RESEARCH

COMPUTER VISION

Occupancy Anticipation for Efficient Exploration and Navigation

August 21, 2020

Abstract

State-of-the-art navigation methods leverage a spatial memory to generalize to new environments, but their occupancy maps are limited to capturing the geometric structures directly observed by the agent. We propose occupancy anticipation, where the agent uses its egocentric RGB-D observations to infer the occupancy state beyond the visible regions. In doing so, the agent builds its spatial awareness more rapidly, which facilitates efficient exploration and navigation in 3D environments. By exploiting context in both the egocentric views and top-down maps our model successfully anticipates a broader map of the environment, with performance significantly better than strong baselines. Furthermore, when deployed for the sequential decision-making tasks of exploration and navigation, our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods on the Gibson and Matterport3D datasets. Our approach is the winning entry in the 2020 Habitat PointNav Challenge. Project page: http://vision.cs.utexas.edu/projects/occupancy_anticipation/

Download the Paper

AUTHORS

Written by

Kristen Grauman

Santhosh Kumar Ramakrishnan

Santhosh Ramakrishnan

Ziad Al-Halah

Publisher

ECCV

Research Topics

Computer Vision

Related Publications

May 12, 2026

HUMAN & MACHINE INTELLIGENCE

RESEARCH

NeuralSet: A High-Performing Python Package for Neuro-AI

Corentin Bel, Linnea Evanson, Julien Gadonneix, Andrea Santos Revilla, Mingfang (Lucy) Zhang, Julie Bonnaire, Charlotte Caucheteux, Alexandre Défossez, Théo Desbordes, Pablo Diego-Simón, Shubh Khanna, Juliette Millet, Pierre Orhan, Saarang Panchavati, Antoine Ratouchniak, Alexis Thual, Hubert Jacob Banville, Jarod Levy, Jean Remi King, Josephine Raugel, Jérémy Rapin, Katelyn Begany, Marlene Careil, Simon Dahan, Sophia Houhamdi, Stéphane d'Ascoli, Teon Brooks, Yohann Benchetrit

May 12, 2026

May 06, 2026

HUMAN & MACHINE INTELLIGENCE

RESEARCH

NeuralBench: A Unifying Framework to Benchmark NeuroAI Models

Saarang Panchavati, Antoine Ratouchniak, Mingfang (Lucy) Zhang, Elisa Cascardi, Hubert Banville, Jarod Levy, Jean-Rémi King, Jérémy Rapin, Katelyn Begany, Marlene Careil, Simon Dahan, Stéphane d'Ascoli, Teon Brooks, Yohann Benchetrit

May 06, 2026

April 16, 2026

RESEARCH

AIRA₂: Overcoming Bottlenecks in AI Research Agents

Nicola Cancedda, Pontus Stenetorp, Alexis Audran-Reiss, Alisia Lupidi, Anton Protopopov, Bassel Al Omari, Carole-Jean Wu, Derek Dunfield, Despoina Magka, Edan Toledo, Hela Momand, Ishita Mediratta, Jakob Foerster, Jean-Christophe Gagnon-Audet, Karen Hambardzumyan, Kelvin Niu, Martin Josifoski, Michael Kuchnik, Michael Shvartsman, Nicolas Baldwin, Parth Pathak, Rishi Hazra, Tatiana Shavrina, Thomas Simon Foster, Yoram Bachrach

April 16, 2026

April 14, 2026

COMPUTER VISION

ML APPLICATIONS

TransText: Transparency Aware Image-to-Video Typography Animation

Zijian Zhou, Bohao Tang, Pengfei Liu, Fei Zhang, Frost Xu, Hang Li (BizAI), Semih Gunel, Sen He, Soubhik Sanyal, Tao Xiang, Viktar Atliha, Zhe Wang

April 14, 2026

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.