Object segmentation is a key component in the visual system of a robot that performs tasks like grasping and object manipulation, especially in presence of occlusions. Like many other computer vision tasks, the adoption of deep architectures has made available algorithms that perform this task with remarkable performance. However, adoption of such algorithms in robotics is hampered by the fact that training requires large amount of computing time and it cannot be performed on-line. In this work, we propose a novel architecture for object segmentation, that overcomes this problem and provides comparable performance in a fraction of the time required by the state-of-the-art methods. Our approach is based on a pre-trained Mask R-CNN, in which various layers have been replaced with a set of classifiers and regressors that are re-trained for a new task. We employ an efficient Kernel-based method that allows for fast training on large scale problems. Our approach is validated on the YCB-Video dataset which is widely adopted in the computer vision and robotics community, demonstrating that we can achieve and even surpass performance of the state-of-the-art, with a significant reduction (${\sim}6\times$) of the training time. The code to reproduce the experiments is publicly available on GitHub.
It has been shown that deep neural networks are prone to overfitting on biased training data. Towards addressing this issue, meta-learning employs a meta model for correcting the training bias. Despite the promising performances, super slow training is currently the bottleneck in the meta learning approaches. In this paper, we introduce a novel Faster Meta Update Strategy (FaMUS) to replace the most expensive step in the meta gradient computation with a faster layer-wise approximation. We empirically find that FaMUS yields not only a reasonably accurate but also a low-variance approximation of the meta gradient. We conduct extensive experiments to verify the proposed method on two tasks. We show our method is able to save two-thirds of the training time while still maintaining the comparable or achieving even better generalization performance. In particular, our method achieves the state-of-the-art performance on both synthetic and realistic noisy labels, and obtains promising performance on long-tailed recognition on standard benchmarks.
We study the problem of efficient semantic segmentation for large-scale 3D point clouds. By relying on expensive sampling techniques or computationally heavy pre/post-processing steps, most existing approaches are only able to be trained and operate over small-scale point clouds. In this paper, we introduce RandLA-Net, an efficient and lightweight neural architecture to directly infer per-point semantics for large-scale point clouds. The key to our approach is to use random point sampling instead of more complex point selection approaches. Although remarkably computation and memory efficient, random sampling can discard key features by chance. To overcome this, we introduce a novel local feature aggregation module to progressively increase the receptive field for each 3D point, thereby effectively preserving geometric details. Extensive experiments show that our RandLA-Net can process 1 million points in a single pass with up to 200X faster than existing approaches. Moreover, our RandLA-Net clearly surpasses state-of-the-art approaches for semantic segmentation on two large-scale benchmarks Semantic3D and SemanticKITTI.
In recent years, object detection has experienced impressive progress. Despite these improvements, there is still a significant gap in the performance between the detection of small and large objects. We analyze the current state-of-the-art model, Mask-RCNN, on a challenging dataset, MS COCO. We show that the overlap between small ground-truth objects and the predicted anchors is much lower than the expected IoU threshold. We conjecture this is due to two factors; (1) only a few images are containing small objects, and (2) small objects do not appear enough even within each image containing them. We thus propose to oversample those images with small objects and augment each of those images by copy-pasting small objects many times. It allows us to trade off the quality of the detector on large objects with that on small objects. We evaluate different pasting augmentation strategies, and ultimately, we achieve 9.7\% relative improvement on the instance segmentation and 7.1\% on the object detection of small objects, compared to the current state of the art method on MS COCO.
Deep neural network models used for medical image segmentation are large because they are trained with high-resolution three-dimensional (3D) images. Graphics processing units (GPUs) are widely used to accelerate the trainings. However, the memory on a GPU is not large enough to train the models. A popular approach to tackling this problem is patch-based method, which divides a large image into small patches and trains the models with these small patches. However, this method would degrade the segmentation quality if a target object spans multiple patches. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for 3D medical image segmentation that utilizes the data-swapping, which swaps out intermediate data from GPU memory to CPU memory to enlarge the effective GPU memory size, for training high-resolution 3D medical images without patching. We carefully tuned parameters in the data-swapping method to obtain the best training performance for 3D U-Net, a widely used deep neural network model for medical image segmentation. We applied our tuning to train 3D U-Net with full-size images of 192 x 192 x 192 voxels in brain tumor dataset. As a result, communication overhead, which is the most important issue, was reduced by 17.1%. Compared with the patch-based method for patches of 128 x 128 x 128 voxels, our training for full-size images achieved improvement on the mean Dice score by 4.48% and 5.32 % for detecting whole tumor sub-region and tumor core sub-region, respectively. The total training time was reduced from 164 hours to 47 hours, resulting in 3.53 times of acceleration.
The reinforcement learning community has made great strides in designing algorithms capable of exceeding human performance on specific tasks. These algorithms are mostly trained one task at the time, each new task requiring to train a brand new agent instance. This means the learning algorithm is general, but each solution is not; each agent can only solve the one task it was trained on. In this work, we study the problem of learning to master not one but multiple sequential-decision tasks at once. A general issue in multi-task learning is that a balance must be found between the needs of multiple tasks competing for the limited resources of a single learning system. Many learning algorithms can get distracted by certain tasks in the set of tasks to solve. Such tasks appear more salient to the learning process, for instance because of the density or magnitude of the in-task rewards. This causes the algorithm to focus on those salient tasks at the expense of generality. We propose to automatically adapt the contribution of each task to the agent's updates, so that all tasks have a similar impact on the learning dynamics. This resulted in state of the art performance on learning to play all games in a set of 57 diverse Atari games. Excitingly, our method learned a single trained policy - with a single set of weights - that exceeds median human performance. To our knowledge, this was the first time a single agent surpassed human-level performance on this multi-task domain. The same approach also demonstrated state of the art performance on a set of 30 tasks in the 3D reinforcement learning platform DeepMind Lab.
Latest deep learning methods for object detection provide remarkable performance, but have limits when used in robotic applications. One of the most relevant issues is the long training time, which is due to the large size and imbalance of the associated training sets, characterized by few positive and a large number of negative examples (i.e. background). Proposed approaches are based on end-to-end learning by back-propagation [22] or kernel methods trained with Hard Negatives Mining on top of deep features [8]. These solutions are effective, but prohibitively slow for on-line applications. In this paper we propose a novel pipeline for object detection that overcomes this problem and provides comparable performance, with a 60x training speedup. Our pipeline combines (i) the Region Proposal Network and the deep feature extractor from [22] to efficiently select candidate RoIs and encode them into powerful representations, with (ii) the FALKON [23] algorithm, a novel kernel-based method that allows fast training on large scale problems (millions of points). We address the size and imbalance of training data by exploiting the stochastic subsampling intrinsic into the method and a novel, fast, bootstrapping approach. We assess the effectiveness of the approach on a standard Computer Vision dataset (PASCAL VOC 2007 [5]) and demonstrate its applicability to a real robotic scenario with the iCubWorld Transformations [18] dataset.
Deep Convolutional Neural Networks have pushed the state-of-the art for semantic segmentation provided that a large amount of images together with pixel-wise annotations is available. Data collection is expensive and a solution to alleviate it is to use transfer learning. This reduces the amount of annotated data required for the network training but it does not get rid of this heavy processing step. We propose a method of transfer learning without annotations on the target task for datasets with redundant content and distinct pixel distributions. Our method takes advantage of the approximate content alignment of the images between two datasets when the approximation error prevents the reuse of annotation from one dataset to another. Given the annotations for only one dataset, we train a first network in a supervised manner. This network autonomously learns to generate deep data representations relevant to the semantic segmentation. Then the images in the new dataset, we train a new network to generate a deep data representation that matches the one from the first network on the previous dataset. The training consists in a regression between feature maps and does not require any annotations on the new dataset. We show that this method reaches performances similar to a classic transfer learning on the PASCAL VOC dataset with synthetic transformations.
This paper tackles the problem of video object segmentation, given some user annotation which indicates the object of interest. The problem is formulated as pixel-wise retrieval in a learned embedding space: we embed pixels of the same object instance into the vicinity of each other, using a fully convolutional network trained by a modified triplet loss as the embedding model. Then the annotated pixels are set as reference and the rest of the pixels are classified using a nearest-neighbor approach. The proposed method supports different kinds of user input such as segmentation mask in the first frame (semi-supervised scenario), or a sparse set of clicked points (interactive scenario). In the semi-supervised scenario, we achieve results competitive with the state of the art but at a fraction of computation cost (275 milliseconds per frame). In the interactive scenario where the user is able to refine their input iteratively, the proposed method provides instant response to each input, and reaches comparable quality to competing methods with much less interaction.
In a weakly-supervised scenario object detectors need to be trained using image-level annotation alone. Since bounding-box-level ground truth is not available, most of the solutions proposed so far are based on an iterative, Multiple Instance Learning framework in which the current classifier is used to select the highest-confidence boxes in each image, which are treated as pseudo-ground truth in the next training iteration. However, the errors of an immature classifier can make the process drift, usually introducing many of false positives in the training dataset. To alleviate this problem, we propose in this paper a training protocol based on the self-paced learning paradigm. The main idea is to iteratively select a subset of images and boxes that are the most reliable, and use them for training. While in the past few years similar strategies have been adopted for SVMs and other classifiers, we are the first showing that a self-paced approach can be used with deep-network-based classifiers in an end-to-end training pipeline. The method we propose is built on the fully-supervised Fast-RCNN architecture and can be applied to similar architectures which represent the input image as a bag of boxes. We show state-of-the-art results on Pascal VOC 2007, Pascal VOC 2010 and ILSVRC 2013. On ILSVRC 2013 our results based on a low-capacity AlexNet network outperform even those weakly-supervised approaches which are based on much higher-capacity networks.
In this work, we present a method for tracking and learning the dynamics of all objects in a large scale robot environment. A mobile robot patrols the environment and visits the different locations one by one. Movable objects are discovered by change detection, and tracked throughout the robot deployment. For tracking, we extend the Rao-Blackwellized particle filter of previous work with birth and death processes, enabling the method to handle an arbitrary number of objects. Target births and associations are sampled using Gibbs sampling. The parameters of the system are then learnt using the Expectation Maximization algorithm in an unsupervised fashion. The system therefore enables learning of the dynamics of one particular environment, and of its objects. The algorithm is evaluated on data collected autonomously by a mobile robot in an office environment during a real-world deployment. We show that the algorithm automatically identifies and tracks the moving objects within 3D maps and infers plausible dynamics models, significantly decreasing the modeling bias of our previous work. The proposed method represents an improvement over previous methods for environment dynamics learning as it allows for learning of fine grained processes.