtasks that are significantly different from one another. Such long-horizon, complex tasks highlight the potential of dexterous hands, which possess adaptability and versatility, capable of seamlessly transitioning between different modes o…
Establishing correspondence between images or scenes is a significant challenge in computer vision, especially given occlusions, viewpoint changes, and varying object appearances. In this paper, we present Siamese Masked Autoencoders (SiamMAE), a simple extension of Masked Autoencoders (MAE) for lea…
Developing embodied agents in simulation has been a key research topic in recent years. Exciting new tasks, algorithms, and benchmarks have been developed in various simulators. However, most of them assume deaf agents in silent environments, while we humans perceive the world with multiple senses.…
Embodied AI agents in large scenes often need to navigate to find objects. In this work, we study a naturally emerging variant of the object navigation task, hierarchical relational object navigation (HRON), where the goal is to find objects specified by logical predicates organized in a hierarchica…
We introduce the ObjectFolder Benchmark, a benchmark suite of 10 tasks for multisensory object-centric learning, centered around object recognition, reconstruction, and manipulation with sight, sound, and touch. We also introduce the ObjectFolder Real dataset, including the multisensory measurements…
Prompt-based learning has emerged as a successful paradigm in natural language processing, where a single general-purpose language model can be instructed to perform any task specified by input prompts. Yet task specification in robotics comes in various forms, such as imitating one-shot demonstrati…
Large language models (LLMs) are shown to possess a wealth of actionable knowledge that can be extracted for robot manipulation in the form of reasoning and planning. Despite the progress, most still rely on pre-defined motion primitives to carry out the physical interactions with the environment, w…
The ability to interactively learn skills from human guidance and adjust behavior according to human preference is crucial to accelerating robot learning. But human guidance is an expensive resource, calling for methods that can learn efficiently. In this work, we argue that learning is more efficie…
Face obfuscation (blurring, mosaicing, etc.) has been shown to be effective for privacy protection; nevertheless, object recognition research typically assumes access to complete, unobfuscated images. In this paper, we explore the effects of face obfuscation on the popular ImageNet challenge visual…
We present BEHAVIOR-1K, a comprehensive simulation benchmark for human-centered robotics. BEHAVIOR-1K includes two components, guided and motivated by the results of an extensive survey on "what do you want robots to do for you?". The first is the definition of 1,000 everyday activities, grounded in…
Modern multi-agent reinforcement learning frameworks rely on centralized training and reward shaping to perform well. However, centralized training and dense rewards are not readily available in the real world. Current multi-agent algorithms struggle to learn in the alternative setup of decentralize…
The ability to plan for multi-step manipulation tasks in unseen situations is crucial for future home robots. But collecting sufficient experience data for end-to-end learning is often infeasible in the real world, as deploying robots in many environments can be prohibitively expensive. On the other
Video-language models (VLMs), large models pre-trained on numerous but noisy video-text pairs from the internet, have revolutionized activity recognition through their remarkable generalization and open-vocabulary capabilities. While complex human activities are often hierarchical and compositional,…
Multiple domains like vision, natural language, and audio are witnessing tremendous progress by leveraging Transformers for large scale pre-training followed by task specific fine tuning. In contrast, in robotics we primarily train a single robot for a single task. However, modular robot systems now…
Objects play a crucial role in our everyday activities. Though multisensory object-centric learning has shown great potential lately, the modeling of objects in prior work is rather unrealistic. ObjectFolder 1.0 is a recent dataset that introduces 100 virtualized objects with visual, auditory, and t…
"The accelerated use of digital cameras prompts an increasing concern about privacy and security, particularly in applications such as action recognition. In this paper, we propose an optimizing framework to provide robust visual privacy protection along the human action recognition pipeline. Our fr…
Federated learning is an emerging research paradigm enabling collaborative training of machine learning models among different organizations while keeping data private at each institution. Despite recent progress, there remain fundamental challenges such as the lack of convergence and the potential…
What makes a video task uniquely suited for videos, beyond what can be understood from a single image? Building on recent progress in self-supervised image-language models, we revisit this question in the context of video and language tasks. We propose the atemporal probe (ATP), a new model for vide…
Humans use all of their senses to accomplish different tasks in everyday activities. In contrast, existing work on robotic manipulation mostly relies on one, or occasionally two modalities, such as vision and touch. In this work, we systematically study how visual, auditory, and tactile perception c…
We introduce BEHAVIOR, a benchmark for embodied AI with 100 activities in simulation, spanning a range of everyday household chores such as cleaning, maintenance, and food preparation. These activities are designed to be realistic, diverse and complex, aiming to reproduce the challenges that agents…
We present a method for learning human-robot collaboration policy from human-human collaboration demonstrations. An effective robot assistant must learn to handle diverse human behaviors shown in the demonstrations and be robust when the humans adjust their strategies during online task execution. O…
Planning in realistic environments requires searching in large planning spaces. Affordances are a powerful concept to simplify this search, because they model what actions can be successful in a given situation. However, the classical notion of affordance is not suitable for long horizon planning be…
The learning efficiency of an intelligent agent can be greatly improved by utilizing a useful set of skills. However; the design of robot skills can often be intractable in real-world applications due to the prohibitive amount of effort and expertise that it requires. In this work; we introduce Skil…
In mobile manipulation (MM), robots can both navigate within and interact with their environment and are thus able to complete many more tasks than robots only capable of navigation or manipulation. In this work, we explore how to apply imitation learning (IL) to learn continuous visuo-motor policie…
In this paper, we study the problem of learning a repertoire of low-level skills from raw images that can be sequenced to complete long-horizon visuomotor tasks. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach for acquiring short-horizon skills autonomously. However, the focus of RL algorithms h…
Imitation Learning (IL) is an effective framework to learn visuomotor skills from offline demonstration data. However, IL methods often fail to generalize to new scene configurations not covered by training data. On the other hand, humans can manipulate objects in varying conditions. Key to such cap…
A video prediction model that generalizes to diverse scenes would enable intelligent agents such as robots to perform a variety of tasks via planning with the model. However, while existing video prediction models have produced promising results on small datasets, they suffer from severe underfittin…
Imitation Learning (IL) is a powerful paradigm to teach robots to perform manipulation tasks by allowing them to learn from human demonstrations collected via teleoperation, but has mostly been limited to single-arm manipulation. However, many real-world tasks require multiple arms, such as lifting…
Batch Normalization (BN) and its variants have delivered tremendous success in combating the covariate shift induced by the training step of deep learning methods. While these techniques normalize the feature distribution by standardizing with batch statistics, they do not correct the influence on f…
Active learning promises to alleviate the massive data needs of supervised machine learning: it has successfully improved sample efficiency by an order of magnitude on traditional tasks like topic classification and object recognition. However, we uncover a striking contrast to this promise: across…
Multisensory object-centric perception, reasoning, and interaction have been a key research topic in recent years. However, the progress in these directions is limited by the small set of objects available---synthetic objects are not realistic enough and are mostly centered around geometry, while re…
While current vision algorithms excel at many challenging tasks, it is unclear how well they understand the physical dynamics of real-world environments. Here we introduce Physion, a dataset and benchmark for rigorously evaluating the ability to predict how physical scenarios will evolve over time.…
Generalization has been a long-standing challenge for reinforcement learning (RL). Visual RL, in particular, can be easily distracted by irrelevant factors in high-dimensional observation space. In this work, we consider robust policy learning which targets zero-shot generalization to unseen visual…
We propose a novel method for privacy-preserving training of deep neural networks leveraging public, out-domain data. While differential privacy (DP) has emerged as a mechanism to protect sensitive data in training datasets, its application to complex visual recognition tasks remains challenging. Tr…
Imitating human demonstrations is a promising approach to endow robots with various manipulation capabilities. While recent advances have been made in imitation learning and batch (offline) reinforcement learning, a lack of open-source human datasets and reproducible learning methods make assessing…
We present iGibson 1.0, a novel simulation environment to develop robotic solutions for interactive tasks in large-scale realistic scenes. Our environment contains 15 fully interactive home-sized scenes with 108 rooms populated with rigid and articulated objects. The scenes are replicas of real-worl…
Recent research in embodied AI has been boosted by the use of simulation environments to develop and train robot learning approaches. However, the use of simulation has skewed the attention to tasks that only require what robotics simulators can simulate: motion and physical contact. We present iGib…
We present 6-PACK, a deep learning approach to category-level 6D object pose tracking on RGB-D data. Our method tracks in real time novel object instances of known object categories such as bowls, laptops, and mugs. 6-PACK learns to compactly represent an object by a handful of 3D keypoints, based o…
Action recognition has typically treated actions and activities as monolithic events that occur in videos. However, there is evidence from Cognitive Science and Neuroscience that people actively encode activities into consistent hierarchical part structures. However, in Computer Vision, few explorat…
A major difficulty of solving continuous POMDPs is to infer the multi-modal distribution of the unobserved true states and to make the planning algorithm dependent on the perceived uncertainty. We cast POMDP filtering and planning problems as two closely related Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) processe…
Imitation learning is an effective and safe technique to train robot policies in the real world because it does not depend on an expensive random exploration process. However, due to the lack of exploration, learning policies that generalize beyond the demonstrated behaviors is still an open challen…
Learning from offline task demonstrations is a problem of great interest in robotics. For simple short-horizon manipulation tasks with modest variation in task instances, offline learning from a small set of demonstrations can produce controllers that successfully solve the task. However, leveraging…
We aim to develop an algorithm for robots to manipulate novel objects as tools for completing different task goals. An efficient and informative representation would facilitate the effectiveness and generalization of such algorithms. For this purpose, we present KETO, a framework of learning keypoin…
We address goal-based imitation learning, where the aim is to output the symbolic goal from a third-person video demonstration. This enables the robot to plan for execution and reproduce the same goal in a completely different environment. The key challenge is that the goal of a video demonstration…
In this paper, we study the problem of procedure planning in instructional videos, which can be seen as the first step towards enabling autonomous agents to plan for complex tasks in everyday settings such as cooking. Given the current visual observation of the world and a visual goal, we ask the qu…
Video action recognition is a complex task dependent on modeling spatial and temporal context. Standard approaches rely on 2D or 3D convolutions to process such context, resulting in expensive operations with millions of parameters. Recent efficient architectures leverage a channel-wise shift-based…
We propose spoken sentence embeddings which capture both acoustic and linguistic content. While existing works operate at the character, phoneme, or word level, our method learns long-term dependencies by modeling speech at the sentence level. Formulated as an audio-linguistic multitask learning pro…
Recently, Neural Architecture Search (NAS) has successfully identified neural network architectures that exceed human designed ones on large-scale image classification. In this paper, we study NAS for semantic image segmentation. Existing works often focus on searching the repeatable cell structure,…
In this paper, we study the task of image retrieval, where the input query is specified in the form of an image plus some text that describes desired modifications to the input image. For example, we may present an image of the Eiffel tower, and ask the system to find images which are visually simil…
We address one-shot imitation learning, where the goal is to execute a previously unseen task based on a single demonstration. While there has been exciting progress in this direction, most of the approaches still require a few hundred tasks for meta-training, which limits the scalability of the app…
We address weakly supervised action alignment and segmentation in videos, where only the order of occurring actions is available during training. We propose Discriminative Differentiable Dynamic Time Warping (D3TW), the first discriminative model using weak ordering supervision. The key technical ch…
A key technical challenge in performing 6D object pose estimation from RGB-D image is to fully leverage the two complementary data sources. Prior works either extract information from the RGB image and depth separately or use costly post-processing steps, limiting their performances in highly clutte…
The fundamental challenge of planning for multi-step manipulation is to find effective and plausible action sequences that lead to the task goal. We present Cascaded Variational Inference Planner (CAVIN), a model-based method that hierarchically generates plans by sampling from latent spaces. To fac
Spatiotemporal predictive learning, though long considered to be a promising self-supervised feature learning method, seldom shows its effectiveness beyond future video prediction. The reason is that it is difficult to learn good representations for both short-term frame dependency and long-term hig…
Though image-to-sequence generation models have become overwhelmingly popular in human-computer communications, they suffer from strongly favoring safe generic questions ("What is in this picture?"). Generating uninformative but relevant questions is not sufficient or useful. We argue that a good qu…
Contact-rich manipulation tasks in unstructured environments often require both haptic and visual feedback. However, it is non-trivial to manually design a robot controller that combines modalities with very different characteristics. While deep reinforcement learning has shown success in learning c…
Our goal is to generate a policy to complete an unseen task given just a single video demonstration of the task in a given domain. We hypothesize that to successfully generalize to unseen complex tasks from a single video demonstration, it is necessary to explicitly incorporate the compositional str…
Deciphering human behaviors to predict their future paths/trajectories and what they would do from videos is important in many applications. Motivated by this idea, this paper studies predicting a pedestrian's future path jointly with future activities. We propose an end-to-end, multi-task learning…
Large, richly annotated datasets have accelerated progress in fields such as computer vision and natural language processing, but replicating these successes in robotics has been challenging. While prior data collection methodologies such as self-supervision have resulted in large datasets, the data…
Visual knowledge bases such as Visual Genome power numerous applications in computer vision, including visual question answering and captioning, but suffer from sparse, incomplete relationships. All scene graph models to date are limited to training on a small set of visual relationships that have t…
Many robotic applications require the agent to perform long-horizon tasks in partially observable environments. In such applications, decision making at any step can depend on observations received far in the past. Hence, being able to properly memorize and utilize the long-term history is crucial.…
A complex visual navigation task puts an agent in different situations which call for a diverse range of visual perception abilities. For example, to "go to the nearest chair", the agent might need to identify a chair in a living room using semantics, follow along a hallway using vanishing point cue…
One of the most widely used optimization methods for large-scale machine learning problems is distributed asynchronous stochastic gradient descent (DASGD). However, a key issue that arises here is that of delayed gradients: when a “worker” node asynchronously contributes a gradient update to the “ma…
We propose dynamic task prioritization for multitask learning. This allows a model to dynamically prioritize difficult tasks during training, where difficulty is inversely proportional to performance, and where difficulty changes over time. In contrast to curriculum learning, where easy tasks are pr…
Grounding textual phrases in visual content with standalone image-sentence pairs is a challenging task. When we consider grounding in instructional videos, this problem becomes profoundly more complex: the latent temporal structure of instructional videos breaks independence assumptions and necessit…
We propose a technique that tackles action detection in multimodal videos under a realistic and challenging condition in which only limited training data and partially observed modalities are available. Common methods in transfer learning do not take advantage of the extra modalities potentially ava…
Recent work has shown that deep neural networks are highly sensitive to tiny perturbations of input images, giving rise to adversarial examples. Though this property is usually considered a weakness of learned models, we explore whether it can be beneficial. We find that neural networks can learn to…
To truly understand the visual world our models should be able not only to recognize images but also generate them. To this end, there has been exciting recent progress on gen- erating images from natural language descriptions. These methods give stunning results on limited domains such as descripti…
We present a novel framework for iterative visual reasoning. Our framework goes beyond current recognition systems that lack the capability to reason beyond stack of convolutions. The framework consists of two core modules: a local module that uses spatial memory to store previous beliefs in paralle…
Tool manipulation is vital for facilitating robots to complete challenging task goals. It requires reasoning about the desired effect of the task and thus properly grasping and manipulating the tool to achieve the task. Task-agnostic grasping optimizes for grasp robustness while ignoring crucial tas…
Recent deep networks are capable of memorizing the entire data even when the labels are completely random. To overcome the overfitting on corrupted labels, we propose a novel technique of learning another neural network, called MentorNet, to supervise the training of the base deep networks, namely,…
We propose Neural Graph Matching (NGM) Networks, a novel framework that can learn to recognize a previous unseen 3D action class with only a few examples. We achieve this by leveraging the inherent structure of 3D data through a graphical representation. This allows us to modularize our model and le…
In this work, we propose a novel robot learning framework called Neural Task Programming (NTP), which bridges the idea of few-shot learning from demonstration and neural program induction. NTP takes as input a task specification (e.g., video demonstration of a task) and recursively decomposes it int…
We propose a new method for learning the structure of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) that is more efficient than recent state-of-the-art methods based on reinforcement learning and evolutionary algorithms. Our approach uses a sequential model-based optimization (SMBO) strategy, in which we sea…
Imitation Learning has empowered recent advances in learning robotic manipulation tasks by addressing shortcomings of Reinforcement Learning such as exploration and reward specification. However, research in this area has been limited to modest-sized datasets due to the difficulty of collecting larg
Images are not simply sets of objects: each image represents a web of interconnected relationships. These relationships between entities carry semantic meaning and help a viewer differentiate between instances of an entity. For example, in an image of a soccer match, there may be multiple persons pr…
Reproducibility has been a significant challenge in deep reinforcement learning and robotics research. Open-source frameworks and standardized benchmarks can serve an integral role in rigorous evaluation and reproducible research. We introduce SURREAL, an open-source scalable framework that supports
Understanding human motion behavior is critical for autonomous moving platforms (like self-driving cars and social robots) if they are to navigate human-centric environments. This is challenging because human motion is inherently multimodal: given a history of human motion paths, there are many soci…
A major challenge in computer vision is scaling activity understanding to the long tail of complex activities without requiring collecting large quantities of data for new actions. The task of video retrieval using natural language descriptions seeks to address this through rich, unconstrained super…
Accurate identification and localization of abnormalities from radiology images play an integral part in clinical diagnosis and treatment planning. Building a highly accurate prediction model for these tasks usually requires a large number of images manually annotated with labels and finding sites o…
The ability to capture temporal information has been critical to the development of video understanding models. While there have been numerous attempts at modeling motion in videos, an explicit analysis of the effect of temporal information for video understanding is still missing. In this work, we…
Recent progress on image captioning has made it possible to generate novel sentences describing images in natural language, but compressing an image into a single sentence can describe visual content in only coarse detail. While one new captioning approach, dense captioning, can potentially describe…
Policy search methods in reinforcement learning have demonstrated success in scaling up to larger problems beyond toy examples. However, deploying these methods on real robots remains challenging due to the large sample complexity required during learning and their vulnerability to malicious interve…
When building artificial intelligence systems that can reason and answer questions about visual data, we need diagnostic tests to analyze our progress and discover short- comings. Existing benchmarks for visual question answer- ing can help, but have strong biases that models can exploit to correctl…
Recent progress in style transfer on images has focused on improving the quality of stylized images and speed of methods. However, real-time methods are highly unstable resulting in visible flickering when applied to videos. In this work we characterize the instability of these methods by examining…
Most natural videos contain numerous events. For example, in a video of a "man playing a piano", the video might also contain "another man dancing" or "a crowd clapping". We introduce the task of dense-captioning events, which involves both detecting and describing events in a video. We propose a ne…
While fine-grained object recognition is an important problem in computer vision, current models are unlikely to accurately classify objects in the wild. These fully supervised models need additional annotated images to classify objects in every new scenario, a task that is infeasible. However, sour…
Existing methods for visual reasoning attempt to directly map inputs to outputs using black-box architectures without explicitly modeling the underlying reasoning processes. As a result, these black-box models often learn to exploit biases in the data rather than learning to perform visual reasoning…
Physiological signals such as heart rate can provide valuable information about an individual's state and activity. However, existing work on computer vision has not yet explored leveraging these signals to enhance egocentric video understanding. In this work, we propose a model for reasoning on mul…
Humans possess an extraordinary ability to learn new skills and new knowledge for problem solving. Such learning ability is also required by an automatic model to deal with arbitrary, open-ended questions in the visual world. We propose a neural-based approach to acquiring task- driven information f…
Understanding the simultaneously very diverse and intricately fine-grained set of possible human actions is a critical open problem in computer vision. Manually labeling training videos is feasible for some action classes but doesn't scale to the full long-tailed distribution of actions. A promising…
Understanding a visual scene goes beyond recognizing individual objects in isolation. Relationships between objects also constitute rich semantic information about the scene. In this work, we explicitly model the objects and their relationships using scene graphs, a visually-grounded graphical struc…
Two less addressed issues of deep reinforcement learning are (1) lack of generalization capability to new goals, and (2) data inefficiency, i.e., the model requires several (and often costly) episodes of trial and error to converge, which makes it impractical to be applied to real-world scenarios. I…
We present an unsupervised representation learning approach that compactly encodes the motion dependencies in videos. Given a pair of images from a video clip, our framework learns to predict the long-term 3D motions. To reduce the complexity of the learning framework, we propose to describe the mot…
We propose an unsupervised method for reference resolution in instructional videos, where the goal is to temporally link an entity (e.g., "dressing") to the action (e.g., "mix yogurt") that produced it. The key challenge is the inevitable visual-linguistic ambiguities arising from the changes in bot…
Existing camera networks in public spaces such as train terminals or malls can help social robots to navigate crowded scenes. However, the localization of the cameras is required, i.e., the positions and poses of all cameras in a unique reference. In this work, we estimate the relative location of a…
A crucial capability of real-world intelligent agents is their ability to plan a sequence of actions to achieve their goals in the visual world. In this work, we address the problem of visual semantic planning: the task of predicting a sequence of actions from visual observations that transform a dy…
We introduce the dense captioning task, which requires a computer vision system to both localize and describe salient regions in images in natural language. The dense captioning task generalizes object detection when the descriptions consist of a single word, and Image Captioning when one predicted…
Multi-person event recognition is a challenging task, often with many people active in the scene but only a small subset contributing to an actual event. In this paper, we propose a model which learns to detect events in such videos while automatically "attending" to the people responsible for the e…
In this work we introduce a fully end-to-end approach for action detection in videos that learns to directly predict the temporal bounds of actions. Our intuition is that the process of detecting actions is naturally one of observation and refinement: observing moments in video, and refining hypothe…
We present an attention-based model that reasons on human body shape and motion dynamics to identify individuals in the absence of RGB information, hence in the dark. Our approach leverages unique 4D spatio-temporal signatures to address the identification problem across days. Formulated as a reinfo…
Humans navigate complex crowded environments based on social conventions: they respect personal space, yielding right-of-way and avoid collisions. In our work, we propose a data-driven approach to learn these human-human interactions for predicting their future trajectories. This is in contrast to t…
We have seen great progress in basic perceptual tasks such as object recognition and detection. However, AI models still fail to match humans in high-level vision tasks due to the lack of capacities for deeper reasoning. Recently the new task of visual question answering (QA) has been proposed to ev…
The long-standing goal of localizing every object in an image remains elusive. Manually annotating objects is quite expensive despite crowd engineering innovations. Current state-of-the-art automatic object detectors can accurately detect at most a few objects per image. This paper brings together t…
We present a model that generates natural language descriptions of images and their regions. Our approach leverages datasets of images and their sentence descriptions to learn about the inter-modal correspondences between language and visual data. Our alignment model is based on a novel combination…
Scaling up fine-grained recognition to all domains of fine-grained objects is a challenge the computer vision community will need to face in order to realize its goal of recognizing all object categories. Current state-of-the-art techniques rely heavily upon the use of keypoint or part annotations,…
This paper develops a novel framework for semantic image retrieval based on the notion of a scene graph. Our scene graphs represent objects ("man", "boat"), attributes of objects ("boat is white") and relationships between objects ("man standing on boat"). We use these scene graphs as queries to ret…
With the widespread availability of cellphones and cameras that have GPS capabilities, it is common for images being uploaded to the Internet today to have GPS coordinates associated with them. In addition to research that tries to predict GPS coordinates from visual features, this also opens up the…
Human actions capture a wide variety of interactions between people and objects. As a result, the set of possible actions is extremely large and it is difficult to obtain sufficient training examples for all actions. However, we could compensate for this sparsity in supervision by leveraging the ric…
In this paper, we propose to learn temporal embeddings of video frames for complex video analysis. Large quantities of unlabeled video data can be easily obtained from the Internet. These videos possess the implicit weak label that they are sequences of temporally and semantically coherent images. W…
Some images that are difficult to recognize on their own may become more clear in the context of a neighborhood of related images with similar social-network metadata. We build on this intuition to improve multilabel image annotation. Our model uses image metadata nonparametrically to generate neigh…
Inspired by the recent success of RGB-D cameras, we propose the enrichment of RGB data with an additional "quasi-free" modality, namely, the wireless signal (e.g., wifi or Bluetooth) emitted by individuals' cell phones, referred to as RGB-W. The received signal strength acts as a rough proxy for dep…