VASC Seminar

June

12
Mon
Santhosh Kumar Ramakrishnan Ph.D. Candidate University of Texas at Austin
Monday, June 12
3:00 pm to 4:00 pm
GHC 6501
Predictive Scene Representations for Embodied Visual Search
Abstract: 
My research advances embodied AI by developing large-scale datasets and state-of-the-art algorithms. In my talk, I will specifically focus on the embodied visual search problem, which aims to enable intelligent search for robots and augmented reality (AR) assistants. Embodied visual search manifests as the visual navigation problem in robotics, where a mobile agent must efficiently navigate in the environment using visual sensors to search for one or more goals (e.g., where is the refrigerator?), and the episodic memory (EM) problem in egocentric videos, where an AI assistant must efficiently scan a long visual history in search of a specific goal (e.g., where did I keep my keys?). My research builds predictive representations of real-world environments to enable agents to perceive unseen parts of the environment conditioned on their limited history of sensory observations.

First, I will talk about my research on visual navigation, which develops predictive representations that enable a robot to anticipate the presence of free space, obstacles, and objects for exploration and object search in novel environments. Predictive representations promote cost-effective learning and result in efficient and performant navigation policies for simulated and real-world environments. Next, I will discuss my latest work on developing efficient and accurate episodic systems for long-form egocentric videos. My research proposes inexpensive predictive representations that capture the coarse context of rooms, objects, and interactions in the video and develops a clip-sampling policy that anticipates the relevant subsets of the video to answer a given human query. The resulting EM system is highly efficient during inference (4-10x lower cost) and performs comparably to the state-of-the-art. Finally, I will discuss the future directions stemming from my research.

Bio:

Santhosh Kumar Ramakrishnan is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin, advised by Dr. Kristen Grauman. His research in computer vision and machine learning focuses on egocentric video understanding and visual navigation for robotics. He has authored or coauthored research articles at top computer vision and machine learning conferences such as CVPR, ECCV, NeurIPS, ICLR, and ICML. His research has been selected as oral presentations at CVPR, a spotlight at ECCV, and featured on the magazine cover of Science Robotics. He has also won multiple outstanding reviewer awards at top conferences.

Homepage:  Santhosh Kumar Ramakrishnan (srama2512.github.io)

 

Sponsored in part by:   Meta Reality Labs Pittsburgh

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