Predicting Long-horizon Futures by Conditioning on Geometry and Time

Our work explores the task of generating future sensor observations conditioned on the past. We are motivated by `predictive coding' concepts from neuroscience as well as robotic applications such as self-driving vehicles. Predictive video modeling is challenging because the future may be multi-modal and learning at scale remains computationally expensive for video processing. To address both challenges, our key insight is to leverage the large-scale pretraining of image diffusion models which can handle multi-modality. We repurpose image models for video prediction by conditioning on new frame timestamps. Such models can be trained with videos of both static and dynamic scenes. To allow them to be trained with modestly-sized datasets, we introduce invariances by factoring out illumination and texture by forcing the model to predict (pseudo) depth, readily obtained for in-the-wild videos via off-the-shelf monocular depth networks. In fact, we show that simply modifying networks to predict grayscale pixels already improves the accuracy of video prediction. Given the extra controllability with timestamp conditioning, we propose sampling schedules that work better than the traditional autoregressive and hierarchical sampling strategies. Motivated by probabilistic metrics from the object forecasting literature, we create a benchmark for video prediction on a diverse set of videos spanning indoor and outdoor scenes and a large vocabulary of objects. Our experiments illustrate the effectiveness of learning to condition on timestamps, and show the importance of predicting the future with invariant modalities.