Dan Rosenbaum

Neural scene representation and rendering

A scene-internalizing computer program To train a computer to “recognize” elements of a scene supplied by its visual sensors, computer scientists typically use millions of images painstakingly labeled by humans. Eslami et al. developed an artificial vision system, dubbed the Generative Query Network (GQN), that has no need for such labeled data. Instead, the GQN first uses images taken from different viewpoints and creates an abstract description of the scene, learning its essentials. Next, on the basis of this representation, the network predicts what the scene would look like from a new, arbitrary viewpoint. Science, this issue p. 1204 A computer vision system predicts how a 3D scene looks from any viewpoint after just a few 2D views from other viewpoints. Scene representation—the process of converting visual sensory data into concise descriptions—is a requirement for intelligent behavior. Recent work has shown that neural networks excel at this task when provided with large, labeled datasets. However, removing the reliance on human labeling remains an important open problem. To this end, we introduce the Generative Query Network (GQN), a framework within which machines learn to represent scenes using only their own sensors. The GQN takes as input images of a scene taken from different viewpoints, constructs an internal representation, and uses this representation to predict the appearance of that scene from previously unobserved viewpoints. The GQN demonstrates representation learning without human labels or domain knowledge, paving the way toward machines that autonomously learn to understand the world around them.