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In this paper, we explore the possibility to increase the training examples without laborious data collection and annotation for long-tailed instance segmentation. We find that an abundance of instance segments can potentially be obtained freely from object-centric images, according to two insights: (i) an object-centric image usually contains one salient object in a simple background; (ii) objects from the same class often share similar appearances or similar contrasts to the background. Motivated by these insights, we propose a simple and scalable framework FREESEG for extracting and leveraging these “free” object segments to facilitate model training. Concretely, we investigate the similarity among object-centric images of the same class to propose candidate segments of foreground instances, followed by a novel ranking of segment quality. The resulting high quality object segments can then be used to augment the existing long-tailed datasets, e.g., by copying and pasting the segments onto the original training images. Extensive experiments show that FREESEG yields substantial improvements on top of strong baselines and achieves state-of-the-art accuracy for segmenting rare object categories.

We study the problem of developing autonomous agents that can follow human instructions to infer and perform a sequence of actions to complete the underlying task. Significant progress has been made in recent years, especially for tasks with short horizons. However, when it comes to long-horizon tasks with extended sequences of actions, an agent can easily ignore some instructions or get stuck in the middle of the long instructions and eventually fail the task. To address this challenge, we propose a model-agnostic milestone-based task tracker(M-TRACK) to guide the agent and monitor its progress. Specifcally, we propose a milestone builder that tags the instructions with navigation and interaction milestones which the agent needs to complete step by step, and a milestone checker that systemically checks the agent’s progress in its current milestone and determines when to proceed to the next. On the challenging ALFRED dataset, our M-TRACK leads to a notable 33% and 52% relative improvement in unseen success rate over two competitive base models.