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Unnat Jain

Possible papers associated with this exact author name in Arrow. This page groups case-insensitive exact name matches and is not a full identity disambiguation profile.

9 papers
2 author rows

Possible papers

9

ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

An Image is Worth More Than 16x16 Patches: Exploring Transformers on Individual Pixels

  • Duy-Kien Nguyen
  • Mahmoud Assran
  • Unnat Jain
  • Martin R. Oswald
  • Cees G. M. Snoek
  • Xinlei Chen

This work does not introduce a new method. Instead, we present an interesting finding that questions the necessity of the inductive bias of locality in modern computer vision architectures. Concretely, we find that vanilla Transformers can operate by directly treating each individual pixel as a token and achieve highly performant results. This is substantially different from the popular design in Vision Transformer, which maintains the inductive bias from ConvNets towards local neighborhoods (e.g., by treating each 16x16 patch as a token). We showcase the effectiveness of pixels-as-tokens across three well-studied computer vision tasks: supervised learning for classification and regression, self-supervised learning via masked autoencoding, and image generation with diffusion models. Although it's computationally less practical to directly operate on individual pixels, we believe the community must be made aware of this surprising piece of knowledge when devising the next generation of neural network architectures for computer vision.

ICRA Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Exploitation-Guided Exploration for Semantic Embodied Navigation

  • Justin Wasserman
  • Girish Chowdhary 0001
  • Abhinav Gupta 0001
  • Unnat Jain

In the recent progress in embodied navigation and sim-to-robot transfer, modular policies have emerged as a de facto framework. However, there is more to compositionality beyond the decomposition of the learning load into modular components. In this work, we investigate a principled way to syntactically combine these components. Particularly, we propose Exploitation-Guided Exploration (XgX) where separate modules for exploration and exploitation come together in a novel and intuitive manner. We configure the exploitation module to take over in the deterministic final steps of navigation i. e. when the goal becomes visible. Crucially, an exploitation module teacher-forces the exploration module and continues driving an overridden policy optimization. XgX, with effective decomposition and novel guidance, improves the state-of-the-art performance on the challenging object navigation task from 70% to 73%. Along with better accuracy, through targeted analysis, we show that XgX is also more efficient at goal-conditioned exploration. Finally, we show sim-to-real transfer to robot hardware and XgX performs over two-fold better than the best baseline from simulation benchmarking. Project page: xgxvisnav. github.io

ICLR Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Habitat 3. 0: A Co-Habitat for Humans, Avatars, and Robots

  • Xavier Puig
  • Eric Undersander
  • Andrew Szot
  • Mikael Dallaire Cote
  • Tsung-Yen Yang
  • Ruslan Partsey
  • Ruta Desai
  • Alexander Clegg

We present Habitat 3.0: a simulation platform for studying collaborative human-robot tasks in home environments. Habitat 3.0 offers contributions across three dimensions: (1) Accurate humanoid simulation: addressing challenges in modeling complex deformable bodies and diversity in appearance and motion, all while ensuring high simulation speed. (2) Human-in-the-loop infrastructure: enabling real human interaction with simulated robots via mouse/keyboard or a VR interface, facilitating evaluation of robot policies with human input. (3) Collaborative tasks: studying two collaborative tasks, Social Navigation and Social Rearrangement. Social Navigation investigates a robot's ability to locate and follow humanoid avatars in unseen environments, whereas Social Rearrangement addresses collaboration between a humanoid and robot while rearranging a scene. These contributions allow us to study end-to-end learned and heuristic baselines for human-robot collaboration in-depth, as well as evaluate them with humans in the loop. Our experiments demonstrate that learned robot policies lead to efficient task completion when collaborating with unseen humanoid agents and human partners that might exhibit behaviors that the robot has not seen before. Additionally, we observe emergent behaviors during collaborative task execution, such as the robot yielding space when obstructing a humanoid agent, thereby allowing the effective completion of the task by the humanoid agent. Furthermore, our experiments using the human-in-the-loop tool demonstrate that our automated evaluation with humanoids can provide an indication of the relative ordering of different policies when evaluated with real human collaborators. Habitat 3.0 unlocks interesting new features in simulators for Embodied AI, and we hope it paves the way for a new frontier of embodied human-AI interaction capabilities. For more details and visualizations, visit: https://aihabitat.org/habitat3.

ICML Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Adaptive Coordination in Social Embodied Rearrangement

  • Andrew Szot
  • Unnat Jain
  • Dhruv Batra
  • Zsolt Kira
  • Ruta Desai
  • Akshara Rai

We present the task of "Social Rearrangement", consisting of cooperative everyday tasks like setting up the dinner table, tidying a house or unpacking groceries in a simulated multi-agent environment. In Social Rearrangement, two robots coordinate to complete a long-horizon task, using onboard sensing and egocentric observations, and no privileged information about the environment. We study zero-shot coordination (ZSC) in this task, where an agent collaborates with a new partner, emulating a scenario where a robot collaborates with a new human partner. Prior ZSC approaches struggle to generalize in our complex and visually rich setting, and on further analysis, we find that they fail to generate diverse coordination behaviors at training time. To counter this, we propose Behavior Diversity Play (BDP), a novel ZSC approach that encourages diversity through a discriminability objective. Our results demonstrate that BDP learns adaptive agents that can tackle visual coordination, and zero-shot generalize to new partners in unseen environments, achieving 35% higher success and 32% higher efficiency compared to baselines.

NeurIPS Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Learning State-Aware Visual Representations from Audible Interactions

  • Himangi Mittal
  • Pedro Morgado
  • Unnat Jain
  • Abhinav Gupta

We propose a self-supervised algorithm to learn representations from egocentric video data. Recently, significant efforts have been made to capture humans interacting with their own environments as they go about their daily activities. In result, several large egocentric datasets of interaction-rich multi-modal data have emerged. However, learning representations from videos can be challenging. First, given the uncurated nature of long-form continuous videos, learning effective representations require focusing on moments in time when interactions take place. Second, visual representations of daily activities should be sensitive to changes in the state of the environment. However, current successful multi-modal learning frameworks encourage representation invariance over time. To address these challenges, we leverage audio signals to identify moments of likely interactions which are conducive to better learning. We also propose a novel self-supervised objective that learns from audible state changes caused by interactions. We validate these contributions extensively on two large-scale egocentric datasets, EPIC-Kitchens-100 and the recently released Ego4D, and show improvements on several downstream tasks, including action recognition, long-term action anticipation, and object state change classification.

NeurIPS Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Bridging the Imitation Gap by Adaptive Insubordination

  • Luca Weihs
  • Unnat Jain
  • Iou-Jen Liu
  • Jordi Salvador
  • Svetlana Lazebnik
  • Aniruddha Kembhavi
  • Alex Schwing

In practice, imitation learning is preferred over pure reinforcement learning whenever it is possible to design a teaching agent to provide expert supervision. However, we show that when the teaching agent makes decisions with access to privileged information that is unavailable to the student, this information is marginalized during imitation learning, resulting in an "imitation gap" and, potentially, poor results. Prior work bridges this gap via a progression from imitation learning to reinforcement learning. While often successful, gradual progression fails for tasks that require frequent switches between exploration and memorization. To better address these tasks and alleviate the imitation gap we propose 'Adaptive Insubordination' (ADVISOR). ADVISOR dynamically weights imitation and reward-based reinforcement learning losses during training, enabling on-the-fly switching between imitation and exploration. On a suite of challenging tasks set within gridworlds, multi-agent particle environments, and high-fidelity 3D simulators, we show that on-the-fly switching with ADVISOR outperforms pure imitation, pure reinforcement learning, as well as their sequential and parallel combinations.

ICML Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Cooperative Exploration for Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning

  • Iou-Jen Liu
  • Unnat Jain
  • Raymond A. Yeh
  • Alexander G. Schwing

Exploration is critical for good results in deep reinforcement learning and has attracted much attention. However, existing multi-agent deep reinforcement learning algorithms still use mostly noise-based techniques. Very recently, exploration methods that consider cooperation among multiple agents have been developed. However, existing methods suffer from a common challenge: agents struggle to identify states that are worth exploring, and hardly coordinate exploration efforts toward those states. To address this shortcoming, in this paper, we propose cooperative multi-agent exploration (CMAE): agents share a common goal while exploring. The goal is selected from multiple projected state spaces by a normalized entropy-based technique. Then, agents are trained to reach the goal in a coordinated manner. We demonstrate that CMAE consistently outperforms baselines on various tasks, including a sparse-reward version of multiple-particle environment (MPE) and the Starcraft multi-agent challenge (SMAC).

NeurIPS Conference 2020 Conference Paper

MultiON: Benchmarking Semantic Map Memory using Multi-Object Navigation

  • Saim Wani
  • Shivansh Patel
  • Unnat Jain
  • Angel Chang
  • Manolis Savva

Navigation tasks in photorealistic 3D environments are challenging because they require perception and effective planning under partial observability. Recent work shows that map-like memory is useful for long-horizon navigation tasks. However, a focused investigation of the impact of maps on navigation tasks of varying complexity has not yet been performed. We propose the multiON task, which requires navigation to an episode-specific sequence of objects in a realistic environment. MultiON generalizes the ObjectGoal navigation task and explicitly tests the ability of navigation agents to locate previously observed goal objects. We perform a set of multiON experiments to examine how a variety of agent models perform across a spectrum of navigation task complexities. Our experiments show that: i) navigation performance degrades dramatically with escalating task complexity; ii) a simple semantic map agent performs surprisingly well relative to more complex neural image feature map agents; and iii) even oracle map agents achieve relatively low performance, indicating the potential for future work in training embodied navigation agents using maps.

NeurIPS Conference 2019 Conference Paper

TAB-VCR: Tags and Attributes based VCR Baselines

  • Jingxiang Lin
  • Unnat Jain
  • Alexander Schwing

Reasoning is an important ability that we learn from a very early age. Yet, reasoning is extremely hard for algorithms. Despite impressive recent progress that has been reported on tasks that necessitate reasoning, such as visual question answering and visual dialog, models often exploit biases in datasets. To develop models with better reasoning abilities, recently, the new visual commonsense reasoning(VCR) task has been introduced. Not only do models have to answer questions, but also do they have to provide a reason for the given answer. The proposed baseline achieved compelling results, leveraging a meticulously designed model composed of LSTM modules and attention nets. Here we show that a much simpler model obtained by ablating and pruning the existing intricate baseline can perform better with half the number of trainable parameters. By associating visual features with attribute information and better text to image grounding, we obtain further improvements for our simpler & effective baseline, TAB-VCR. We show that this approach results in a 5. 3%, 4. 4% and 6. 5% absolute improvement over the previous state-of-the-art on question answering, answer justification and holistic VCR. Webpage: https: //deanplayerljx. github. io/tabvcr/

v2026.09.13