Environment Predictive Coding for Visual Navigation
Authors: Santhosh Kumar Ramakrishnan,Tushar Nagarajan,Ziad Al-Halah,Kristen Grauman
ICLR 2022,Poster

Abstract: We introduce environment predictive coding, a self-supervised approach to learn environment-level representations for embodied agents. In contrast to prior work on self-supervised learning for individual images, we aim to encode a 3D environment using a series of images observed by an agent moving in it. We learn these representations via a masked-zone prediction task, which segments an agent’s trajectory into zones and then predicts features of randomly masked zones, conditioned on the agent’s camera poses. This explicit spatial conditioning encourages learning representations that capture the geometric and semantic regularities of 3D environments. We learn such representations on a collection of video walkthroughs and demonstrate successful transfer to multiple downstream navigation tasks. Our experiments on the real-world scanned 3D environments of Gibson and Matterport3D show that our method obtains 2 - 6× higher sample-efﬁciency and up to 57% higher performance over standard image-representation learning.