Interactron: Embodied Adaptive Object Detection

TL;DR

Interactron introduces an adaptive object detection method that continues training during inference through environment interaction, significantly improving detection performance and adaptability in diverse real-world settings.

Contribution

This work presents a novel approach for test-time adaptation of object detection models via environment interaction without explicit supervision.

Findings

7.2 point improvement in AP over DETR

Effective adaptation to environments with different appearances

Performs well in diverse real-world settings

Abstract

Over the years various methods have been proposed for the problem of object detection. Recently, we have witnessed great strides in this domain owing to the emergence of powerful deep neural networks. However, there are typically two main assumptions common among these approaches. First, the model is trained on a fixed training set and is evaluated on a pre-recorded test set. Second, the model is kept frozen after the training phase, so no further updates are performed after the training is finished. These two assumptions limit the applicability of these methods to real-world settings. In this paper, we propose Interactron, a method for adaptive object detection in an interactive setting, where the goal is to perform object detection in images observed by an embodied agent navigating in different environments. Our idea is to continue training during inference and adapt the model at test time without any explicit supervision via interacting with the environment. Our adaptive object detection model provides a 7.2 point improvement in AP (and 12.7 points in AP50) over DETR, a recent, high-performance object detector. Moreover, we show that our object detection model adapts to environments with completely different appearance characteristics, and performs well in them. The code is available at: https://github.com/allenai/interactron .