Papers › Learning to Learn How to Learn: Self-Adaptive Visual Navigation Using Meta-Learning

Learning to Learn How to Learn: Self-Adaptive Visual Navigation Using Meta-Learning

3 Dec 2018CVPR 2019 6arXiv:1812.00971archive 2025-07-28

Mitchell Wortsman, Kiana Ehsani, Mohammad Rastegari, Ali Farhadi, Roozbeh Mottaghi

Learning is an inherently continuous phenomenon. When humans learn a new task there is no explicit distinction between training and inference. As we learn a task, we keep learning about it while performing the task. What we learn and how we learn it varies during different stages of learning. Learning how to learn and adapt is a key property that enables us to generalize effortlessly to new settings. This is in contrast with conventional settings in machine learning where a trained model is frozen during inference. In this paper we study the problem of learning to learn at both training and test time in the context of visual navigation. A fundamental challenge in navigation is generalization to unseen scenes. In this paper we propose a self-adaptive visual navigation method (SAVN) which learns to adapt to new environments without any explicit supervision. Our solution is a meta-reinforcement learning approach where an agent learns a self-supervised interaction loss that encourages effective navigation. Our experiments, performed in the AI2-THOR framework, show major improvements in both success rate and SPL for visual navigation in novel scenes. Our code and data are available at: https://github.com/allenai/savn .

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normalize_adj allenai/savn/models/gcn.py official repository ran · our draft was wrong Apache-2.0 (permissive) · f3a3398f34669aea · report
gpuify allenai/savn/utils/net_util.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 4f398ddeb57bc2ba · report
resnet_input_transform allenai/savn/utils/net_util.py official repository unverified Apache-2.0 (permissive) · 63c26f3420b7a699 · report
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Tasks

Meta Reinforcement LearningMeta-LearningReinforcement LearningVisual Navigation

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Visual Navigation AI2-THOR SAVN SPL (All) 16.15 #2 of 2 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Navigation AI2-THOR SAVN SPL (L≥5) 13.91 #2 of 2 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Navigation AI2-THOR SAVN Success Rate (All) 40.86 #2 of 2 Archive leaderboard report
Visual Navigation AI2-THOR SAVN Success Rate (L≥5) 28.7 #2 of 2 Archive leaderboard report

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