ALP: Action-Aware Embodied Learning for Perception

Current methods in training and benchmarking vision models exhibit an over-reliance on passive, curated datasets. Although models trained on these datasets have shown strong performance in a wide variety of tasks such as classification, detection, and segmentation, they fundamentally are unable to generalize to an ever-evolving world due to constant out-of-distribution shifts of input data. Therefore, instead of training on fixed datasets, can we approach learning in a more human-centric and adaptive manner? In this paper, we introduce \textbf{A}ction-aware Embodied \textbf{L}earning for \textbf{P}erception (ALP), an embodied learning framework that incorporates action information into representation learning through a combination of optimizing policy gradients through reinforcement learning and inverse dynamics prediction objectives. Our method actively explores complex 3D environments to both learn generalizable task-agnostic representations as well as collect downstream training data. We show that ALP outperforms existing baselines in object detection and semantic segmentation. In addition, we show that by training on actively collected data more relevant to the environment and task, our method generalizes more robustly to downstream tasks compared to models pre-trained on fixed datasets such as ImageNet.