# Making the Flow Glow -- Robot Perception under Severe Lighting Conditions using Normalizing Flow Gradients

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.07565 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07565/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 21 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Dec 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 21 of 21)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Microsoft COCO: Common Objects in Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1405.0312/) (2014)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1409.0575/) (2014)
- [EfficientNet: Rethinking Model Scaling for Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.11946/) (2019)
- [Deep Learning Face Attributes in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.7766/) (2014)
- [Density estimation using Real NVP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.08803/) (2016)
- [YOLOv4: Optimal Speed and Accuracy of Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.10934/) (2020)
- [Glow: Generative Flow with Invertible 1x1 Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03039/) (2018)
- [Normalizing Flows for Probabilistic Modeling and Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.02762/) (2019)
- [Generalized Out-of-Distribution Detection: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.11334/) (2021)
- [A Survey of Uncertainty in Deep Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03342/) (2021)
- [Likelihood Ratios for Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02845/) (2019)
- [Generalized ODIN: Detecting Out-of-distribution Image without Learning from Out-of-distribution Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.11297/) (2020)
- [Why Normalizing Flows Fail to Detect Out-of-Distribution Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.08545/) (2020)
- [Contrastive Training for Improved Out-of-Distribution Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.05566/) (2020)
- [Robustness to Out-of-Distribution Inputs via Task-Aware Generative Uncertainty](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.10687/) (2018)
- [Unsupervised anomaly detection for a Smart Autonomous Robotic Assistant Surgeon (SARAS)using a deep residual autoencoder](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11008/) (2021)
- [Embedded out-of-distribution detection on an autonomous robot platform](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15965/) (2021)
- [Self-Calibrating Anomaly and Change Detection for Autonomous Inspection Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.02379/) (2022)
- [Out-of-Distribution Detection for Adaptive Computer Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09293/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [TransNormal: Dense Visual Semantics for Diffusion-based Transparent Object Normal Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00839/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Modern robotic perception is highly dependent on neural networks. It is well known that neural network-based perception can be unreliable in real-world deployment, especially in difficult imaging conditions. Out-of-distribution detection is commonly proposed as a solution for ensuring reliability in real-world deployment. Previous work has shown that normalizing flow models can be used for out-of-distribution detection to improve reliability of robotic perception tasks. Specifically, camera parameters can be optimized with respect to the likelihood output from a normalizing flow, which allows a perception system to adapt to difficult vision scenarios. With this work we propose to use the absolute gradient values from a normalizing flow, which allows the perception system to optimize local regions rather than the whole image. By setting up a table top picking experiment with exceptionally difficult lighting conditions, we show that our method achieves a 60% higher success rate for an object detection task compared to previous methods.