GOMAA-Geo: GOal Modality Agnostic Active Geo-localization

We consider the task of active geo-localization (AGL) in which an agent uses a sequence of visual cues observed during aerial navigation to find a target specified through multiple possible modalities. This could emulate a UAV involved in a search-and-rescue operation navigating through an area, observing a stream of aerial images as it goes. The AGL task is associated with two important challenges. Firstly, an agent must deal with a goal specification in one of multiple modalities (e.g., through a natural language description) while the search cues are provided in other modalities (aerial imagery). The second challenge is limited localization time (e.g., limited battery life, urgency) so that the goal must be localized as efficiently as possible, i.e. the agent must effectively leverage its sequentially observed aerial views when searching for the goal. To address these challenges, we propose GOMAA-Geo - a goal modality agnostic active geo-localization agent - for zero-shot generalization between different goal modalities. Our approach combines cross-modality contrastive learning to align representations across modalities with supervised foundation model pretraining and reinforcement learning to obtain highly effective navigation and localization policies. Through extensive evaluations, we show that GOMAA-Geo outperforms alternative learnable approaches and that it generalizes across datasets - e.g., to disaster-hit areas without seeing a single disaster scenario during training - and goal modalities - e.g., to ground-level imagery or textual descriptions, despite only being trained with goals specified as aerial views. Code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/mvrl/GOMAA-Geo/tree/main.

Paper

Similar papers

Peer review

Reviewer DjP35/10 · confidence 4/52024-06-24

Summary

The paper introduces GOMAA-Geo, a system designed for active geo-localization tasks where the goal can be specified in various modalities, including text, ground-level, or aerial imagery. The framework uses a combination of cross-modality contrastive learning to align representations across different modalities, supervised foundation model pretraining, and reinforcement learning to derive effective navigation and localization policies. It demonstrates strong performance in both same-modality and cross-modality localization tasks, with an emphasis on zero-shot generalization to new, unseen datasets.

Strengths

1. Modality Agnosticism: The ability to handle goal specifications in various modalities makes GOMAA-Geo highly versatile and applicable in diverse real-world scenarios, particularly in search-and-rescue operations where goal modalities can vary significantly. 2. Zero-Shot Generalization: The framework is effective at generalizing to completely new environments and goal modalities it has never seen during training, which is crucial for practical applications where pre-collected data might not be available. 3. Robust Performance: Extensive testing shows that GOMAA-Geo consistently outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in terms of success rates across multiple datasets and modalities, confirming its efficacy.

Weaknesses

1. Complex Integration: The integration of multiple complex components—contrastive learning, supervised pretraining, and reinforcement learning—while effective, can be challenging to optimize and maintain, potentially limiting its adaptability. 2. Computational Demands: The processes involved, particularly the training across different modalities and the reinforcement learning steps, might require substantial computational resources, which could be a barrier to deployment in resource-constrained environments. 3. Limited Discussion on Failure Cases: The paper could benefit from a more detailed discussion on scenarios where GOMAA-Geo fails or performs suboptimally, which would be valuable for future improvements and practical deployments.

Questions

N/A

Rating

5

Confidence

4

Soundness

4

Presentation

3

Contribution

3

Limitations

Yes.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-12

Follow-up to our response

Dear Reviewer DjP3, In our rebuttal, we have already addressed all your previous comments and have answered 9JwT's queries about our dataset, and provided all necessary details along with a link to the dataset. As we approach the end of the discussion period, we wanted to follow up to see if our responses have addressed your concerns. We would be very grateful to hear additional feedback from you and will provide further clarification if needed. If you believe our response has adequately resolved the issues you raised, we kindly ask you to consider the possibility of raising the score. Thank you again for your time and effort. Thanks, Authors

Reviewer noHa4/10 · confidence 4/52024-07-11

Summary

In this paper, the author proposes a direction classification task, which is for the drone path navigation. My main concerns are about the task. Usually we have the global satellite-view image, shall we estimate the direction? Most works do the location retrieval, which is a common practise in the geolocation.

Strengths

In this paper, the author proposes a direction classification task, which is for the drone path navigation. The method seems sound. The idea is presented clear.

Weaknesses

1. My main concerns are about the task. Usually we have the global satellite-view image, shall we estimate the direction? Most works do the location retrieval, which is a common practise in the geolocation. 2. Can the network general to unseen scenarios? For example, there are many similar buildings or similar forests. 3. I am not sure the network could predict the future according to the history. Because there are no global map as input. 4. The drone usually do not go back, so the estimation space is only 3 directions. If we further consider the boundary or corner, there are only 2 / 1 direction. Will it affect the model? 5. I see the samples shown in the paper. I see a biases toward the boundary and corner. Could you show more samples with destination at the center? 6. Missing alignment. How about give a destination between the two patches? 7. The direction estimation is not new. Similar methods have been explored in the RL and detection. 8. Typos. i.e. should be i.e.,

Questions

Please see the Weakness.

Rating

4

Confidence

4

Soundness

2

Presentation

2

Contribution

2

Limitations

Please see the Weakness.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-12

Follow-up to our response

Dear Reviewer noHa, In our rebuttal, we addressed all your concerns in detail including your concern regarding the task, and also provided additional visualizations that you requested. We will include all the additional visualizations in our revised draft. As we approach the end of the discussion period, we would like to follow up to ensure that our responses have satisfactorily addressed your concerns. We would greatly appreciate any further feedback you may have and are prepared to offer additional clarification if necessary. If you believe our response has adequately resolved the issues you raised, we kindly ask you to consider the possibility of raising the score. Thank you again for your time and effort. Thanks, Authors

Reviewer 9JwT5/10 · confidence 3/52024-07-13

Summary

This paper introduces GOMAA-Geo, a framework designed to enhance active geo-localization for the UAV, enabling them to find targets specified through various modalities like natural language or imagery. It addresses the challenge of efficient localization in dynamic environments without specific training on disaster scenarios. Utilizing a modality-agnostic approach with cross-modality contrastive learning and a combination of pretraining and reinforcement learning, GOMAA-Geo achieves robust navigation and localization. It conducted extensive experiments across various datasets and demonstrated its effectiveness.

Strengths

- It proposes a new dataset named Multi-Modal Goal Dataset for Active Geolocalization (MM-GAG) for active geo-localization across different goal modalities: aerial images, ground-level images, and natural language text. - This paper introduced a framework named GOMAA-Geo, which utilizes a modality-agnostic approach, combining cross-modality contrastive learning to generalize across different goal specifications and modalities. - Extensive experiments are done in this paper, which is quite laborious.

Weaknesses

- The introduced dataset is the main contribution of the paper, but the details of the dataset are very limited, and there is no more information in the appendix, such as the details of data collection, why the zero-shot generalization performance of the evaluation model is better? - The writing needs to be improved, especially the method part, which is quite confusing. In 240 lines, it is claimed that the complete GOMAA-Geo framework integrates all the components introduced before, but it is not easy to find the corresponding relationship from the text to the figure, and the connection between Figure 1, Figure 2, and Figure 3 is also difficult to sort out.

Questions

What is the full name of the UAV? There is no explanation in the whole paper, which will cause confusion to readers.

Rating

5

Confidence

3

Soundness

2

Presentation

2

Contribution

3

Limitations

It addresses the limitations in the Appendix.

Reviewer 9JwT2024-08-09

The reason why I believe the dataset is the main contribution is twofold: (1) As stated by the author in the rebuttal, "We summarize our contributions in Lines 55-67," for the contribution paragraph, the first part introduces the GOMAA-Geo framework, and the second part discusses the dataset contribution: "We create a novel dataset to assess various approaches for active geo-localization across three different goal modalities: aerial images, ground-level images, and natural language text." (2) In this paper, the authors claim the proposed open-source dataset MM-GAG is "currently available for evaluating the zero-shot generalizability of GOMAA-Geo across diverse goal modalities, such as ground-level images and natural language text." (Lines 266-270). They conduct a variety of experiments using MM-GAG, detailed in Table 1, Table 2, and further explored in Table 12, Table 14, and Figure 17 in the Appendix. This indicates that a significant portion of the main experiments and ablations in the paper utilized this dataset, and thus, the quality of the dataset impacts the evaluation results. If the dataset quality is poor, such as having biases, how can I trust that the method proposed by the paper is effective? This is why I am hesitant to give a high score from the dataset perspective. If the author does not consider the dataset as an important contribution, I will reduce my evaluation of the experiments related to MM-GAG, and if evaluating purely from a methodological perspective, I am willing to increase my score. Additionally, regarding the details of the data, although more details are provided in the supplementary materials from Lines 762-769, I still hope for more specific information to validate the dataset's collection rationality. Lines 762-763 mention: "After filtering the images, the dataset contained 73 images in total across the globe." I would like to know how much data was initially collected, what the filtering was based on, what confirms the global coverage of the dataset, why these specific locations were chosen for sampling, and how the current dataset ensures that it is not biased.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-10

Additional Details Regarding the Dataset

Thank you for your comment. We’re pleased to provide additional details about the dataset that you requested. Please see our detailed response below. **Regarding sampling locations**: The ground-level images were collected from a diverse group of users via a small-scale crowdsourcing effort. We made every effort to ensure the images were sourced from a wide range of countries. The sampling locations were determined by the GPS information embedded in the EXIF data of the images, not by manual selection. The purpose of using the privately sourced images was to avoid leakage into any of the foundation models. **Regarding filtering**: Initially, we collected 82 images. We applied a basic filter to the collected ground-level images, based on the availability of GPS data. Since we needed to retrieve satellite imagery corresponding to each ground-level image, we required that each image include GPS information in its EXIF data. Images **lacking GPS information** were excluded. We did not apply any further filtering. Finally, our dataset comprises 73 ground-level images. **Regarding biases**: As mentioned before, we did our best to ensure diversity among the ground-level images. Our dataset features both indoor and outdoor scenes from 11 different countries. Furthermore, we report the average pairwise similarity between the images in our dataset, computed using cosine similarity of the corresponding image embeddings from various vision models: | Vision Model | DinoV2 [1] | SigLIP [2] | CLIP [3] | |--------------------------|--------|--------|-------------| | Avg. Pairwise Similarity | 0.10±0.22 | 0.32±0.17 | 0.56±0.13 | The low average pairwise similarity suggests that the images in our dataset represent a diverse range of concepts. Finally, we would like to emphasize that a single ground-level image can be utilized to generate up to 300 potential start and goal scenarios by spatially adjusting the grid of satellite images. By randomly initializing start and goal locations and averaging the results over 5 different random seeds enabled us to robustly evaluate our model (Line 289). **Link to the dataset**: An anonymous link to the dataset was included in the supplementary material of our initial submission. For your convenience, here is the [link](https://huggingface.co/datasets/Gomaa-Geo/MM-GAG/tree/main) for further reference. **References:** [1]: Oquab, Maxime, et al. "Dinov2: Learning robust visual features without supervision." Transactions on Machine Learning Research (TMLR), 2023. [2]: Zhai et al. "Sigmoid loss for language image pre-training". International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2023. [3]: Radford et al. "Learning Transferable Visual Models from Natural Language Supervision". International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2021.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-12

Follow-up to our response

Dear Reviewer 9JwT, In our rebuttal, as you requested, we provided all the necessary details about the dataset along with the anonymous dataset link. As we approach the end of the discussion period, we wanted to follow up to see if our responses address your concerns. We would be very grateful to hear additional feedback from you and will provide further clarification if needed. If you believe our response has adequately resolved the issues you raised, we kindly ask you to consider the possibility of raising the score. Thank you again for your time and effort. Thanks, Authors

Reviewer 9JwT2024-08-14

Thanks for your response. I'd like to raise the rating to 5.

Reviewer 4muN6/10 · confidence 4/52024-07-13

Summary

The paper introduces GOMAA-Geo, a novel framework for active geo-localization (AGL) that is capable of zero-shot generalization across different goal modalities. GOMAA-Geo is designed to assist agents, such as UAVs in search-and-rescue operations, to locate targets specified through various modalities (e.g., natural language, ground-level images, or aerial images) using a sequence of visual cues observed during aerial navigation. The framework addresses two main challenges: 1. Dealing with goal specifications in multiple modalities while relying on aerial imagery as search cues. 2. Limited localization time due to constraints like battery life, necessitating efficient goal localization. GOMAA-Geo integrates cross-modality contrastive learning to align representations across modalities, foundation model pretraining, and reinforcement learning to develop effective navigation and localization policies. The framework has been evaluated extensively and shown to outperform alternative approaches, demonstrating its ability to generalize across datasets and goal modalities without prior exposure during training.

Strengths

1. The paper proposes a novel approach that combines cross-modality learning, foundation model pretraining, and reinforcement learning for active geo-localization, which is novel to some extent. 2. GOMAA-Geo's ability to generalize across different datasets and modalities without prior training exposure, enhancing its applicability in diverse real-world scenarios. The framework has undergone rigorous testing and comparison with alternative methods, demonstrating its effectiveness through quantitative and qualitative analyses. 3. The authors have created a new dataset to facilitate benchmarking, which is beneficial for future research in the area.

Weaknesses

While the framework shows promise, it may require further validation in real-world conditions with actual UAVs and under various environmental challenges.

Questions

See the weakness

Rating

6

Confidence

4

Soundness

3

Presentation

4

Contribution

3

Limitations

I suggest the authors to discuss the negative impacts of proposed method to our society like public safety.

Reviewer 4muN2024-08-13

Response to Authors

I have no further questions. I still give positive rating. Thank the authors for your rebuttal.

Reviewer DjP32024-08-11

Thanks for the response, I have reviewed all the other reviewers' comments and the authors' responses. I agree with Reviewer 9JWt that the main contribution of the dataset lacks some details and the zero-shot performance requires a more reasonable explanation. While I also acknowledge the paper's significant contribution to the community, I would like to change my rating to borderline accept.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-11

Thank you for the comments and your engagement. We provide our response to your comments below: > **Q1**: "Lack some details regarding the dataset" **A1**: Thank you for your comment. We refer you to our detailed response ([link](https://openreview.net/forum?id=gPCesxD4B4&noteId=wpmhB8kN3m)) to Reviewer 9JwT's concerns about the dataset. We believe we have thoroughly addressed all relevant details as requested. Should you have any further questions or concerns regarding the dataset, please do not hesitate to reach out to us. The dataset has already been made available at this anonymous [link](https://huggingface.co/datasets/Gomaa-Geo/MM-GAG/tree/main). Finally, as you mentioned in your response "lack some details", **it would be beneficial if you could specify which specific details you are referring to. This will enable us to respond more effectively.** Next, we clarify the reason behind the superior zero-shot generalization performance of our model. > **Q2**: Reason for superior zero-shot generalization performance? **A2**: The CLIP-MMFE module utilizes a satellite image encoder to project satellite images into the CLIP feature space. The original CLIP model, trained on 400 million image-text pairs, predominantly consists of diverse ground-level images. This extensive training allows the CLIP vision encoder to develop robust, generalized visual representations, making it a powerful feature extractor with strong zero-shot capabilities. The satellite image encoder of the CLIP-MMFE module, although trained on a more specialized dataset of satellite images, maps these images into the CLIP feature space. As a result, it inherits the CLIP model’s exceptional zero-shot performance. This inheritance occurs because the satellite encoder benefits from the rich and diverse visual features learned by the CLIP vision encoder. By mapping satellite images to the same feature space as the CLIP model, the satellite encoder leverages the extensive training of the CLIP model, thereby achieving improved zero-shot generalization capabilities. In essence, the effective feature extraction and zero-shot learning abilities of the CLIP vision encoder are extended to the satellite image encoder and is achieved by aligning the feature space of the satellite image encoder of the CLIP-MMFE module and CLIP vision encoder as discussed in lines 149-170, enhancing its performance in recognizing and interpreting new or unseen satellite imagery within the well-established CLIP feature space. To substantiate our argument, we have conducted numerous experiments and provided both qualitative and quantitative analyses throughout the paper. We would like to emphasize one key result here. To validate how aligning features from different modalities to the unified CLIP space—achieved through the CLIP-MMFE module—enhances zero-shot performance, we conducted an experiment (**detailed in Appendix D**) comparing it to a modality-specific feature extractor, such as SatMAE, a foundational satellite image encoder. Although the performance of both approaches is comparable when the goal modality is satellite imagery, a significant performance gap emerges in zero-shot evaluations with other goal modalities. This highlights the benefit of aligning features from different modalities to the robust, zero-shot generalizable CLIP space, as demonstrated by our results. We would be very happy to provide further clarification and hopefully clarify your concerns (if any) about zero-shot generalizability before the discussion period concludes.

Authorsrebuttal2024-08-12

Follow-up to our response

Dear Reviewer 4muN, Thank you very much for your valuable reviews and the time you've invested. As the author-reviewer discussion period is coming to an end, we sincerely want to confirm whether we have addressed your concerns. If you believe our response has adequately resolved the issues you raised, we kindly ask you to consider the possibility of raising the score. Thank you again for your time and effort. Thanks, Authors

Program Chairsdecision2024-09-25

Decision

Accept (poster)

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