Spatial memory, or the ability to remember and recall specific locations and objects, is central to autonomous agents ability to carry out tasks in real environments. However, most existing artificial memory modules are not very adept at storing spat
ial information. We propose a parameter-free module, Egospheric Spatial Memory (ESM), which encodes the memory in an ego-sphere around the agent, enabling expressive 3D representations. ESM can be trained end-to-end via either imitation or reinforcement learning, and improves both training efficiency and final performance against other memory baselines on both drone and manipulator visuomotor control tasks. The explicit egocentric geometry also enables us to seamlessly combine the learned controller with other non-learned modalities, such as local obstacle avoidance. We further show applications to semantic segmentation on the ScanNet dataset, where ESM naturally combines image-level and map-level inference modalities. Through our broad set of experiments, we show that ESM provides a general computation graph for embodied spatial reasoning, and the module forms a bridge between real-time mapping systems and differentiable memory architectures. Implementation at: https://github.com/ivy-dl/memory.
We introduce Ivy, a templated Deep Learning (DL) framework which abstracts existing DL frameworks. Ivy unifies the core functions of these frameworks to exhibit consistent call signatures, syntax and input-output behaviour. New high-level framework-a
gnostic functions and classes, which are usable alongside framework-specific code, can then be implemented as compositions of the unified low-level Ivy functions. Ivy currently supports TensorFlow, PyTorch, MXNet, Jax and NumPy. We also release four pure-Ivy libraries for mechanics, 3D vision, robotics, and differentiable environments. Through our evaluations, we show that Ivy can significantly reduce lines of code with a runtime overhead of less than 1% in most cases. We welcome developers to join the Ivy community by writing their own functions, layers and libraries in Ivy, maximizing their audience and helping to accelerate DL research through inter-framework codebases. More information can be found at https://ivy-dl.org.
We demonstrate that challenging shortest path problems can be solved via direct spline regression from a neural network, trained in an unsupervised manner (i.e. without requiring ground truth optimal paths for training). To achieve this, we derive a
geometry-dependent optimal cost function whose minima guarantees collision-free solutions. Our method beats state-of-the-art supervised learning baselines for shortest path planning, with a much more scalable training pipeline, and a significant speedup in inference time.
