Scene Graph Contrastive Learning for Embodied Navigation

Training effective embodied AI agents often involves expert imitation, specialized components such as maps, or leveraging additional sensors for depth and localization. Another approach is to use neural architectures alongside self-supervised objectives which encourage better representation learning. However, in practice, there are few guarantees that these self-supervised objectives encode task-relevant information. We propose the Scene Graph Contrastive (SGC) loss, which uses scene graphs as training-only supervisory signals. The SGC loss does away with explicit graph decoding and instead uses contrastive learning to align an agent’s representation with a rich graphical encoding of its environment. The SGC loss is simple to implement and encourages representations that encode objects’ semantics, relationships, and history. By using the SGC loss, we attain gains on three embodied tasks: Object Navigation, Multi-Object Navigation, and Arm Point Navigation. Finally, we present studies and analyses which demonstrate the ability of our trained representation to encode semantic cues about the environment.