{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/auxiliary-tasks-speed-up-learning-pointgoal","title":"Auxiliary Tasks Speed Up Learning PointGoal Navigation","arxiv_id":"2007.04561","date":"2020-07-09","proceeding":null,"authors":["Joel Ye","Dhruv Batra","Erik Wijmans","Abhishek Das"],"abstract":"PointGoal Navigation is an embodied task that requires agents to navigate to a specified point in an unseen environment. Wijmans et al. showed that this task is solvable but their method is computationally prohibitive, requiring 2.5 billion frames and 180 GPU-days. In this work, we develop a method to significantly increase sample and time efficiency in learning PointNav using self-supervised auxiliary tasks (e.g. predicting the action taken between two egocentric observations, predicting the distance between two observations from a trajectory,etc.).We find that naively combining multiple auxiliary tasks improves sample efficiency,but only provides marginal gains beyond a point. To overcome this, we use attention to combine representations learnt from individual auxiliary tasks. Our best agent is 5.5x faster to reach the performance of the previous state-of-the-art, DD-PPO, at 40M frames, and improves on DD-PPO's performance at 40M frames by 0.16 SPL. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/joel99/habitat-pointnav-aux.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.04561v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2007.04561v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"auxiliary-tasks-speed-up-learning-pointgoal","repo_url":"https://github.com/joel99/habitat-pointnav-aux","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":null,"task_name":"GPU"},{"task_slug":"navigate","task_name":"Navigate"},{"task_slug":"pointgoal-navigation","task_name":"PointGoal Navigation"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"dd-ppo","method_name":"DD-PPO"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2007.04561","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2007.04561"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/joel99/habitat-pointnav-aux","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran_fixture":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":1,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"3d55b1fe02272004","entry":"distributed_mean_and_var","repo":"joel99/habitat-pointnav-aux","repo_kind":"official","path":"habitat_baselines/rl/ddppo/algo/ddppo.py","file_url":"https://github.com/joel99/habitat-pointnav-aux/blob/HEAD/habitat_baselines/rl/ddppo/algo/ddppo.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_fixture","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"RAISES","metamorphic_tier":"invariant","behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"NOASSERTION","inline_ok":false,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"3d55b1fe02272004"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}