12 accepted papers
Object-centric representations are a promising path toward more systematic generalization by providing flexible abstractions upon which compositional world models can be built. Recent work on simple 2D and 3D datasets has shown that models with object-centric inductive biases can learn to segment an…
One of the most challenging aspects of real-world reinforcement learning (RL) is the multitude of unpredictable and ever-changing distractions that could divert an agent from what was tasked to do in its training environment. While an agent could learn from reward signals to ignore them, the complex
We present SMURF, a method for unsupervised learning of optical flow that improves state of the art on all benchmarks by 36% to 40% and even outperforms several supervised approaches such as PWC-Net and FlowNet2. Our method integrates architecture improvements from supervised optical flow, i.e. the…
General-purpose robotic systems must master a large repertoire of diverse skills. While reinforcement learning provides a powerful framework for acquiring individual behaviors, the time needed to acquire each skill makes the prospect of a generalist robot trained with RL daunting. In this paper, we…
Mapping and localization, preferably from a small number of observations, are fundamental tasks in robotics. We address these tasks by combining spatial structure (differentiable mapping) and end-to-end learning in a novel neural network architecture: the Differentiable Mapping Network (DMN). The DM…
Estimating the 3D pose of desktop objects is crucial for applications such as robotic manipulation. Many existing approaches to this problem require a depth map of the object for both training and prediction, which restricts them to opaque, lambertian objects that produce good returns in an RGBD sen…
We systematically compare and analyze a set of key components in unsupervised optical flow to identify which photometric loss, occlusion handling, and smoothness regularization is most effective. Alongside this investigation we construct a number of novel improvements to unsupervised flow models, su…
We present a novel method for simultaneous learning of depth, egomotion, object motion, and camera intrinsics from monocular videos, using only consistency across neighboring video frames as supervision signal. Similarly to prior work, our method learns by applying differentiable warping to frames a…
We introduce Recurrent State Representation Learning (RSRL) to tackle the problem of state representation learning in robotics for partially observable environments. To learn low-dimensional state representations, we combine a Long Short Term Memory network with robotic priors. RSRL introduces new p…
We present differentiable particle filters (DPFs): a differentiable implementation of the particle filter algorithm with learnable motion and measurement models. Since DPFs are end-to-end differentiable, we can efficiently train their models by optimizing end-to-end state estimation performance, rat…
We describe the winning entry to the Amazon Picking Challenge. From the experience of building this system and competing in the Amazon Picking Challenge, we derive several conclusions: 1) We suggest to characterize robotic systems building along four key aspects, each of them spanning a spectrum of…
We present a method for multi-class segmentation from RGB-D data in a realistic warehouse picking setting. The method computes pixel-wise probabilities and combines them to find a coherent object segmentation. It reliably segments objects in cluttered scenarios, even when objects are translucent, re…