MSR Thesis Defense

Title: Learning Single Image 3D Reconstruction from Single-View Image Collections Abstract We present a framework for learning 3D object shapes and dense cross-object 3D correspondences from just an unaligned category-specific image collection. The 3D shapes are generated implicitly as deformations to a category-specific signed distance field and are learned in an unsupervised manner solely from unaligned [...]

Title: Audio-Visual State-Aware Representation Learning from Interaction-Rich Data Abstract In robotics and augmented reality, the input to the agent is a long stream of video from the first-person or egocentric point of view. Recently, there have been significant efforts to capture humans from their first-person/egocentric view interacting with their own environment as they go about [...]

Title: On Privacy and Personalization in Federated Learning: Analyses and Applications Abstract: Recent advances in machine learning often rely on large and centralized datasets. However, curating such data can be challenging when they hold private information, and policies/regulations may mandate that they remain distributed across data silos (e.g. mobile devices or hospitals). Federated learning (FL) [...]

Title: Seeing in 3D: Towards Generalizable 3D Visual Representations for Robotic Manipulation Abstract: Despite the recent progress in computer vision and deep learning, robot perception remains a tremendous challenge due to the variations of the objects and the scenes in manipulation tasks. Ideally, a robot trying to manipulate a new object should be able to [...]

Title: Efficient Spatially Sparse Inference for Conditional GANs and Diffusion Models Abstract: During image editing, existing deep generative models tend to re-synthesize the entire output from scratch, including the unedited regions. This leads to a significant waste of computation, especially for minor editing operations. In this work, we present Spatially Sparse Inference (SSI), a general-purpose technique [...]

Title: Spectral Unmixing and Mapping of Coral Reef Benthic Cover Abstract: Coral reefs are important to the global ecosystem and the local communities and wildlife that rely on the habitat they create. However, coral reefs are also in critical and rapid decline: reefs have degraded over recent decades and what remains is at increasing risk [...]

Title: Learn2Plan: Learning variable ordering heuristics for scalable task planning Abstract: Traditional approaches to planning attempt to transform a system into a goal state by applying specific actions in a specific order. In these methods, there is an exponential search space due to considering many possible actions at every decision point. Hierarchical Task Networks use incremental [...]

Title: Robot Information Gathering for Dynamic Systems in Wildfire Scenarios Abstract: The monitoring of complex dynamic systems, such as those encountered in disaster response, search and rescue, wildlife conservation, and environmental monitoring, presents the fundamental challenge of how to track efficiently with limited resources and partial observability. This thesis presents algorithms and techniques for robotic [...]

Title: Edge Detection by Centimeter Scale Low-Cost Mobile Robots Abstract: In Search and Rescue (SaR) efforts after natural disasters like earthquakes, the primary focus is to find and rescue people in building rubble. These rescue efforts could put first responders at risk and are slow due to the unstable nature of the environment. Robotic solutions [...]

Title: Soft Delta Robots for Dexterous Manipulation Abstract: Dexterous manipulation capabilities of end-effectors afford us a wide range of strategies for fine-grained manipulation tasks. Recent utilization of readily available materials like soft filaments and silicone elastomers has enabled the development of low-cost mechanically intelligent robotic manipulators. This is important for democratizing robot manipulation and increasing [...]

Title: Exploring Safe Reinforcement Learning for Sequential Decision Making   Abstract: Safe Reinforcement Learning (RL) focuses on the problem of training a policy to maximize the reward while ensuring safety. It is an important step towards applying RL to safety-critical real-world applications. However, safe RL is challenging due to the trade-off between the two objectives [...]

Abstract: Contemporary autonomous vehicle (AV) benchmarks have advanced techniques for training 3D detectors, particularly on large-scale LiDAR data. Surprisingly, although semantic class labels naturally follow a long-tailed distribution, these benchmarks focus on only a few common classes (e.g., pedestrian and car) and neglect many rare classes in-the-tail (e.g., debris and stroller). However, in the real [...]

Title: Phenotyping and Skeletonization for Agricultural Robotics Abstract: Scientific phenotyping of plants is a crucial aspect of experimental plant breeding. By accurately measuring plant characteristics, phenotyping plays a vital role in the development of new plant varieties that are better adapted to specific environments and have improved yield, quality, and resistance to stress and disease. In [...]

Zoom Link: https://cmu.zoom.us/j/95273358670?pwd=Z09Jc3g1aDV1dTdTMEVUWUwxcUZPQT09 Meeting ID: 952 7335 8670 Passcode: 050721 Title: Exploring Reinforcement Learning approaches for Safety Critical EnvironmentsAbstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for addressing challenging decision-making and robotic control tasks. By leveraging the principles of trial-and-error learning, RL algorithms enable agents to learn optimal strategies through interactions with an environment. However, [...]

Title: Distributional Distance Classifiers for Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning Abstract: Autonomous systems are increasingly being deployed in stochastic real-world environments. Often, these agents are trying to find the shortest path to a commanded goal. But what does it mean to find the shortest path in stochastic environments, where every strategy has a non-zero probability of failing? At [...]

Title: Emergent Communication and Decision-Making in Multi-Agent Teams Abstract: Explicit communication among humans is key to coordinating and learning. In multi-agent reinforcement learning for partially-observable environments, agents may convey information to others via learned communication, allowing the team to complete its task. However, agents need to be able to communicate more than simply referential messages [...]

Title: Tactile Sensing applied to deformable object manipulation Abstract: The application of robotic manipulation of deformable materials, such as cloth, spans various sectors including fabric manufacturing and domestic laundry management. Historically, most methodologies have employed vision-based sensors as the proprioceptive input to robot policies. However, this study aims to explore an alternate route by leveraging [...]

Title: Distilling View-conditioned Diffusion for 3D Reconstruction Abstract: We propose a 3D neural mode-seeking formulation that combines probabilistic generation of unseen regions with faithful reprojection of seen regions in a consistent 3D representation. Feature reprojection methods (NerFormer, PixelNeRF) are 3D consistent, but fail to hallucinate unseen regions. Image generation methods (ViewFormer) generate plausible hallucinations, but generated [...]

Title: Scaling up Camera Calibration and Amodal 3D Object Reconstruction for Smart Cities Abstract: Smart cities integrate thousands of outdoor cameras to enhance urban infrastructure, but their automated analysis potential remains untapped due to various challenges. Firstly, the lack of accurate camera calibration information, such as its intrinsics parameters and external orientation, restricts the measurement [...]

Title: Surface Ripples: Analyzing Transient Vibrations on Object's Surfaces Abstract: The subtle vibrations on an object's surface contain information about its physical properties and interaction with the environment.  Prior works imaged surface vibration to recover the object's material properties via modal analysis, which discards the transient vibrations propagating immediately after the object is disturbed. In this [...]