Modular Vehicle Control for Transferring Semantic Information to Unseen Weather Conditions using GANs
End-to-end supervised learning has shown promising results for self-driving cars, particularly under conditions for which it was trained. However, it may not necessarily perform well under unseen conditions. In this paper, we demonstrate how knowledge can be transferred from one weather condition for which semantic labels and steering commands are available to a completely new set of conditions for which we have no access to labeled data. The problem is addressed by dividing the task of vehicle control into independent perception and control modules, such that changing one does not affect the other. We train the control module only on the data for the available condition and keep it fixed even under new conditions. The perception module is then used as an interface between the new weather conditions and this control model. The perception module in turn is trained using semantic labels, which we assume are already available for the same weather condition on which the control model was trained. However, obtaining them for other conditions is a tedious and error-prone process. Therefore, we propose to use a generative adversarial network (GAN)-based model to retrieve the semantic information for the new conditions in an unsupervised manner. We introduce a master-servant architecture, where the master model (semantic labels available) trains the servant model (semantic labels not available). The servant model can then be used for steering the vehicle without retraining the control module.
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