# Modality-invariant Visual Odometry for Embodied Vision

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.00348 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.00348/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 53 of its 75 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 29 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 53)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [Matterport3D: Learning from RGB-D Data in Indoor Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.06158/) (2017)
- [Habitat: A Platform for Embodied AI Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01201/) (2019)
- [Semantic Understanding of Scenes through the ADE20K Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.05442/) (2016)
- [Scaling Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.04560/) (2021)
- [The Replica Dataset: A Digital Replica of Indoor Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.05797/) (2019)
- [AI2-THOR: An Interactive 3D Environment for Visual AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05474/) (2017)
- [Open3D: A Modern Library for 3D Data Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.09847/) (2018)
- [DROID-SLAM: Deep Visual SLAM for Monocular, Stereo, and RGB-D Cameras](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.10869/) (2021)
- [Taskonomy: Disentangling Task Transfer Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.08328/) (2018)
- [Perceiver IO: A General Architecture for Structured Inputs & Outputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.14795/) (2021)
- [Hypersim: A Photorealistic Synthetic Dataset for Holistic Indoor Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.02523/) (2020)
- [How to train your ViT? Data, Augmentation, and Regularization in Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.10270/) (2021)
- [On Evaluation of Embodied Navigation Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.06757/) (2018)
- [Habitat 2.0: Training Home Assistants to Rearrange their Habitat](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14405/) (2021)
- [Gibson Env: Real-World Perception for Embodied Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.10654/) (2018)
- [DD-PPO: Learning Near-Perfect PointGoal Navigators from 2.5 Billion Frames](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.00357/) (2019)
- [Why gradient clipping accelerates training: A theoretical justification for adaptivity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11881/) (2019)
- [Omnidata: A Scalable Pipeline for Making Multi-Task Mid-Level Vision Datasets from 3D Scans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.04994/) (2021)
- [Learning to Explore using Active Neural SLAM](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05155/) (2020)
- [MultiMAE: Multi-modal Multi-task Masked Autoencoders](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01678/) (2022)
- [A Survey of Embodied AI: From Simulators to Research Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.04918/) (2021)
- [Omnivore: A Single Model for Many Visual Modalities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.08377/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [URDFormer: A Pipeline for Constructing Articulated Simulation Environments from Real-World Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.11656/) (2024)
- [X-Fi: A Modality-Invariant Foundation Model for Multimodal Human Sensing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10167/) (2024)
- [Cohort-Based Active Modality Acquisition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.16791/) (2025)
- [Fusion or Confusion? Multimodal Complexity Is Not All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22991/) (2025)
- [The Empirical Impact of Forgetting and Transfer in Continual Visual Odometry](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01797/) (2024)
- [BRIGHT-VO: Brightness-Guided Hybrid Transformer for Visual Odometry with Multi-modality Refinement Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.08659/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Effectively localizing an agent in a realistic, noisy setting is crucial for many embodied vision tasks. Visual Odometry (VO) is a practical substitute for unreliable GPS and compass sensors, especially in indoor environments. While SLAM-based methods show a solid performance without large data requirements, they are less flexible and robust w.r.t. to noise and changes in the sensor suite compared to learning-based approaches. Recent deep VO models, however, limit themselves to a fixed set of input modalities, e.g., RGB and depth, while training on millions of samples. When sensors fail, sensor suites change, or modalities are intentionally looped out due to available resources, e.g., power consumption, the models fail catastrophically. Furthermore, training these models from scratch is even more expensive without simulator access or suitable existing models that can be fine-tuned. While such scenarios get mostly ignored in simulation, they commonly hinder a model's reusability in real-world applications. We propose a Transformer-based modality-invariant VO approach that can deal with diverse or changing sensor suites of navigation agents. Our model outperforms previous methods while training on only a fraction of the data. We hope this method opens the door to a broader range of real-world applications that can benefit from flexible and learned VO models.