Learning Continuous Environment Fields via Implicit Functions

Xueting Li, Shalini De Mello, Xiaolong Wang, Ming-Hsuan Yang, Jan Kautz, Sifei Liu

Keywords: Continuous Scene Representation, Implicit Neural Networks

Abstract: We propose a novel scene representation that encodes reaching distance -- the distance between any position in the scene to a goal along a feasible trajectory. We demonstrate that this environment field representation can directly guide the dynamic behaviors of agents in 2D mazes or 3D indoor scenes. Our environment field is a continuous representation and learned via a neural implicit function using discretely sampled training data. We showcase its application for agent navigation in 2D mazes, and human trajectory prediction in 3D indoor environments. To produce physically plausible and natural trajectories for humans, we additionally learn a generative model that predicts regions where humans commonly appear, and enforce the environment field to be defined within such regions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed method can generate both feasible and plausible trajectories efficiently and accurately.

One-sentence Summary: We propose a novel scene representation that can dynamically change behaviors of agents inside the scene.

Community Implementations: [ 1 code implementation](https://www.catalyzex.com/paper/arxiv:2111.13997/code)