No Arabic abstract
A range of methods with suitable inductive biases exist to learn interpretable object-centric representations of images without supervision. However, these are largely restricted to visually simple images; robust object discovery in real-world sensory datasets remains elusive. To increase the understanding of such inductive biases, we empirically investigate the role of reconstruction bottlenecks for scene decomposition in GENESIS, a recent VAE-based model. We show such bottlenecks determine reconstruction and segmentation quality and critically influence model behaviour.
Generative latent-variable models are emerging as promising tools in robotics and reinforcement learning. Yet, even though tasks in these domains typically involve distinct objects, most state-of-the-art generative models do not explicitly capture the compositional nature of visual scenes. Two recent exceptions, MONet and IODINE, decompose scenes into objects in an unsupervised fashion. Their underlying generative processes, however, do not account for component interactions. Hence, neither of them allows for principled sampling of novel scenes. Here we present GENESIS, the first object-centric generative model of 3D visual scenes capable of both decomposing and generating scenes by capturing relationships between scene components. GENESIS parameterises a spatial GMM over images which is decoded from a set of object-centric latent variables that are either inferred sequentially in an amortised fashion or sampled from an autoregressive prior. We train GENESIS on several publicly available datasets and evaluate its performance on scene generation, decomposition, and semi-supervised learning.
Q-learning methods represent a commonly used class of algorithms in reinforcement learning: they are generally efficient and simple, and can be combined readily with function approximators for deep reinforcement learning (RL). However, the behavior of Q-learning methods with function approximation is poorly understood, both theoretically and empirically. In this work, we aim to experimentally investigate potential issues in Q-learning, by means of a unit testing framework where we can utilize oracles to disentangle sources of error. Specifically, we investigate questions related to function approximation, sampling error and nonstationarity, and where available, verify if trends found in oracle settings hold true with modern deep RL methods. We find that large neural network architectures have many benefits with regards to learning stability; offer several practical compensations for overfitting; and develop a novel sampling method based on explicitly compensating for function approximation error that yields fair improvement on high-dimensional continuous control domains.
Robots can effectively grasp and manipulate objects using their 3D models. In this paper, we propose a simple shape representation and a reconstruction method that outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of geometric metrics and enables grasp generation with high precision and success. Our reconstruction method models the object geometry as a pair of depth images, composing the shell of the object. This representation allows using image-to-image residual ConvNet architectures for 3D reconstruction, generates object reconstruction directly in the camera frame, and generalizes well to novel object types. Moreover, an object shell can be converted into an object mesh in a fraction of a second, providing time and memory efficient alternative to voxel or implicit representations. We explore the application of shell representation for grasp planning. With rigorous experimental validation, both in simulation and on a real setup, we show that shell reconstruction encapsulates sufficient geometric information to generate precise grasps and the associated grasp quality with over 90% accuracy. Diverse grasps computed on shell reconstructions allow the robot to select and execute grasps in cluttered scenes with more than 93% success rate.
We present a scalable technique for upper bounding the Lipschitz constant of generative models. We relate this quantity to the maximal norm over the set of attainable vector-Jacobian products of a given generative model. We approximate this set by layerwise convex approximations using zonotopes. Our approach generalizes and improves upon prior work using zonotope transformers and we extend to Lipschitz estimation of neural networks with large output dimension. This provides efficient and tight bounds on small networks and can scale to generative models on VAE and DCGAN architectures.
For machine learning models to be most useful in numerous sociotechnical systems, many have argued that they must be human-interpretable. However, despite increasing interest in interpretability, there remains no firm consensus on how to measure it. This is especially true in representation learning, where interpretability research has focused on disentanglement measures only applicable to synthetic datasets and not grounded in human factors. We introduce a task to quantify the human-interpretability of generative model representations, where users interactively modify representations to reconstruct target instances. On synthetic datasets, we find performance on this task much more reliably differentiates entangled and disentangled models than baseline approaches. On a real dataset, we find it differentiates between representation learning methods widely believed but never shown to produce more or less interpretable models. In both cases, we ran small-scale think-aloud studies and large-scale experiments on Amazon Mechanical Turk to confirm that our qualitative and quantitative results agreed.