Clustering Learning for Robotic Vision
Authors: Eugenio Culurciello, Jordan Bates, Aysegul Dundar, Jose Carrasco, Clement Farabet
ICLR 2013

Abstract: We present the clustering learning technique applied to multi-layer feedforward deep neural networks. We show that this unsupervised learning technique can compute network filters with only a few minutes and a much reduced set of pa- rameters. The goal of this paper is to promote the technique for general-purpose robotic vision systems. We report its use in static image datasets and object track- ing datasets. We show that networks trained with clustering learning can outper- form large networks trained for many hours on complex datasets.

Clustering Learning for Robotic Vision
Eugenio Culurciello∗
Purdue University
euge@purdue.edu
Jordan Bates
Purdue University
jtbates@purdue.edu
Aysegul Dundar
Purdue University
adundar@purdue.edu
J.A. Perez-Carrasco
University of Seville
jperez2@us.es
Clement Farabet
New York University
cfarabet@nyu.edu
Abstract
We present the clustering learning technique applied to multi-layer feedforward
deep neural networks. We show that this unsupervised learning technique can
compute network ﬁlters with only a few minutes and a much reduced set of pa-
rameters. The goal of this paper is to promote the technique for general-purpose
robotic vision systems. We report its use in static image datasets and object track-
ing datasets. We show that networks trained with clustering learning can outper-
form large networks trained for many hours on complex datasets.
1 Introduction
In the recent years the fusion of bio-inspired and neuromorphic vision models with machine learning
has dominated the development of artiﬁcial vision systems for the categorization of multiple objects
in static frames. Bio-inspired deep networks are computer-vision and computational-neuroscience
models of the mammalian visual system implemented in deep neural networks [1–6]. Most deep net-
work architectures are composed of multiple layers (2, 3 typically), where each layer is composed
of: linear two-dimensional ﬁltering, non-linearity, pooling of data, output data normalization [7–9].
Recent machine learning research has focused on the task of training such deep networks from the
abundant digital data available in the form of image frames and videos. In particular, deep networks
need to learn good feature representations for complex visual tasks such as object categorization
and tracking of objects in space and time, identifying object presence and absence. These repre-
sentations usually involve learning the linear ﬁlter weight values from labeled and unlabeled input
data. Since labeled data is costly and often ridden with human errors [10–12], the recent focus is on
learning these features purely from unlabeled input data [13–17]. These recent methods typically
learn multiple layers of deep networks by training several layers of features, one layer at a time, with
varying complexity of learning models.
Recent techniques based on unsupervised clustering algorithms are especially promising because
they use simple learning methods that quickly converge [17]. These algorithms are easy to setup and
train and are especially suited for robotics research, because less complex knowledge of machine
learning is needed, environment-speciﬁc data can be collected quickly with a few minutes of video,
∗More information on Eugenio Culurciello’s laboratory and research can be found here:
http://engineering.purdue.edu/elab/. Real time robotic vision systems: http://www.neuﬂow.org/
1
arXiv:1301.2820v3  [cs.CV]  13 Mar 2013
setup of custom size deep networks is quick and can be adapted to speciﬁc tasks. In addition, real-
time operation with efﬁcient networks can be obtained with only a few minutes of training and setup,
leading to quick and direct experimentation in robotic experiments.
In this paper we present results obtained with unsupervised clustering algorithms on the training
and operation of deep neural networks for real-time robotic vision systems. We provide simple
techniques and open-source software that allows robotic researchers to use deep network in a short
setup time and with little or no knowledge of machine learning necessary. The main goal of the paper
is not to present state-of-art results on a speciﬁc dataset. Rather we use standard published datasets
to evaluate the performance of prototype robotic vision system for general-purpose use, where no
dataset is available. It is thus not useful to train the network to perform only on one dataset, when the
levels of performance would not carry over to another dataset or real-world images. The goal is thus
mainly to evaluate the use of unsupervised networks that can support at least ten frames-per-second
operation on commercial hardware, such as recent laptop computers.
The paper presents the following key innovations: (1) use of clustering learning for quickly training
robotic systems (Section 2), (2) the use of distance-based ﬁltering, as opposed to the standard con-
volution (Section 2.2), (3) the experimental proof that clustering learning networks can outperform
supervised networks on general purpose robotic tracking tasks (Section 4).
2 Methods
In this paper we created and tested a model of unsupervised clustering algorithms (CL) that can
quickly learn linear ﬁlters’ weight values, and also is amenable to real-time operation with con-
ventional mobile hardware. We used the Torch7 software for all our experiments [18], since this
software can reduce training and learning of deep networks by 5-10 times compared to similar Mat-
lab and Python tools.
2.1 Input data
Input image data was obtained from the CIFAR10 [19] and the Street View House Numbers (SVHN)
[20] datasets. The SVHN dataset has a training size of 73,257 32x32 images and test size of 26,032
32x32 images. The CIFAR10 dataset has a training size of 20,000 32x32 images and a test size of
2,000 32x32 images. Both datasets offer a 10 categories classiﬁcation task on 32x32 size images.
The train dataset was in all cases learned to 100% accuracy, and training was then stopped. Input
data was contrast normalized separately on each RGB channel with a 9x9 gaussian ﬁlter using the
Torch7 ”nn.Spatial Contrastive Normalization” function.
For the real-time networks in Section 3, we used patches from a contrast-normalized version of a
few images from the Berkeley image dataset [21]. As testing data for a general-purposed robotic
vision system, we decided to test our networks in a tracking task, where the network has to be able
to track an object of interest based on a single presentation. For this purpose we use the challenging
benchmark TLD dataset [22]. From this dataset we selected multiple videos with different properties
of occlusions, camera movement, pose, scale and illumination changes.
Even if other groups showed slight improvements using the YUV color space [7], we were not able
to reproduce the beneﬁts of YUV , so we kept the images in their original RGB space.
Also we did not use whitening of data (such as ZCA whitening) even if other groups have shown
clear advantages of using it. We did not use whitening because of two main reasons: ﬁrst, it is not
applicable for general-purpose vision system where an a-priori dataset cannot be obtained. Second,
whitening computation is very expensive (similar to the ﬁrst layer of a convolutional neural network)
and we instead replaced it with local contrast normalization, which is a bio-inspired technique [23]
to whiten the input data removing its mean bias and adapting the input dynamic range.
2.2 Network architecture
The deep neural network architecture is composed of 4 layers, not counting pooling and normaliza-
tion operations. Two layers of linear two-dimensional ﬁltering and two layers of output classiﬁer
in the form of a fully connected 2-layer neural network. The ﬁrst two layers were composed of
2
input Image
1 to N1 sum-abs-diff
constastive norm
N1 to N1
L2 pooling
N1 to N1 Tanh
subtractive norm
Figure 1: Architecture of one layer of the clustering learning (CL) network. Filters were applied
with a sum-abs-diff operations, followed by contrastive normalization, L-2 pooling of features, non-
linearity tanh, and subtractive normalization.
a two-dimensional convolutional linear ﬁltering stage, a L2 norm pooling stage, and a subtractive
normalization layer for removing the mean of all outputs. The ﬁlters of the ﬁrst two layers are gen-
erated with unsupervised clustering algorithms, as explained below. Training of the last two fully-
connected neural network layers was performed with approximately 50-100 epochs on the SVHN
dataset on a quad-core Intel i7 laptop, or about 8 hours. Test data maximum precision usually only
needed approximately 15 epochs.
The layers in the clustering learning network used the following sequence of operations. Using the
naming convention in [8], for each layer l xi is an input feature map, yi is an output feature map.
The input of each layer is a 3D array with nl 2D feature maps of size nl1 ·nl2. Each component
(pixel, neuron) is denoted xijk. The output is also a 3D array, yi composed of ml feature maps of
size ml1 ·ml2.
1. SpatialSAD module: performing sum-abs-diff operation on images convolutionally with
the learned CL ﬁlters: yci = ∑
i |kij −xi|, where |x|is the absolute value of x.
2. Spatial Contrastive Normalization: to zero the data mean and standard deviation
3. L2 pooling over 2x2 regions: ypi = ∑
n×n(ycij ·gnij), computing the weighted average
of the input in an n·n(here n= 2) region with a gaussian kernel gn.
4. Tanh nonlinearity: ynli = tanh(ypi)
5. Spatial Subtractive or Contrastive Normalization: to zero the data mean, reset std
to unity. The subtractive normalization operation for a given site ynlijk computes:
vijk = ynlijk −∑
ipq wpq ·ynli,j+p,k+q, where wpq is a normalized truncated Gaus-
sian weighting window (typically of size 9x9). The divisive normalization computes
yijk = vijk/max(mean(σjk),σjk) where σjk = (∑
ipq wpq ·v2
i,j+p,k+q)1/2. The local
contrast normalization layer is inspired by visual neuroscience models.
In order to show the effectiveness of the learning techniques, we compared them to a standard 1-
layer and a 2-layers convolutional neural network (CNN) [8, 9, 24], followed by the same 2-layers
classiﬁer. The layers in the convolutional neural network used the following sequence of operations:
1. SpatialConvolution module: performing convolutions on images with the learned CL ﬁl-
ters: yci = bj + ∑
i kij ∗xi, where ∗is the 2D discrete convolution operator and bj is a
trainable bias parameter.
2. L2 pooling over 2x2 regions: as described above.
3. Tanh nonlinearity: as described above.
4. Spatial Subtractive Normalization: as described above.
All networks used 16 ﬁlters on the ﬁrst layer, 128 ﬁlters on the second layer. The ﬁnal classiﬁer
was ﬁxed to 128 hidden units and 10 output classes for CIFAR and SVHN. Clustering learning
networks used a fully connected (all channels connected to all channels) input to 1st, and 1st to 2nd
layer, while convolutional neural networks used 1-out-of-3 and 4-out-of-16 random connection table
between the input and 1st layer, and 1st and 2nd layer respectively.
3
(a) 1st layer ﬁlters
 (b) 2nd layer ﬁlters
Figure 2: Filters obtained with clustering learning on the 1st and 2nd layer. The ﬁlters obtained
on the 1st layer are quite similar to elongated Gabor patches, and what can be obtained with more
complex and numerically involved unsupervised techniques. Filter training with CL was obtained
in 10 min time on a modern laptop.
Notice that CL networks used sum-abs-diff metrics to correlate ﬁlters responses to inputs. This is
different to the standard approach of deep networks [1, 7, 15, 19] where convolution operations are
used. Our choice of sum-abs-diff operations was dictated by improved performance of the CL ﬁlters
with respect to convolutions. In a standard modern computer the difference between convolutions
(multiplications by weights) and distance metrics (differences, subtractions) is not visible, as multi-
pliers are optimized to perform as fast as the simpler difference operations. On the other hand, when
programmable hardware as FPGA is used, the use of differences instead of multipliers can reduce
the silicon area utilization, and power up to 15 times on a 16 bit operation, and more for larger
number of bits. A full comparison of the hardware advantages of using distance operators instead of
convolutions will be the subject of future publications.
2.3 Learning
We use k-means clustering algorithm to learn a set of 16 ﬁlters in the ﬁrst layer, and 128 ﬁlters in the
second layer. The techniques and scripts are general and can quickly modiﬁed to learn any number
of ﬁlters. The ﬁlter sizes on both layers was set to 5 x 5 pixels for the SVHN datasets. In CIFAR 1st
layer we used 5 x 5 ﬁlters, and on the 2nd layer, we used 3 x 3 ﬁlters, as features were more spatially
constrained in this dataset. Clustering used the same size patches of the normalized images, and we
used 1 M patches from each dataset to train the ﬁrst layer. The second layer training was performed
by passing the entire dataset through the ﬁrst layer of the deep neural network. The output dataset
was then used again with the same script to train another set of linear ﬁlters, by using 1 M patches
of the processed dataset.
Clustering learning ﬁlters learned on the 2nd layer used as many planes as the output of the 1st layer
(16 here). For example we learned 128 ﬁlters each with 16 dimensions of 5 x 5 pixels. This was
done to cluster different sets of features for each output of the 1st layer, and increased performance
by an average of 5% or more.
Examples of the ﬁlters learned with CL techniques on a 1st and 2nd layer are given in ﬁgure 2.
Both layer ﬁlters were obtained with training for 10 minutes on a modern quad-core Intel i7 laptop.
A supervised network of this size would require several tens of thousands of image examples and
several hours of training time.
Convolutional neural networks were trained with supervised methods using stochastic gradient de-
scent and other techniques as mentioned in [8].
4
3 Real-time network
The goal of this paper was to provide a simple and fast method to train unsupervised networks for
general-purposed robotic vision system. For real-time experiments we used the TLD dataset [22].
We then compared the tracking performance of a real-time deep network both trained supervised
[25], and with CL techniques described here.
The CL network for this task had the same two-layer network architecture used in [25]. This insured
real-time operation of 6 frames/s on a quad-code Intel i7 laptop computer. We focused on this
network and restricted ourselves to real-time operation because the goal of this project is the use of
deep networks in mobile computers. The network operates on 46 x 46 input images, uses 16 ﬁlters
with 7 x 7 receptive ﬁeld on the ﬁrst layer and 128 ﬁlters with 7 x 7 receptive ﬁeld on the second
layer. The 1st to 2nd layer fan-in was 8, and the 2nd to 3rd layer fan-in was 64. Both layers were
connected with random tables. The network produces a 128 feature vector as output.
We trained the same size and number of ﬁlters through clustering algorithm for use in this network.
We used patches from a contrast-normalized version of a few images from the Berkeley image
dataset [21]. Any set of natural-scene images can be used to train the general-purpose network
presented in this section, and we on purpose chose not to sample patches from the target TLD
dataset, in order to demonstrate the learning invariance properties of our technique.
4 Results
4.1 Static datasets
We report the results in the SVHN dataset in ﬁgure 3. Here we compared results of accuracy in the
test set for 4 cases: clustering learning with 1 layer (CL 1 layer), clustering learning with 2 layers
(CL 2 layers), a 1-layer and a 2-layers convolutional neural network (CNN 1l, 2l).
0 20 40 60 80 100 120
epoch [#]
80
82
84
86
88
90
92Accuracy [%]
CL 1 layer
CL 2 layers
CNN 1l
CNN 2l
Figure 3: Test set accuracy comparison for a convolutional neural network (CNN) and a clustering
learning (CL) network with 1 and 2 layers on the SVHN dataset
The data shows that clustering learning and CNN with 1 layer provide remarkably the same levels of
accuracy on the dataset. This shows that at least on the 1st layer, the features learned with clustering
learning are very effective. Adding a second layer brings the convnet to 91% levels of accuracy,
which are standard without using any sophisticated tricks and with a small network with only 16
ﬁlters on the ﬁrst layer. On the other had, the clustering learning network with 2 layers showed more
than 1% increase in accuracy, from 88% to 89%. This increase is not as large as one would want
and expect from adding a second layer, but is consistent with unsupervised learning results [17, 26].
5
It is interesting to note that with the clustering learning 2 layers network accuracy was above 88%,
and plateaued with the train set accuracy plateauing also at 92%. This shows that clustering learning
ﬁlters also do not over ﬁt, and present non-perfect, but almost identical results on both train and test
sets. We note that CNN network trained supervised on SVHN report state-of-the-art performances
of 96% and above.
The results above were all obtained with feed-forward hierarchical networks. We also tried to use
multiple layers of clustering learning unsupervised networks in parallel, as recommended by other
publications [8, 17], but we did not obtain any beneﬁts from that strategy, on the contrary parallel
networks always reported losses of 3-5% accuracy with respect to a single layer. This is different
from what reported in [17, 26].
We also report here the results in the CIFAR10 dataset in ﬁgure 4. As in the SVHN case, we
compared results of accuracy in the test set for 4 cases: clustering learning with 1 layer (CL 1 layer),
clustering learning with 2 layers (CL 2 layers), a 1-layer and a 2-layers convolutional neural network
(convnet 1l, 2l).
0 10 20 30 40 50
epoch [#]
35
40
45
50
55
60
65
70
75Accuracy [%]
CL 1 layer
CL 2 layers
CNN 1l
CNN 2l
Figure 4: Test set accuracy comparison for a convolutional neural network (CNN) and a clustering
learning (CL) network with 1 and 2 layers on the CIFAR10 dataset
The results in the CIFAR10 dataset show a gain of more than 10% from using a single layer convnet
to a 2 layer convnet. Clustering learning showed the same behavior as in the SVHN dataset: adding
a second layer achieved 3-5% better accuracy on the test set. This dataset uses very small images and
is notoriously difﬁcult, and clustering learning only reported a 50% accuracy overall with 2 layers.
All results are much lower than the current state of art in this dataset, which is close to 90% [27]. But
again we stress that our goal is real-time implementation and other researcher have obtained record
results in this dataset only with very large networks, most of which are not amenable to real-time
operation.
We tested random ﬁlters used on the ﬁrst 2 layers of the networks for both SVHN and CIFAR10
datasets. The 1st layer of the network was trained with CL, as mentioned above. The randomly
connected network used a ﬁxed CNN layer as described in section 2.2. Same qualitative results were
obtained with a random CL model. The SpatialConvolution module was initialized with uniformly
random ﬁlters by the Torch7 tool, and left untouched. We have found that random ﬁlters on the 2nd
layer of this networks perform with the same levels of precision as the 2nd layers trained with CL.
This was true for both SVNH and CIFAR10 datasets.
We also used the ﬁlters obtained with CL on a 2-layers standard CNN network. But the use of
convolution operation was giving results that were 5-10% less precise that the results obtained with
sum-abs-diff operators.
6
4.2 Dynamic datasets
The results for the comparison for the real-time tracking network on the TLD dataset [28] are given
in Table 1. Each video contains only one target. The metric used is the number of correctly tracked
frames. More information and images on this dataset can be found here [29]. All network we
tested were real-time networks performing at or above 5 frames/s. As can be seen in Table 1,
the Clustering Learning (CL) network performs better than the convolutional neural network from
[25] in all sequences, and is comparable only in one sequence (”Pedestrian 2”). These results are
currently not state-of-the-art, which is currently obtained in references [22, 30].
Not only the perfomance of the CL network is higher than CNN on the TLD dataset, but also the
CNN from [25] was trained in a week time, while the CL network was tried in 10 minutes. There is
a clear advantage to using CL networks for general-purpose, dataset-free robotic vision tasks.
Table 1: Precision comparison between of a Clustering Learning (CL) network and a convolutional
neural network (CNN) [25] used as trackers in the TLD dataset [22].
Sequence Frames Precision: CL Precision: CNN [25]
David 761 0.18 0.08
Jumping 313 0.37 0.20
Pedestrian 1 140 0.81 0.69
Pedestrian 2 338 0.78 0.79
Pedestrian 3 184 0.45 0.44
Car 945 0.67 0.48
Carchase 9928 0.38 0.26
In addition, we present in table 2 a comparison of running time of the most recent deep network
work performing at the state-of-the-art in a variety of static datasets. We provide this comparison to
show that although these networks perform extremely well on a speciﬁc dataset, we point out that
similarly to the experimental results in 1, that performance might not carry over to robotic vision
tasks such as tracking of previously unseen objects. We also want to point out that the state-of-the-
art networks in table 2 are far from real-time operation, and it is not clear in their publication how
that can be achieved down-sizing the networks or what performance they might attain.
Table 2: Comparison of execution time of state-of-the-art networks as compared to the proposed CL
network.
Publication Frames/s Precision 1st layer ﬁlters Whitening
CL (this work) 5-10 89%, SVHN 16 none
[25] 1-2 79.5%, Stanford 16 none
[31] 1? 80.8%, RGB-D 128 ZCA
[26] 0.1? 82%, CIFAR10 1600 ZCA
[32] 1? 98.5% ImageNet 96 none
[27] 0.3? 88.8%, CIFAR10 300 none
[7] 2-4? 99.5%, MNIST 32 none
The data provided in table 2 reports published and informally obtained data on the best results
obtained in static datasets. Cl networks also reported 50% precision on CIFAR10, a low value
compared to [26, 27]. As reference [31] precision we used the RGB only data. Most published
results did not report computer time. We asked the author to provide us the data for this table,
when available. We estimated other network compute time based on the size of the 1st layer of their
network, which is usually the most computationally demanding. We estimated frames/s based on
the speed of our networks. We want to stress the importance of reporting computing time for deep
networks, and the use of whitening, as it is the only way to compare large and small networks and
try to ﬁnd the optimal size for robotic vision system, or other tasks.
7
5 Discussion
We presented results on clustering learning algorithms for general-purpose vision system. These
algorithms can be used to train multi-layer feed-forward neural networks in minutes, with fully
automated scripts with a reduced set of learning parameters. We show results on static datasets and
dynamic tracking of objects in videos. We show results that prove that CL techniques are a viable
and quick option to training deep networks. In static datasets, although they do not perform at the
state-of-the-art because of their small network size, they can however be run in real-time because of
the small network size. The accuracy gap in recognition can be reduced by using more features, as
reported in [17], with an evaluation time linearly proportionalto the number of ﬁlters used. We also
show that on tracking datasets the CL networks outperforms CNN networks. We believe the tracking
dataset is a better approximation of robotic tasks, where locking on a target object is required for
approach and manipulation.
We show that sum-abs-diff operators can be more effective than convolution operations for ﬁltering
in deep networks. We also point out that custom hardware with these operators will be more efﬁcient
in power and space.
Many groups in the ﬁeld of deep learning work on static datasets to demonstrate the best learning
techniques. A lot of these techniques cannot be applied in robotic vision system with the current
modern hardware because they cannot perform in real-time ad require too much computational load.
We argue that more research is needed in the ﬁeld of applied and real-time deep networks, where
shortcuts need to be taken in order to optimize performance for speedy operation. The use of custom
hardware is recommended [33] but not necessary in many applications.
CL models are also very interesting to bio-inspired vision research because they provide a close
connection between computational neuroscience and machine learning. In particular unsupervised
clustering algorithms provide a simplistic model of Hebbian Learning methods, where neurons that
respond to the same input are clustered [34–37] . Most of previous work was mathematically com-
plex and not efﬁcient to implement. In this paper we thus present one of the ﬁrst practical applica-
tion of Hebbian-like learning applied to deep networks. Its fast and simple computation can help
researchers quickly train complex neural networks.
Further research is also needed to justify unsupervised learning on the 2nd or later layers. Our
experiments indicate that random ﬁlters are as good as learned CL ﬁlters. This fact was also shown
in other papers [26, 31] where random ﬁlters were used in the 2nd layer, after one CL-trained layer
with a large number of features (128 or above).
All the code for this paper is available here: https://github.com/culurciello/CL_
paper1_code.
Acknowledgments
We are especially grateful to the the Torch7 developing team, in particular Ronan Collobert, who ﬁrst
developed this great, easy and efﬁcient tool, Clement Farabet, Koray Kavukcuoglu, Leon Bottou.
We could not have done any of this work without standing on these giants shoulders.
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Peer review:
[Review]:
I am *very* sympathetic to the aims of the authors:
Find simple, effective and fast deep networks to understand sensor data. The authors defer some of the more interesting bits to future work however: they note that sum-abs-diff should be much more efficient in silicon implementation then convolution style results. That would indeed be interesting, and would make this paper all the more exciting.

Methods that make such learning efficient are certainly important.

The paper references [8] to explain seemingly significant details. At least a summary seems in order.
Ideally a pseudo-code description. Currently the paper is close to un-reproducible, which is unfortunate as it seems easy to correct that.

Details of the contrast normalization would make the paper more self contained. This is a rather specialized technique (by that name), and should be discussed when addressing the community at large.

I can't parse the second paragraph of Section 2.3.

Many of the details elements seem a bit unmotivated. The authors repeatedly mention in the beginning (which seem like details too early in the paper) things they *don't* do (Whitening, ZCA?, color space changes), but these seem like details, and the motivation to *not* perform them isn't compelling. Why the difference in connectivity between the CNN and that presented here?

The video data-sets are very interesting and compelling. It would be good for a sense of scale to report the results for [22,30] as well.

The fact that second layers that are random still works well is interesting:
'The randomly connected 2nd layer used a fixed CNN layer as described in section 2.2.'

Why was this experiment with a random CNN, and not a random CL (sum-abs-diff) to match the experiments?

What does one conclude from these results?
It seems the first layer is, to a close approximate, equivalent to a Gabor filter bank. The second layer, random appears to be perfectly acceptable. (Truly random? How does randomly initialized from the data do?)
That seems rather disappointing from a learning point of view.

In general the paper reads a bit like an early draft of a workshop paper. Interesting experiments, but hard to read, and seemingly incomplete. 

A few points on style seem in order:

First the authors graciously acknowledge prior work and say 'we could not have done any of this work without standing on the shoulders of giants.' Oddly, one of the giants acknowledged is one of the authors. I assume this is some last minute mistake due to authorship changes, but it reflects the rushed and incomplete nature of the work.

Similarly, the advertisements for the laboratory in the footnotes are odd and out of place in a conference submission.

The title seems slightly misleading: this seems to be a straightforward ML for vision paper with otherwise no connection to robotics.

Pros:

Tacking important issues for the field.
Good and interesting experiments.
Focus on performance is important.

Cons:

Difficult to understand details of implementation.
Many design decisions make it hard to compare/contrast techniques and seem unmotivated.
Some of the most interesting work (demonstrating benefits of technique in performance) are deferred to future work.
Style and writing make the paper difficult to read.