Atilla Baskurt

Assem Sadek, Guillaume Bono, Boris Chidlovskii et al.

Navigation has been classically solved in robotics through the combination of SLAM and planning. More recently, beyond waypoint planning, problems involving significant components of (visual) high-level reasoning have been explored in simulated environments, mostly addressed with large-scale machine learning, in particular RL, offline-RL or imitation learning. These methods require the agent to learn various skills like local planning, mapping objects and querying the learned spatial representations. In contrast to simpler tasks like waypoint planning (PointGoal), for these more complex tasks the current state-of-the-art models have been thoroughly evaluated in simulation but, to our best knowledge, not yet in real environments. In this work we focus on sim2real transfer. We target the challenging Multi-Object Navigation (Multi-ON) task and port it to a physical environment containing real replicas of the originally virtual Multi-ON objects. We introduce a hybrid navigation method, which decomposes the problem into two different skills: (1) waypoint navigation is addressed with classical SLAM combined with a symbolic planner, whereas (2) exploration, semantic mapping and goal retrieval are dealt with deep neural networks trained with a combination of supervised learning and RL. We show the advantages of this approach compared to end-to-end methods both in simulation and a real environment and outperform the SOTA for this task.

Emre Dogan, Gonen Eren, Christian Wolf et al.

We propose a new method for human pose estimation which leverages information from multiple views to impose a strong prior on articulated pose. The novelty of the method concerns the types of coherence modelled. Consistency is maximised over the different views through different terms modelling classical geometric information (coherence of the resulting poses) as well as appearance information which is modelled as latent variables in the global energy function. Moreover, adequacy of each view is assessed and their contributions are adjusted accordingly. Experiments on the HumanEva and UMPM datasets show that the proposed method significantly decreases the estimation error compared to single-view results.

Lilei Zheng, Ying Zhang, Stefan Duffner et al.

This paper presents a deep nonlinear metric learning framework for data visualization on an image dataset. We propose the Triangular Similarity and prove its equivalence to the Cosine Similarity in measuring a data pair. Based on this novel similarity, a geometrically motivated loss function - the triangular loss - is then developed for optimizing a metric learning system comprising two identical CNNs. It is shown that this deep nonlinear system can be efficiently trained by a hybrid algorithm based on the conventional backpropagation algorithm. More interestingly, benefiting from classical manifold learning theories, the proposed system offers two different views to visualize the outputs, the second of which provides better classification results than the state-of-the-art methods in the visualizable spaces.