Research

Computer Vision

DD-PPO: Learning Near-Perfect PointGoal Navigators from 2.5 Billion Frames

April 26, 2020

Abstract

We present Decentralized Distributed Proximal Policy Optimization (DD-PPO), a method for distributed reinforcement learning in resource-intensive simulated environments. DD-PPO is distributed (uses multiple machines), decentralized (lacks a centralized server), and synchronous (no computation is ever ‘stale’), making it conceptually simple and easy to implement. In our experiments on training virtual robots to navigate in Habitat-Sim (Savva et al., 2019), DD-PPO exhibits near-linear scaling – achieving a speedup of 107x on 128 GPUs over a serial implementation. We leverage this scaling to train an agent for 2.5 Billion steps of experience (the equivalent of 80 years of human experience) – over 6 months of GPU-time training in under 3 days of wall-clock time with 64 GPUs.

This massive-scale training not only sets the state of art on Habitat Autonomous Navigation Challenge 2019, but essentially ‘solves’ the task – near-perfect autonomous navigation in an unseen environment without access to a map, directly from an RGB-D camera and a GPS+Compass sensor. Fortuitously, error vs computation exhibits a power-law-like distribution; thus, 90% of peak performance is obtained relatively early (at 100 million steps) and relatively cheaply (under 1 day with 8 GPUs). Finally, we show that the scene understanding and navigation policies learned can be transferred to other navigation tasks – the analog of ‘ImageNet pre-training + task-specific fine-tuning’ for embodied AI. Our model outperforms ImageNet pre-trained CNNs on these transfer tasks and can serve as a universal resource (all models and code are publicly available).

Code: github.com/facebookresearch/habitat-api
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PBpV5i1v4

Download the Paper

AUTHORS

Written by

Erik Wijmans

Abhishek Kadian

Ari Morcos

Stefan Lee

Irfan Essa

Devi Parikh

Manolis Savva

Dhruv Batra

Research Areas

Computer Vision

Related Publications

June 17, 2019

Computer Vision

DMC-Net: Generating Discriminative Motion Cues for Fast Compressed Video Action Recognition | Facebook AI Research

Zheng Shou, Xudong Lin, Yannis Kalantidis, Laura Sevilla-Lara, Marcus Rohrbach, Shih-Fu Chang, Zhicheng Yan

June 17, 2019

June 18, 2019

Computer Vision

Embodied Question Answering in Photorealistic Environments with Point Cloud Perception | Facebook AI Research

Erik Wijmans, Samyak Datta, Oleksandr Maksymets, Abhishek Das, Georgia Gkioxari, Stefan Lee, Irfan Essa, Devi Parikh, Dhruv Batra

June 18, 2019

July 28, 2019

Speech & Audio

Computer Vision

Learning to Optimize Halide with Tree Search and Random Programs | Facebook AI Research

Andrew Adams, Karima Ma, Luke Anderson, Riyadh Baghdadi, Tzu-Mao Li, Michaël Gharbi, Benoit Steiner, Steven Johnson, Kayvon Fatahalian, Frédo Durand, Jonathan Ragan-Kelley

July 28, 2019

June 17, 2019

Computer Vision

Graph-Based Global Reasoning Networks | Facebook AI Research

Yunpeng Chen, Marcus Rohrbach, Zhicheng Yan, Shuicheng Yan, Jiashi Feng, Yannis Kalantidis

June 17, 2019

Help Us Pioneer The Future of AI

We share our open source frameworks, tools, libraries, and models for everything from research exploration to large-scale production deployment.