Towards Self-supervised Curious Robots
In the last decade, we have made significant advances in the field of computer vision thanks to supervised learning. But this passive supervision of our models has now become our biggest bottleneck. In this talk, I will discuss our efforts towards scaling up and empowering visual and robotic learning via self-supervised learning. First, I will then describe how self-supervised learning can be used for passive visual representation learning. I will describe some of the pitfalls of recent approaches and ways to overcome them. Next, I will discuss how embodiment is crucial for self-supervised learning — our agents live in the physical world and need the ability to interact in the physical world. Towards this goal, I will finally present our efforts in large-scale learning of embodied agents in robotics. Finally, I will discuss how we can move from passive supervision to active exploration — the ability of agents to create their own training data.”
Biography
Abhinav Gupta is an Associate Professor at the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University and Research Manager at Facebook AI Research (FAIR). Abhinav’s research focuses on scaling up learning by building self-supervised, lifelong and interactive learning systems. Specifically, he is interested in how self-supervised systems can effectively use data to learn visual representation, common sense and representation for actions in robots. Abhinav is a recipient of several awards including ONR Young Investigator Award, PAMI Young Researcher Award, Sloan Research Fellowship, Okawa Foundation Grant, Bosch Young Faculty Fellowship, YPO Fellowship, IJCAI Early Career Spotlight, ICRA Best Student Paper award, and the ECCV Best Paper Runner-up Award. His research has also been featured in Newsweek, BBC, Wall Street Journal, Wired and Slashdot.