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VALAN: Vision and Language Agent Navigation

VALAN, short for Vision and Language Agent Navigation is a lightweight and scalable software framework for deep reinforcement learning based on the SEED RL architecture. The framework facilitates the development and evaluation of embodied agents for solving grounded language understanding tasks, such as Vision-and-Language Navigation and Vision-and-Dialog Navigation, in photo-realistic environments, such as Matterport3D and StreetLearn. Such tasks require agents to interpret natural language instructions/dialog to navigate in photo-realistic environments in order to achieve prescribed navigation goals. We have added a minimal set of abstractions on top of SEED RL allowing us to generalize the architecture to solve a variety of other RL problems.

This package contains the implementations of the following problems:

• VLN task on R2R dataset in Matterport3D environment (paper)
• NDH task on CVDN dataset in Matterport3D environment (paper)
• SDR and VLN tasks on Touchdown dataset in StreetLearn environment (paper)

See Mehta et al. for details about our implementation for Touchdown and the data supporting it.

For a detailed description of the architecture please read Lansing et al. Please cite the paper if you use the code from this repository in your work.

Bibtex

@article{lansing2019valan,
    title={VALAN: Vision and Language Agent Navigation},
    author={Larry Lansing and Vihan Jain and Harsh Mehta and Haoshuo Huang and Eugene Ie},
    year={2019},
    eprint={1912.03241},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    primaryClass={cs.LG}
}

Prerequisites

Before getting started, we need two main packages to run VALAN: docker and git.

• Docker

  1. Install docker by following the links below. Note that GPU support is only available for docker version 19.03 and later (after Aug 2019).
     • For Ubuntu: https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/ubuntu
     • For Debian: https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/debian
  2. Make sure docker works as non-root user (i.e., without sudo) by following this instruction and section "Manage Docker as a non-root user" inside.

     • Now the following command should work without sudo:

       docker run hello-world
       

• Git

  1. Install git use the following:

     apt-get update && apt-get install git
     

  2. Clone the VALAN git repository to your directory:

     git clone https://github.com/google-research/valan.git
     cd valan
     

• Optional: To launch distributed training on the GCP AI-Platform you also need to sign up for a GCP account and install the Cloud SDK.

  • Follow https://cloud.google.com/ai-platform

Usage

Running on local machine

• Quick Start

  For a quick start, run the following toy example that works out of the box. It launches a training job inside a docker container, and uses Tmux to manage the learner with 3 train actors, 3 eval actors, and an eval aggregator, each of which runs separately in an asyncronous manner. The toy dataset contains only 3 R2R scans (houses) and a dozen paths, and will be copied to /tmp/valan/testdata/. Make sure you are inside directory valan/ before start. Then run the following:

  bash launch_locally_with_docker.sh R2R R2R_3scans R2R_3scans 3 3
  

  To stop an individual worker, type CTRL+C in the worker's Tmux window. To stop training, switch to the learner's window by typing CTRL+b then 0, then type CTRL+C to kill the learner. To terminate and quit the docker container, type CTRL+b then d, which will detach the container, kill all tasks inside, and remove the container.

• Custom Training

  You can run the job with your own R2R dataset as follows:

  bash launch_locally_with_docker.sh PROBLEM TRAIN_DATA EVAL_DATA NUM_ACTORS NUM_EVAL_ACTORS
  

  Note that the full R2R dataset is quite large and has 56 scans with 14k paths. Although the training job can run with only a few actors on a single machine, it can be very slow to do so. Thus it is recommended to run the full R2R dataset or other data of similar size on a distributed platform, e.g., GCP.

Running on distributed environment (e.g., GCP)

We provide the tool and a concrete example to run VALAN on GCP with distributed learning. Note that training the AI Platform requires signing up for a GCP account and will will incurr charges for using the compute resources. See: https://cloud.google.com/ai-platform

• Set up GCP SDK and project

  • To get started, install the GCP Cloud SDK following this instruction https://cloud.google.com/sdk/docs/quickstart and set up your GCP project.

  • Enable billing for your project.

  • Set up your Cloud Storage bucket for you AI Platform account following this instruction: https://cloud.google.com/ai-platform/training/docs/working-with-cloud-storage. Note that all of your input and training data will be stored in Cloud buckets.

  • Authenticate your gcloud account and set your default project:

    gcloud auth login
    gcloud config set project [YOUR_PROJECT]
    

• Optional: prepare your Matterport 3D data and image features.

  TODO

• Launch training job on GCP

  Each full training job consists of a learner (the main training node), a group of train actors that process and enqueue data for the learner concurrently, as well as several sets of eval actors for the evaluation job, all of which run asynchronously with the learner. The evaluation job can have multiple data sources, for instance, "train", "val_seen", and "val_unseen" for the training set, the "val_seen" set, and "val_unseen" set respectively. Each of them has its own group of actors plus one eval aggregator that dequeues and aggregates evaluated examples from all eval actors within this group.

  The learner always runs on the "master" node with an accelerator. The train actors run on the "worker" nodes and use multi-threading to concurrently load and process the input data. All eval actors and eval aggregators run on the "evaluator" nodes. The learner runs on accelerator and all actors run on CPUs.

  • To train a VLN agent using a toy dataset (containing only 3 scans), run the following:

    bash gcp/r2r_train_3scans.sh
    

    This script will first make a copy of ./r2r/testdata to a GCS bucket gs://valan/testdata, then launch a training example with 1 GPU, 12 training actors (3 workers each runs 4 threads), 4 eval actors (including 1 eval aggregator) and 4 test actors (including 1 test aggregator).

    To monitor the training status using TensorBoard: https://cloud.google.com/ai-platform/docs/getting-started-tensorflow-estimator#tensorboard-local

    tensorboard --logdir=gs://valan/$JOB_DIR
    

    To monitor the job details and logs: http://console.cloud.google.com/ai-platform

    More details on job monitoring can be found here: https://cloud.google.com/ai-platform/training/docs/monitor-training#console

  • To train a VLN agent using the full set of R2R data, make sure you data is copied to your GCS bucket, then change the dir paths and configurations defined in the following script accordingly. Then:

    bash gcp/r2r_train.sh
    

    Similarly, the training status can be monitored using TensorBoard and the AI-platform console as aforementioned.

    Using the configuration from above and pre-extracted EfficientNet-B4 features, we can get an agent with a success rate of 38.5, SDTW of 32, and SPL of 34, trained on the R2R_train.json dataset.

Disclaimer

This is not an official Google product.