Pierre Sermanet

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23ranked-venue papers

7as first author

7since 2021 · last 2024

—ORCID · none

Domains — the database's venue-derived domains; a paper can count in several

Artificial intelligence and machine learning · 23 · 7 first-author · 7 since 2021Systems, architecture and hardware · 11 · 3 first-author · 4 since 2021Graphics, computer vision, multimedia, augmented reality and games · 6 · 2 first-author · 1 since 2021

Year	Publication	Venue	Position
2024	Video Language Planning abstract We are interested in enabling visual planning for complex long-horizon tasks in the space of generated videos and language, leveraging recent advances in large generative models pretrained on Internet-scale data. To this end, we present video language planning (VLP), an algorithm that consists of a tree search procedure, where we train (i) vision-language models to serve as both policies and value functions, and (ii) text-to-video models as dynamics models. VLP takes as input a long-horizon task instruction and current image observation, and outputs a long video plan that provides detailed multimodal (video and language) specifications that describe how to complete the final task. VLP scales with increasing computation budget where more computation time results in improved video plans, and is able to synthesize long-horizon video plans across different robotics domains -- from multi-object rearrangement, to multi-camera bi-arm dexterous manipulation. Generated video plans can be translated into real robot actions via goal-conditioned policies, conditioned on each intermediate frame of the generated video. Experiments show that VLP substantially improves long-horizon task success rates compared to prior methods on both simulated and real robots (across 3 hardware platforms). Yilun Du, Sherry Yang 0001, Peter R. Florence, Fei Xia 0002, Ayzaan Wahid, Brian Ichter, Pierre Sermanet, Tianhe Yu, Pieter Abbeel, Josh Tenenbaum, Leslie Pack Kaelbling, Andy Zeng 0001, Jonathan Tompson	ICLR	7
2024	Open X-Embodiment: Robotic Learning Datasets and RT-X Models : Open X-Embodiment Collaboration abstract Large, high-capacity models trained on diverse datasets have shown remarkable successes on efficiently tackling downstream applications. In domains from NLP to Computer Vision, this has led to a consolidation of pretrained models, with general pretrained backbones serving as a starting point for many applications. Can such a consolidation happen in robotics? Conventionally, robotic learning methods train a separate model for every application, every robot, and even every environment. Can we instead train "generalist" X-robot policy that can be adapted efficiently to new robots, tasks, and environments? In this paper, we provide datasets in standardized data formats and models to make it possible to explore this possibility in the context of robotic manipulation, alongside experimental results that provide an example of effective X-robot policies. We assemble a dataset from 22 different robots collected through a collaboration between 21 institutions, demonstrating 527 skills (160266 tasks). We show that a high-capacity model trained on this data, which we call RT-X, exhibits positive transfer and improves the capabilities of multiple robots by leveraging experience from other platforms. The project website is robotics-transformer-x.github.io. Abigail O'Neill, Abhiram Maddukuri, Abhishek Gupta 0004, Abhishek Padalkar, Abraham Lee, Acorn Pooley, Agrim Gupta, Ajay Mandlekar, Ajinkya Jain, Albert Tung, Alex Bewley, Alex Irpan, Alexander Khazatsky, Anant Rai, Anchit Gupta, Andrew E. Wang, Anikait Singh, Animesh Garg, Aniruddha Kembhavi, Annie Xie, Anthony Brohan, Antonin Raffin, Archit Sharma, Arefeh Yavary, Arhan Jain, Ashwin Balakrishna, Ayzaan Wahid, Ben Burgess-Limerick, Bernhard Schölkopf, Blake Wulfe, Brian Ichter, Cewu Lu, Charles Xu 0003, Charlotte Le, Chelsea Finn, Chen Wang 0053, Chenfeng Xu, Cheng Chi 0001, Chenguang Huang, Christine Chan, Christopher Agia, Chuer Pan, Chuyuan Fu, Coline Devin, Danfei Xu, Daniel Morton, Danny Drieß, Daphne Chen, Deepak Pathak, Dhruv Shah, Dieter Büchler, Dinesh Jayaraman, Dmitry Kalashnikov, Dorsa Sadigh, Edward Johns, Ethan Paul Foster, Fangchen Liu, Federico Ceola, Fei Xia 0002, Feiyu Zhao, Freek Stulp, Gaoyue Zhou, Gaurav S. Sukhatme, Gautam Salhotra, Gilbert Feng, Giulio Schiavi, Glen Berseth, Gregory Kahn, Guanzhi Wang, Hao Su 0001, Haoshu Fang, Henghui Bao, Heni Ben Amor, Henrik I. Christensen, Hiroki Furuta, Homer Walke, Hongjie Fang, Huy Ha, Igor Mordatch, Ilija Radosavovic, Isabel Leal, Jacky Liang, Jad Abou-Chakra, Jaehyung Kim 0001, Jaimyn Drake, Jan Peters 0001, Jan Schneider 0007, Jasmine Hsu, Jeannette Bohg, Jeffrey T. Bingham, Jensen Gao, Jiaheng Hu, Jiajun Wu 0001, Jiankai Sun, Jianlan Luo, Jiayuan Gu, Jie Tan 0001, Jihoon Oh, Jimmy Wu, Jingpei Lu, Jitendra Malik, João Silvério, Joey Hejna, Jonathan Booher, Jonathan Tompson, Jonathan Yang, Jordi Salvador, Joseph J. Lim, Junhyek Han, Kanishka Rao, Karl Pertsch, Karol Hausman, Keegan Go, Keerthana Gopalakrishnan, Kenneth Y. Goldberg, Kendra Byrne, Kenneth Oslund, Kento Kawaharazuka, Kevin Black, Kevin Zhang 0002, Kiana Ehsani, Kiran Lekkala, Kirsty Ellis, Krishan Rana, Krishnan Srinivasan, Kuan Fang, Kunal Pratap Singh, Kuo-Hao Zeng, Kyle Hatch, Kyle Hsu, Laurent Itti, Yunliang Chen 0001, Lerrel Pinto, Li Fei-Fei 0001, Liam Tan, Linxi Fan, Lionel Ott, Lisa Lee, Luca Weihs, Magnum Chen, Marion Lepert, Marius Memmel, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Masha Itkina, Mateo Guaman Castro, Max Spero, Maximilian Du, Michael Ahn, Michael C. Yip, Mingtong Zhang 0003, Mingyu Ding, Minho Heo, Mohan Kumar Srirama, Mohit Sharma 0001, Moo Jin Kim, Naoaki Kanazawa, Nicklas Hansen 0001, Nicolas Heess, Nikhil J. Joshi, Niko Sünderhauf, Norman Di Palo, Nur Muhammad Shafiullah, Oier Mees, Oliver Kroemer, Osbert Bastani, Pannag R. Sanketi, Patrick Tree Miller, Patrick Yin, Paul Wohlhart, Peng Xu 0010, Peter David Fagan, Peter Mitrano, Pierre Sermanet, Pieter Abbeel, Priya Sundaresan, Qiuyu Chen, Rafael Rafailov, Ria Doshi, Roberto Martin Martin, Rohan Baijal, Rosario Scalise, Rose Hendrix, Roy Lin, Runjia Qian, Russell Mendonca, Rutav Shah, Ryan Hoque, Ryan Julian, Samuel Bustamante-Gomez, Sean Kirmani, Sergey Levine, Sherry Moore, Shikhar Bahl, Shivin Dass, Shubham D. Sonawani, Shuran Song, Sichun Xu, Siddhant Haldar, Siddharth Karamcheti, Simeon Adebola, Simon Guist, Soroush Nasiriany, Stefan Schaal, Stefan Welker, Stephen Tian, Subramanian Ramamoorthy, Sudeep Dasari, Suneel Belkhale, Sungjae Park, Suraj Nair 0003, Suvir Mirchandani, Takayuki Osa, Tanmay Gupta, Tatsuya Harada, Tatsuya Matsushima, Ted Xiao, Thomas Kollar, Tianhe Yu, Tianli Ding, Todor Davchev, Tony Z. Zhao, Travis Armstrong, Trevor Darrell, Trinity Chung, Vidhi Jain, Vincent Vanhoucke, Wolfram Burgard, Xiaolong Wang 0004, Xinghao Zhu, Xinyang Geng, Liangwei Xu, Yecheng Jason Ma 0001, Yejin Kim 0003, Yevgen Chebotar, Yilin Wu 0003, Yonatan Bisk, Yoonyoung Cho, Youngwoon Lee, Yuchen Cui, Yueh-Hua Wu, Yujin Tang, Yuke Zhu, Yunchu Zhang, Yunfan Jiang 0001, Yunshuang Li, Yunzhu Li, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yutaka Matsuo, Zehan Ma, Zichen Jeff Cui, Zichen Zhang 0016, Zipeng Lin	ICRA	184
2024	RoboVQA: Multimodal Long-Horizon Reasoning for Robotics abstract We present a scalable, bottom-up and intrinsically diverse data collection scheme that can be used for high-level reasoning with long and medium horizons and that has 2.2x higher throughput compared to traditional narrow top-down step-by-step collection. We collect realistic data by performing any user requests within the entirety of 3 office buildings and using multiple embodiments (robot, human, human with grasping tool). With this data, we show that models trained on all embodiments perform better than ones trained on the robot data only, even when evaluated solely on robot episodes. We explore the economics of collection costs and find that for a fixed budget it is beneficial to take advantage of the cheaper human collection along with robot collection. We release a large and highly diverse (29,520 unique instructions) dataset dubbed RoboVQA containing 829,502 (video, text) pairs for robotics-focused visual question answering. We also demonstrate how evaluating real robot experiments with an intervention mechanism enables performing tasks to completion, making it deployable with human oversight even if imperfect while also providing a single performance metric. We demonstrate a single video-conditioned model named RoboVQA-VideoCoCa trained on our dataset that is capable of performing a variety of grounded high-level reasoning tasks in broad realistic settings with a cognitive intervention rate 46% lower than the zeroshot state of the art visual language model (VLM) baseline and is able to guide real robots through long-horizon tasks. The performance gap with zero-shot state-of-the-art models indicates that a lot of grounded data remains to be collected for real-world deployment, emphasizing the critical need for scalable data collection approaches. Finally, we show that video VLMs significantly outperform single-image VLMs with an average error rate reduction of 19% across all VQA tasks. Thanks to video conditioning and dataset diversity, the model can be used as general video value functions (e.g. success and affordance) in situations where actions needs to be recognized rather than states, expanding capabilities and environment understanding for robots. Data and videos are available at robovqa.github.io Pierre Sermanet, Tianli Ding, Jeffrey Zhao, Fei Xia 0002, Debidatta Dwibedi, Keerthana Gopalakrishnan, Christine Chan, Gabriel Dulac-Arnold, Sharath Maddineni, Nikhil J. Joshi, Peter R. Florence, Wei Han 0002, Robert Baruch, Yao Lu 0006, Suvir Mirchandani, Peng Xu 0010, Pannag R. Sanketi, Karol Hausman, Izhak Shafran, Brian Ichter, Yuan Cao 0007	ICRA	1
2023	PaLM-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Model abstract Large language models excel at a wide range of complex tasks. However, enabling general inference in the real world, e.g. for robotics problems, raises the challenge of grounding. We propose embodied language models to directly incorporate real-world continuous sensor modalities into language models and thereby establish the link between words and percepts. Input to our embodied language model are multimodal sentences that interleave visual, continuous state estimation, and textual input encodings. We train these encodings end-to-end, in conjunction with a pre-trained large language model, for multiple embodied tasks including sequential robotic manipulation planning, visual question answering, and captioning. Our evaluations show that PaLM-E, a single large embodied multimodal model, can address a variety of embodied reasoning tasks, from a variety of observation modalities, on multiple embodiments, and further, exhibits positive transfer: the model benefits from diverse joint training across internet-scale language, vision, and visual-language domains. Our largest model with 562B parameters, in addition to being trained on robotics tasks, is a visual-language generalist with state-of-the-art performance on OK-VQA, and retains generalist language capabilities with increasing scale. Danny Drieß, Fei Xia 0002, Mehdi S. M. Sajjadi, Corey Lynch, Aakanksha Chowdhery, Brian Ichter, Ayzaan Wahid, Jonathan Tompson, Tianhe Yu, Wenlong Huang, Yevgen Chebotar, Pierre Sermanet, Daniel Duckworth, Sergey Levine, Vincent Vanhoucke, Karol Hausman, Marc Toussaint, Klaus Greff, Andy Zeng 0001, Igor Mordatch, Peter R. Florence	ICML	13
2023	Visuomotor Control in Multi-Object Scenes Using Object-Aware Representations abstract Perceptual understanding of the scene and the relationship between its different components is important for successful completion of robotic tasks. Representation learning has been shown to be a powerful technique for this, but most of the current methodologies learn task specific representations that do not necessarily transfer well to other tasks. Furthermore, representations learned by supervised methods require large, labeled datasets for each task that are expensive to collect in the real-world. Using self-supervised learning to obtain representations from unlabeled data can mitigate this problem. However, current self-supervised representation learning methods are mostly object agnostic, and we demonstrate that the resulting representations are insufficient for general purpose robotics tasks as they fail to capture the complexity of scenes with many components. In this paper, we show the effectiveness of using object-aware representation learning techniques for robotic tasks. Our self-supervised representations are learned by observing the agent freely interacting with different parts of the environment and are queried in two different settings: (i) policy learning and (ii) object location prediction. We show that our model learns control policies in a sample-efficient manner and outperforms state-of-the-art object agnostic techniques as well as methods trained on raw RGB images. Our results show a 20% increase in performance in low data regimes (1000 trajectories) in policy training using implicit behavioral cloning (IBC). Furthermore, our method outperforms the baselines for the task of object localization in multi-object scenes. Further qualitative results are available at https://sites.google.com/view/slots4robots. Negin Heravi, Ayzaan Wahid, Corey Lynch, Peter R. Florence, Travis Armstrong, Jonathan Tompson, Pierre Sermanet, Jeannette Bohg, Debidatta Dwibedi	ICRA	7
2022	Learning High Speed Precision Table Tennis on a Physical Robot abstract Learning goal conditioned control in the real world is a challenging open problem in robotics. Reinforcement learning systems have the potential to learn autonomously via trial-and-error, but in practice the costs of manual reward design, ensuring safe exploration, and hyperparameter tuning are often enough to preclude real world deployment. Imitation learning approaches, on the other hand, offer a simple way to learn control in the real world, but typically require costly cu-rated demonstration data and lack a mechanism for continuous improvement. Recently, iterative imitation methods have been shown to be effective at relaxing both these constraints, learning goal directed control from undirected demonstration data, and improving continuously via self-supervised goal reaching. These approaches, however, have not yet been shown to scale beyond simple simulated environments. In this work, we present the first evidence that simple iterative imitation learning can scale to goal-directed behavior on a real robot in a dynamic setting: high speed, precision table tennis (e.g. “land the ball on this particular target”). We find that this approach offers a straightforward way to do continuous on-robot learning, without complexities such as reward design, value function learning, or sim-to-real transfer. We also find that this approach is scalable-sample efficient enough to train on a physical robot in just a few hours. In real world evaluations, we find that that the resulting policy can perform on par or better than amateur humans (with players sampled randomly from a robotics lab) at the task of returning the ball to specific targets on the table. Finally, we analyze the effect of an initial undirected bootstrap dataset size on performance, finding that a modest amount of unstructured demonstration data provided up-front drastically speeds up the convergence of a general purpose goal-reaching policy. See supplementary video for examples of the policy on a physical robot. Tianli Ding, Laura Graesser, Saminda Abeyruwan, David B. D'Ambrosio, Anish Shankar, Pierre Sermanet, Pannag R. Sanketi, Corey Lynch	IROS	6
2021	With a Little Help from My Friends: Nearest-Neighbor Contrastive Learning of Visual Representations abstract Self-supervised learning algorithms based on instance discrimination train encoders to be invariant to pre-defined transformations of the same instance. While most methods treat different views of the same image as positives for a contrastive loss, we are interested in using positives from other instances in the dataset. Our method, Nearest-Neighbor Contrastive Learning of visual Representations (NNCLR), samples the nearest neighbors from the dataset in the latent space, and treats them as positives. This provides more semantic variations than pre-defined transformations.We find that using the nearest-neighbor as positive in contrastive losses improves performance significantly on ImageNet classification using ResNet-50 under the linear evaluation protocol, from 71.7% to 75.6%, outperforming previous state-of-the-art methods. On semi-supervised learning benchmarks we improve performance significantly when only 1% ImageNet labels are available, from 53.8% to 56.5%. On transfer learning benchmarks our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods (including supervised learning with ImageNet) on 8 out of 12 downstream datasets. Furthermore, we demonstrate empirically that our method is less reliant on complex data augmentations. We see a relative reduction of only 2.1% ImageNet Top-1 accuracy when we train using only random crops. Debidatta Dwibedi, Yusuf Aytar, Jonathan Tompson, Pierre Sermanet, Andrew Zisserman	ICCV	4
2020	Counting Out Time: Class Agnostic Video Repetition Counting in the Wild abstract We present an approach for estimating the period with which an action is repeated in a video. The crux of the approach lies in constraining the period prediction module to use temporal self-similarity as an intermediate representation bottleneck that allows generalization to unseen repetitions in videos in the wild. We train this model, called RepNet, with a synthetic dataset that is generated from a large unlabeled video collection by sampling short clips of varying lengths and repeating them with different periods and counts. This combination of synthetic data and a powerful yet constrained model, allows us to predict periods in a class-agnostic fashion. Our model substantially exceeds the state of the art performance on existing periodicity (PERTUBE) and repetition counting (QUVA) benchmarks. We also collect a new challenging dataset called Countix (~90 times larger than existing datasets) which captures the challenges of repetition counting in real-world videos. Project webpage: https://sites.google.com/view/repnet . Debidatta Dwibedi, Yusuf Aytar, Jonathan Tompson, Pierre Sermanet, Andrew Zisserman	CVPR	4
2020	Online Learning of Object Representations by Appearance Space Feature Alignment abstract We propose a self-supervised approach for learning representations of objects from monocular videos and demonstrate it is particularly useful for robotics. The main contributions of this paper are: 1) a self-supervised model called Object-Contrastive Network (OCN) that can discover and disentangle object attributes from video without using any labels; 2) we leverage self-supervision for online adaptation: the longer our online model looks at objects in a video, the lower the object identification error, while the offline baseline remains with a large fixed error; 3) we show the usefulness of our approach for a robotic pointing task; a robot can point to objects similar to the one presented in front of it. Videos illustrating online object adaptation and robotic pointing are provided as supplementary material. Sören Pirk, Mohi Khansari, Corey Lynch, Pierre Sermanet	ICRA	5
2020	Motion2Vec: Semi-Supervised Representation Learning from Surgical Videos abstract Learning meaningful visual representations in an embedding space can facilitate generalization in downstream tasks such as action segmentation and imitation. In this paper, we learn a motion-centric representation of surgical video demonstrations by grouping them into action segments/subgoals/options in a semi-supervised manner. We present Motion2Vec, an algorithm that learns a deep embedding feature space from video observations by minimizing a metric learning loss in a Siamese network: images from the same action segment are pulled together while pushed away from randomly sampled images of other segments, while respecting the temporal ordering of the images. The embeddings are iteratively segmented with a recurrent neural network for a given parametrization of the embedding space after pre-training the Siamese network. We only use a small set of labeled video segments to semantically align the embedding space and assign pseudo-labels to the remaining unlabeled data by inference on the learned model parameters. We demonstrate the use of this representation to imitate surgical suturing kinematic motions from publicly available videos of the JIGSAWS dataset. Results give 85.5% segmentation accuracy on average suggesting performance improvement over several state-of-the-art baselines, while kinematic pose imitation gives 0.94 centimeter error in position per observation on the test set. Videos, code and data are available at: https://sites.google.com/view/motion2vec. Ajay Kumar Tanwani, Pierre Sermanet, Andy Yan, Raghav Anand, Mariano Phielipp, Kenneth Y. Goldberg	ICRA	2
2019	Temporal Cycle-Consistency Learning abstract We introduce a self-supervised representation learning method based on the task of temporal alignment between videos. The method trains a network using temporal cycle-consistency (TCC), a differentiable cycle-consistency loss that can be used to find correspondences across time in multiple videos. The resulting per-frame embeddings can be used to align videos by simply matching frames using nearest-neighbors in the learned embedding space. To evaluate the power of the embeddings, we densely label the Pouring and Penn Action video datasets for action phases. We show that (i) the learned embeddings enable few-shot classification of these action phases, significantly reducing the supervised training requirements; and (ii) TCC is complementary to other methods of self-supervised learning in videos, such as Shuffle and Learn and Time-Contrastive Networks. The embeddings are also used for a number of applications based on alignment (dense temporal correspondence) between video pairs, including transfer of metadata of synchronized modalities between videos (sounds, temporal semantic labels), synchronized playback of multiple videos, and anomaly detection. Project webpage: https://sites.google.com/view/temporal-cycle-consistency . Debidatta Dwibedi, Yusuf Aytar, Jonathan Tompson, Pierre Sermanet, Andrew Zisserman	CVPR	4
2019	Wasserstein Dependency Measure for Representation Learning abstract Mutual information maximization has emerged as a powerful learning objective for unsupervised representation learning obtaining state-of-the-art performance in applications such as object recognition, speech recognition, and reinforcement learning. However, such approaches are fundamentally limited since a tight lower bound on mutual information requires sample size exponential in the mutual information. This limits the applicability of these approaches for prediction tasks with high mutual information, such as in video understanding or reinforcement learning. In these settings, such techniques are prone to overfit, both in theory and in practice, and capture only a few of the relevant factors of variation. This leads to incomplete representations that are not optimal for downstream tasks. In this work, we empirically demonstrate that mutual information-based representation learning approaches do fail to learn complete representations on a number of designed and real-world tasks. To mitigate these problems we introduce the Wasserstein dependency measure, which learns more complete representations by using the Wasserstein distance instead of the KL divergence in the mutual information estimator. We show that a practical approximation to this theoretically motivated solution, constructed using Lipschitz constraint techniques from the GAN literature, achieves substantially improved results on tasks where incomplete representations are a major challenge. Sherjil Ozair, Corey Lynch, Yoshua Bengio, Aäron van den Oord, Sergey Levine, Pierre Sermanet	NeurIPS	6
2018	Time-Contrastive Networks: Self-Supervised Learning from Video abstract We propose a self-supervised approach for learning representations and robotic behaviors entirely from unlabeled videos recorded from multiple viewpoints, and study how this representation can be used in two robotic imitation settings: imitating object interactions from videos of humans, and imitating human poses. Imitation of human behavior requires a viewpoint-invariant representation that captures the relationships between end-effectors (hands or robot grippers) and the environment, object attributes, and body pose. We train our representations using a triplet loss, where multiple simultaneous viewpoints of the same observation are attracted in the embedding space, while being repelled from temporal neighbors which are often visually similar but functionally different. This signal causes our model to discover attributes that do not change across viewpoint, but do change across time, while ignoring nuisance variables such as occlusions, motion blur, lighting and background. We demonstrate that this representation can be used by a robot to directly mimic human poses without an explicit correspondence, and that it can be used as a reward function within a reinforcement learning algorithm. While representations are learned from an unlabeled collection of task-related videos, robot behaviors such as pouring are learned by watching a single 3rd-person demonstration by a human. Reward functions obtained by following the human demonstrations under the learned representation enable efficient reinforcement learning that is practical for real-world robotic systems. Video results, open-source code and dataset are available at sermanet.github.io/imitate. Pierre Sermanet, Corey Lynch, Yevgen Chebotar, Jasmine Hsu, Eric Jang, Stefan Schaal, Sergey Levine	ICRA	1
2018	Learning Actionable Representations from Visual Observations abstract In this work we explore a new approach for robots to teach themselves about the world simply by observing it. In particular we investigate the effectiveness of learning task-agnostic representations for continuous control tasks. We extend Time-Contrastive Networks (TCN) that learn from visual observations by embedding multiple frames jointly in the embedding space as opposed to a single frame. We show that by doing so, we are now able to encode both position and velocity attributes significantly more accurately. We test the usefulness of this self-supervised approach in a reinforcement learning setting. We show that the representations learned by agents observing themselves take random actions, or other agents perform tasks successfully, can enable the learning of continuous control policies using algorithms like Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) using only the learned embeddings as input. We also demonstrate significant improvements on the real-world Pouring dataset with a relative error reduction of 39.4% for motion attributes and 11.1% for static attributes compared to the single-frame baseline. Video results are available at https://sites.google.com/view/actionablerepresentations. Debidatta Dwibedi, Jonathan Tompson, Corey Lynch, Pierre Sermanet	IROS	4
2015	Going deeper with convolutions abstract We propose a deep convolutional neural network architecture codenamed Inception that achieves the new state of the art for classification and detection in the ImageNet Large-Scale Visual Recognition Challenge 2014 (ILSVRC14). The main hallmark of this architecture is the improved utilization of the computing resources inside the network. By a carefully crafted design, we increased the depth and width of the network while keeping the computational budget constant. To optimize quality, the architectural decisions were based on the Hebbian principle and the intuition of multi-scale processing. One particular incarnation used in our submission for ILSVRC14 is called GoogLeNet, a 22 layers deep network, the quality of which is assessed in the context of classification and detection. Christian Szegedy, Wei Liu 0015, Yangqing Jia, Pierre Sermanet, Scott E. Reed, Dragomir Anguelov, Dumitru Erhan, Vincent Vanhoucke, Andrew Rabinovich	CVPR	4
2013	Pedestrian Detection with Unsupervised Multi-stage Feature Learning abstract Pedestrian detection is a problem of considerable practical interest. Adding to the list of successful applications of deep learning methods to vision, we report state-of-the-art and competitive results on all major pedestrian datasets with a convolutional network model. The model uses a few new twists, such as multi-stage features, connections that skip layers to integrate global shape information with local distinctive motif information, and an unsupervised method based on convolutional sparse coding to pre-train the filters at each stage. Pierre Sermanet, Koray Kavukcuoglu, Soumith Chintala, Yann LeCun	CVPR	1
2012	Convolutional neural networks applied to house numbers digit classification Pierre Sermanet, Soumith Chintala, Yann LeCun	ICPR	1
2011	Traffic sign recognition with multi-scale Convolutional Networks abstract We apply Convolutional Networks (ConvNets) to the task of traffic sign classification as part of the GTSRB competition. ConvNets are biologically-inspired multi-stage architectures that automatically learn hierarchies of invariant features. While many popular vision approaches use hand-crafted features such as HOG or SIFT, ConvNets learn features at every level from data that are tuned to the task at hand. The traditional ConvNet architecture was modified by feeding 1ststage features in addition to 2ndstage features to the classifier. The system yielded the 2nd-best accuracy of 98.97% during phase I of the competition (the best entry obtained 98.98%), above the human performance of 98.81%, using 32×32 color input images. Experiments conducted after phase 1 produced a new record of 99.17% by increasing the network capacity, and by using greyscale images instead of color. Interestingly, random features still yielded competitive results (97.33%). Pierre Sermanet, Yann LeCun	IJCNN	1
2010	Learning Convolutional Feature Hierarchies for Visual Recognition abstract We propose an unsupervised method for learning multi-stage hierarchies of sparse convolutional features. While sparse coding has become an increasingly popular method for learning visual features, it is most often trained at the patch level. Applying the resulting filters convolutionally results in highly redundant codes because overlapping patches are encoded in isolation. By training convolutionally over large image windows, our method reduces the redudancy between feature vectors at neighboring locations and improves the efficiency of the overall representation. In addition to a linear decoder that reconstructs the image from sparse features, our method trains an efficient feed-forward encoder that predicts quasi-sparse features from the input. While patch-based training rarely produces anything but oriented edge detectors, we show that convolutional training produces highly diverse filters, including center-surround filters, corner detectors, cross detectors, and oriented grating detectors. We show that using these filters in multi-stage convolutional network architecture improves performance on a number of visual recognition and detection tasks. Koray Kavukcuoglu, Pierre Sermanet, Y-Lan Boureau, Karol Gregor, Michaël Mathieu, Yann LeCun	NIPS	2
2009	EBLearn: Open-Source Energy-Based Learning in C++ abstract Energy-based learning (EBL) is a general framework to describe supervised and unsupervised training methods for probabilistic and non-probabilistic factor graphs. An energy-based model associates a scalar energy to configurations of inputs, outputs, and latent variables. Learning machines can be constructed by assembling modules and loss functions. Gradient-based learning procedures are easily implemented through semi-automatic differentiation of complex models constructed by assembling predefined modules. We introduce an open-source and cross-platform C++ library called EBLearn to enable the construction of energy-based learning models. EBLearn is composed of two major components, libidx: an efficient and flexible multi-dimensional tensor library, and libeblearn: an object-oriented library of trainable modules and learning algorithms. The latter has facilities for such models as convolutional networks, as well as for image processing. It also provides graphical display functions. Pierre Sermanet, Koray Kavukcuoglu, Yann LeCun	ICTAI	1
2008	Deep belief net learning in a long-range vision system for autonomous off-road driving abstract We present a learning-based approach for long-range vision that is able to accurately classify complex terrain at distances up to the horizon, thus allowing high-level strategic planning. A deep belief network is trained with unsupervised data and a reconstruction criterion to extract features from an input image, and the features are used to train a realtime classifier to predict traversability. The online supervision is given by a stereo module that provides robust labels for nearby areas up to 12 meters distant. The approach was developed and tested on the LAGR mobile robot. Raia Hadsell, Ayse Erkan, Pierre Sermanet, Marco Scoffier, Urs Muller, Yann LeCun	IROS	3
2008	Mapping and planning under uncertainty in mobile robots with long-range perception abstract Recent advances in self-supervised learning have enabled very long-range visual detection of obstacles and pathways (to 100 meters or more). Unfortunately, the category and range of regions at such large distances come with a considerable amount of uncertainty. We present a mapping and planning system that accurately represents range and category uncertainties, and accumulates the evidence from multiple frames in a principled way. The system relies on a hyperbolicpolar map centered on the robot with a 200 m radius. Map cells are histograms that accumulate evidence obtained from a self-supervised object classifier operating on image windows. The performance of the system is demonstrated on the LAGR off-road robot platform. Pierre Sermanet, Raia Hadsell, Marco Scoffier, Urs Muller, Yann LeCun	IROS	1
2007	Adaptive long range vision in unstructured terrain abstract A novel probabilistic online learning framework for autonomous off-road robot navigation is proposed. The system is purely vision-based and is particularly designed for predicting traversability in unknown or rapidly changing environments. It uses self-supervised learning to quickly adapt to novel terrains after processing a small number of frames, and it can recognize terrain elements such as paths, man-made structures, and natural obstacles at ranges up to 30 meters. The system is developed on the LAGR mobile robot platform and the performance is evaluated using multiple metrics, including ground truth. Ayse Erkan, Raia Hadsell, Pierre Sermanet, Jan Ben, Urs Muller, Yann LeCun	IROS	3