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Aleksis Pirinen

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6 papers

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AAMAS Conference 2026 Conference Paper

DiffVAS: Diffusion-Guided Visual Active Search in Partially Observable Environments

Anindya Sarkar
Srikumar Sastry
Aleksis Pirinen
Nathan Jacobs
Yevgeniy Vorobeychik

Visualactivesearch(VAS)hasbeenintroducedasamodelingframework that leverages visual cues to direct aerial (e. g. , UAV-based) exploration and pinpoint areas of interest within extensive geospatialregions. PotentialapplicationsofVASincludedetectinghotspots for rare wildlife poaching, aiding search-and-rescue missions, and uncovering illegal trafficking of weapons, among other uses. Previous VAS approaches assume that the entire search space is known upfront, which is often unrealistic due to constraints such as a restricted field of view and high acquisition costs, and they typically learn policies tailored to specific target objects, which limits their ability to search for multiple target categories simultaneously. In this work, we propose DiffVAS, a target-conditioned policy that searches for diverse objects simultaneously according to task requirements in partially observable environments, which advances the deployment of visual active search policies in real-world applications. DiffVAS leverages a diffusion model to reconstruct the entire geospatial area from sequentially observed partial glimpses, which enables a target-conditioned reinforcement learning-based planning module to effectively reason and guide subsequent search steps. Extensive experiments demonstrate that DiffVAS excels in searching diverse objects in partially observable environments, significantly surpassing state-of-the-art methods on several datasets. Code and models are available at this link.

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NeurIPS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

GOMAA-Geo: GOal Modality Agnostic Active Geo-localization

Anindya Sarkar
Srikumar Sastry
Aleksis Pirinen
Chongjie Zhang
Nathan Jacobs
Yevgeniy Vorobeychik

We consider the task of active geo-localization (AGL) in which an agent uses a sequence of visual cues observed during aerial navigation to find a target specified through multiple possible modalities. This could emulate a UAV involved in a search-and-rescue operation navigating through an area, observing a stream of aerial images as it goes. The AGL task is associated with two important challenges. Firstly, an agent must deal with a goal specification in one of multiple modalities (e. g. , through a natural language description) while the search cues are provided in other modalities (aerial imagery). The second challenge is limited localization time (e. g. , limited battery life, urgency) so that the goal must be localized as efficiently as possible, i. e. the agent must effectively leverage its sequentially observed aerial views when searching for the goal. To address these challenges, we propose GOMAA-Geo -- a goal modality agnostic active geo-localization agent -- for zero-shot generalization between different goal modalities. Our approach combines cross-modality contrastive learning to align representations across modalities with supervised foundation model pretraining and reinforcement learning to obtain highly effective navigation and localization policies. Through extensive evaluations, we show that GOMAA-Geo outperforms alternative learnable approaches and that it generalizes across datasets -- e. g. , to disaster-hit areas without seeing a single disaster scenario during training -- and goal modalities -- e. g. , to ground-level imagery or textual descriptions, despite only being trained with goals specified as aerial views. Our code is available at: https: //github. com/mvrl/GOMAA-Geo.

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AAAI Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Embodied Visual Active Learning for Semantic Segmentation

David Nilsson
Aleksis Pirinen
Erik Gärtner
Cristian Sminchisescu

We study the task of embodied visual active learning, where an agent is set to explore a 3d environment with the goal to acquire visual scene understanding by actively selecting views for which to request annotation. While accurate on some benchmarks, today’s deep visual recognition pipelines tend to not generalize well in certain real-world scenarios, or for unusual viewpoints. Robotic perception, in turn, requires the capability to refine the recognition capabilities for the conditions where the mobile system operates, including cluttered indoor environments or poor illumination. This motivates the proposed task, where an agent is placed in a novel environment with the objective of improving its visual recognition capability. To study embodied visual active learning, we develop a battery of agents – both learnt and pre-specified – and with different levels of knowledge of the environment. The agents are equipped with a semantic segmentation network and seek to acquire informative views, move and explore in order to propagate annotations in the neighbourhood of those views, then refine the underlying segmentation network by online retraining. The trainable method uses deep reinforcement learning with a reward function that balances two competing objectives: task performance, represented as visual recognition accuracy, which requires exploring the environment, and the necessary amount of annotated data requested during active exploration. We extensively evaluate the proposed models using the photorealistic Matterport3D simulator and show that a fully learnt method outperforms comparable pre-specified counterparts, even when requesting fewer annotations.

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AAAI Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Deep Reinforcement Learning for Active Human Pose Estimation

Erik Gärtner
Aleksis Pirinen
Cristian Sminchisescu

Most 3d human pose estimation methods assume that input – be it images of a scene collected from one or several viewpoints, or from a video – is given. Consequently, they focus on estimates leveraging prior knowledge and measurement by fusing information spatially and/or temporally, whenever available. In this paper we address the problem of an active observer with freedom to move and explore the scene spatially – in ‘time-freeze’ mode – and/or temporally, by selecting informative viewpoints that improve its estimation accuracy. Towards this end, we introduce Pose-DRL, a fully trainable deep reinforcement learning-based active pose estimation architecture which learns to select appropriate views, in space and time, to feed an underlying monocular pose estimator. We evaluate our model using single- and multi-target estimators with strong result in both settings. Our system further learns automatic stopping conditions in time and transition functions to the next temporal processing step in videos. In extensive experiments with the Panoptic multi-view setup, and for complex scenes containing multiple people, we show that our model learns to select viewpoints that yield signiﬁcantly more accurate pose estimates compared to strong multi-view baselines.

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NeurIPS Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Domes to Drones: Self-Supervised Active Triangulation for 3D Human Pose Reconstruction

Aleksis Pirinen
Erik Gärtner
Cristian Sminchisescu

Existing state-of-the-art estimation systems can detect 2d poses of multiple people in images quite reliably. In contrast, 3d pose estimation from a single image is ill-posed due to occlusion and depth ambiguities. Assuming access to multiple cameras, or given an active system able to position itself to observe the scene from multiple viewpoints, reconstructing 3d pose from 2d measurements becomes well-posed within the framework of standard multi-view geometry. Less clear is what is an informative set of viewpoints for accurate 3d reconstruction, particularly in complex scenes, where people are occluded by others or by scene objects. In order to address the view selection problem in a principled way, we here introduce ACTOR, an active triangulation agent for 3d human pose reconstruction. Our fully trainable agent consists of a 2d pose estimation network (any of which would work) and a deep reinforcement learning-based policy for camera viewpoint selection. The policy predicts observation viewpoints, the number of which varies adaptively depending on scene content, and the associated images are fed to an underlying pose estimator. Importantly, training the policy requires no annotations - given a 2d pose estimator, ACTOR is trained in a self-supervised manner. In extensive evaluations on complex multi-people scenes filmed in a Panoptic dome, under multiple viewpoints, we compare our active triangulation agent to strong multi-view baselines, and show that ACTOR produces significantly more accurate 3d pose reconstructions. We also provide a proof-of-concept experiment indicating the potential of connecting our view selection policy to a physical drone observer.

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JMLR Journal 2019 Journal Article

Exact Clustering of Weighted Graphs via Semidefinite Programming

Aleksis Pirinen
Brendan Ames

As a model problem for clustering, we consider the densest $k$-disjoint-clique problem of partitioning a weighted complete graph into $k$ disjoint subgraphs such that the sum of the densities of these subgraphs is maximized. We establish that such subgraphs can be recovered from the solution of a particular semidefinite relaxation with high probability if the input graph is sampled from a distribution of clusterable graphs. Specifically, the semidefinite relaxation is exact if the graph consists of $k$ large disjoint subgraphs, corresponding to clusters, with weight concentrated within these subgraphs, plus a moderate number of nodes not belonging to any cluster. Further, we establish that if noise is weakly obscuring these clusters, i.e, the between-cluster edges are assigned very small weights, then we can recover significantly smaller clusters. For example, we show that in approximately sparse graphs, where the between-cluster weights tend to zero as the size $n$ of the graph tends to infinity, we can recover clusters of size polylogarithmic in $n$ under certain conditions on the distribution of edge weights. Empirical evidence from numerical simulations is also provided to support these theoretical phase transitions to perfect recovery of the cluster structure. [abs] [ pdf ][ bib ] &copy JMLR 2019. ( edit, beta )

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