End-to-End (Instance)-Image Goal Navigation through Correspondence as an
  Emergent Phenomenon
Guillaume Bono Leonid Antsfeld Boris Chidlovskii Philippe Weinzaepfel Christian Wolf
Most recent work in goal oriented visual navigation resorts to large-scale
machine learning in simulated environments. The main challenge lies in learning
compact representations generalizable to unseen environments and in learning
high-capacity perception modules capable of reasoning on high-dimensional
input. The latter is particularly difficult when the goal is not given as a
category ("ObjectNav") but as an exemplar image ("ImageNav"), as the perception
module needs to learn a comparison strategy requiring to solve an underlying
visual correspondence problem. This has been shown to be difficult from reward
alone or with standard auxiliary tasks. We address this problem through a
sequence of two pretext tasks, which serve as a prior for what we argue is one
of the main bottleneck in perception, extremely wide-baseline relative pose
estimation and visibility prediction in complex scenes. The first pretext task,
cross-view completion is a proxy for the underlying visual correspondence
problem, while the second task addresses goal detection and finding directly.
We propose a new dual encoder with a large-capacity binocular ViT model and
show that correspondence solutions naturally emerge from the training signals.
Experiments show significant improvements and SOTA performance on the two
benchmarks, ImageNav and the Instance-ImageNav variant, where camera intrinsics
and height differ between observation and goal.