495 research outputs found
Long-Term Image Boundary Prediction
Boundary estimation in images and videos has been a very active topic of
research, and organizing visual information into boundaries and segments is
believed to be a corner stone of visual perception. While prior work has
focused on estimating boundaries for observed frames, our work aims at
predicting boundaries of future unobserved frames. This requires our model to
learn about the fate of boundaries and corresponding motion patterns --
including a notion of "intuitive physics". We experiment on natural video
sequences along with synthetic sequences with deterministic physics-based and
agent-based motions. While not being our primary goal, we also show that fusion
of RGB and boundary prediction leads to improved RGB predictions.Comment: Accepted in the AAAI Conference for Artificial Intelligence, 201
Combining Self-Supervised Learning and Imitation for Vision-Based Rope Manipulation
Manipulation of deformable objects, such as ropes and cloth, is an important
but challenging problem in robotics. We present a learning-based system where a
robot takes as input a sequence of images of a human manipulating a rope from
an initial to goal configuration, and outputs a sequence of actions that can
reproduce the human demonstration, using only monocular images as input. To
perform this task, the robot learns a pixel-level inverse dynamics model of
rope manipulation directly from images in a self-supervised manner, using about
60K interactions with the rope collected autonomously by the robot. The human
demonstration provides a high-level plan of what to do and the low-level
inverse model is used to execute the plan. We show that by combining the high
and low-level plans, the robot can successfully manipulate a rope into a
variety of target shapes using only a sequence of human-provided images for
direction.Comment: 8 pages, accepted to International Conference on Robotics and
Automation (ICRA) 201
Video Time: Properties, Encoders and Evaluation
Time-aware encoding of frame sequences in a video is a fundamental problem in
video understanding. While many attempted to model time in videos, an explicit
study on quantifying video time is missing. To fill this lacuna, we aim to
evaluate video time explicitly. We describe three properties of video time,
namely a) temporal asymmetry, b)temporal continuity and c) temporal causality.
Based on each we formulate a task able to quantify the associated property.
This allows assessing the effectiveness of modern video encoders, like C3D and
LSTM, in their ability to model time. Our analysis provides insights about
existing encoders while also leading us to propose a new video time encoder,
which is better suited for the video time recognition tasks than C3D and LSTM.
We believe the proposed meta-analysis can provide a reasonable baseline to
assess video time encoders on equal grounds on a set of temporal-aware tasks.Comment: 14 pages, BMVC 201
Learning Particle Dynamics for Manipulating Rigid Bodies, Deformable Objects, and Fluids
Real-life control tasks involve matters of various substances---rigid or soft
bodies, liquid, gas---each with distinct physical behaviors. This poses
challenges to traditional rigid-body physics engines. Particle-based simulators
have been developed to model the dynamics of these complex scenes; however,
relying on approximation techniques, their simulation often deviates from
real-world physics, especially in the long term. In this paper, we propose to
learn a particle-based simulator for complex control tasks. Combining learning
with particle-based systems brings in two major benefits: first, the learned
simulator, just like other particle-based systems, acts widely on objects of
different materials; second, the particle-based representation poses strong
inductive bias for learning: particles of the same type have the same dynamics
within. This enables the model to quickly adapt to new environments of unknown
dynamics within a few observations. We demonstrate robots achieving complex
manipulation tasks using the learned simulator, such as manipulating fluids and
deformable foam, with experiments both in simulation and in the real world. Our
study helps lay the foundation for robot learning of dynamic scenes with
particle-based representations.Comment: Accepted to ICLR 2019. Project Page: http://dpi.csail.mit.edu Video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrPpP7aW3L
Unsupervised Discovery of Parts, Structure, and Dynamics
Humans easily recognize object parts and their hierarchical structure by
watching how they move; they can then predict how each part moves in the
future. In this paper, we propose a novel formulation that simultaneously
learns a hierarchical, disentangled object representation and a dynamics model
for object parts from unlabeled videos. Our Parts, Structure, and Dynamics
(PSD) model learns to, first, recognize the object parts via a layered image
representation; second, predict hierarchy via a structural descriptor that
composes low-level concepts into a hierarchical structure; and third, model the
system dynamics by predicting the future. Experiments on multiple real and
synthetic datasets demonstrate that our PSD model works well on all three
tasks: segmenting object parts, building their hierarchical structure, and
capturing their motion distributions.Comment: ICLR 2019. The first two authors contributed equally to this wor
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