Exploring Temporal Representation in Neural Processes for Multimodal Action Prediction
Organizations: DIBRIS Department, University of Genoa, Via All’Opera Pia 13 16145 Genoa, Italy · CONTACT Unit, Italian Institute of Technology, Via Enrico Melen 83, 16152 Genoa, Italy · International Research Center for Neurointelligence, The University of Tokyo 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-0033, Japan
Abstract
Inspired by the human ability to understand and predict others, we study the applicability of Conditional Neural Processes (CNP) to the task of self-supervised multimodal action prediction in robotics. Following recent results regarding the ontogeny of the Mirror Neuron System (MNS), we focus on the preliminary objective of self-actions prediction. We find a good MNS-inspired model in the existing Deep Modality Blending Network (DMBN), able to reconstruct the visuo-motor sensory signal during a partially observed action sequence by leveraging the probabilistic generation of CNP. After a qualitative and quantitative evaluation, we highlight its difficulties in generalizing to unseen action sequences, and identify the cause in its inner representation of time. Therefore, we propose a revised version, termed DMBN-Positional Time Encoding (DMBN-PTE), that facilitates learning a more robust representation of temporal information, and provide preliminary results of its effectiveness in expanding the applicability of the architecture. DMBN-PTE figures as a first step in the development of robotic systems that autonomously learn to forecast actions on longer time scales refining their predictions with incoming observations.
Figures & tables
| Model | Image Encoder Loss (1e-3) | Joint Encoder Loss (1e-3) |
| Null | 42.95 (29.05, 56.85) | 88.52 (81.76, 95.29) |
| Random | 2.18 (1.80, 2.56) | 4.48 (3.15, 5.81) |
| DMBN | 29.63 (25.47, 33.79) | 86.56 (79.18, 93.94) |
| DMBN-PTE | 0.69 (0.64, 0.74) | 0.19 (0.15, 0.23) |