Many current methods to learn intuitive physics are based on interaction networks and similar approaches. However, they rely on information that has proven difficult to estimate directly from image data in the past. We aim to narrow this gap by inferring all the semantic information needed from raw pixel data in the form of a scene-graph. Our approach is based on neural-symbolic capsules, which identify which objects in the scene are static, dynamic, elastic or rigid, possible joints between them, as well as their collision information. By integrating all this with interaction networks, we demonstrate how our method is able to learn intuitive physics directly from image sequences and apply its knowledge to new scenes and objects, resulting in an inverse-simulation pipeline.
Since the introduction of interaction networks, there has been a lot of research into extending and refining these methods, as well as integrating them with other models. One such extension has been to automatically discover object relations in a scene @cite_12 . An alternative approach has been to connect interaction networks directly with multilayer perceptrons. Watters al @cite_3 showed that by adding a front-end in the form of a convolutional neural network, intuitive physics can be learned for rigid bodies directly from video data. There has also been research into integrating unsupervised methods @cite_18 , integrating graph networks @cite_10 , optimizing the flow of information to and from interaction networks @cite_13 and using interaction networks in planning systems @cite_2 .
@cite_18 @cite_10 @cite_3 @cite_2 @cite_13 @cite_12
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From just a glance, humans can make rich predictions about the future of a wide range of physical systems. On the other hand, modern approaches from engineering, robotics, and graphics are often restricted to narrow domains or require information about the underlying state. We introduce the Visual Interaction Network, a general-purpose model for learning the dynamics of a physical system from raw visual observations. Our model consists of a perceptual front-end based on convolutional neural networks and a dynamics predictor based on interaction networks. Through joint training, the perceptual front-end learns to parse a dynamic visual scene into a set of factored latent object representations. The dynamics predictor learns to roll these states forward in time by computing their interactions, producing a predicted physical trajectory of arbitrary length. We found that from just six input video frames the Visual Interaction Network can generate accurate future trajectories of hundreds of time steps on a wide range of physical systems. Our model can also be applied to scenes with invisible objects, inferring their future states from their effects on the visible objects, and can implicitly infer the unknown mass of objects. This work opens new opportunities for model-based decision-making and planning from raw sensory observations in complex physical environments. We notice information flow in convolutional neural networks is restricted inside local neighborhood regions due to the physical design of convolutional filters, which limits the overall understanding of complex scenes. In this paper, we propose the point-wise spatial attention network (PSANet) to relax the local neighborhood constraint. Each position on the feature map is connected to all the other ones through a self-adaptively learned attention mask. Moreover, information propagation in bi-direction for scene parsing is enabled. Information at other positions can be collected to help the prediction of the current position and vice versa, information at the current position can be distributed to assist the prediction of other ones. Our proposed approach achieves top performance on various competitive scene parsing datasets, including ADE20K, PASCAL VOC 2012 and Cityscapes, demonstrating its effectiveness and generality. From just a glance, humans can make rich predictions about the future state of a wide range of physical systems. On the other hand, modern approaches from engineering, robotics, and graphics are often restricted to narrow domains and require direct measurements of the underlying states. We introduce the Visual Interaction Network, a general-purpose model for learning the dynamics of a physical system from raw visual observations. Our model consists of a perceptual front-end based on convolutional neural networks and a dynamics predictor based on interaction networks. Through joint training, the perceptual front-end learns to parse a dynamic visual scene into a set of factored latent object representations. The dynamics predictor learns to roll these states forward in time by computing their interactions and dynamics, producing a predicted physical trajectory of arbitrary length. We found that from just six input video frames the Visual Interaction Network can generate accurate future trajectories of hundreds of time steps on a wide range of physical systems. Our model can also be applied to scenes with invisible objects, inferring their future states from their effects on the visible objects, and can implicitly infer the unknown mass of objects. Our results demonstrate that the perceptual module and the object-based dynamics predictor module can induce factored latent representations that support accurate dynamical predictions. This work opens new opportunities for model-based decision-making and planning from raw sensory observations in complex physical environments. Deep convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have become a key element in the recent breakthrough of salient object detection. However, existing CNN-based methods are based on either patchwise (regionwise) training and inference or fully convolutional networks. Methods in the former category are generally time-consuming due to severe storage and computational redundancies among overlapping patches. To overcome this deficiency, methods in the second category attempt to directly map a raw input image to a predicted dense saliency map in a single network forward pass. Though being very efficient, it is arduous for these methods to detect salient objects of different scales or salient regions with weak semantic information. In this paper, we develop hybrid contrast-oriented deep neural networks to overcome the aforementioned limitations. Each of our deep networks is composed of two complementary components, including a fully convolutional stream for dense prediction and a segment-level spatial pooling stream for sparse saliency inference. We further propose an attentional module that learns weight maps for fusing the two saliency predictions from these two streams. A tailored alternate scheme is designed to train these deep networks by fine-tuning pretrained baseline models. Finally, a customized fully connected conditional random field model incorporating a salient contour feature embedding can be optionally applied as a postprocessing step to improve spatial coherence and contour positioning in the fused result from these two streams. Extensive experiments on six benchmark data sets demonstrate that our proposed model can significantly outperform the state of the art in terms of all popular evaluation metrics.