  How much does having visual priors about the world (e.g. the fact that the
world is 3D) assist in learning to perform downstream motor tasks (e.g.
delivering a package)? We study this question by integrating a generic
perceptual skill set (e.g. a distance estimator, an edge detector, etc.) within
a reinforcement learning framework--see Figure 1. This skill set (hereafter
mid-level perception) provides the policy with a more processed state of the
world compared to raw images.
  We find that using a mid-level perception confers significant advantages over
training end-to-end from scratch (i.e. not leveraging priors) in
navigation-oriented tasks. Agents are able to generalize to situations where
the from-scratch approach fails and training becomes significantly more sample
efficient. However, we show that realizing these gains requires careful
selection of the mid-level perceptual skills. Therefore, we refine our findings
into an efficient max-coverage feature set that can be adopted in lieu of raw
images. We perform our study in completely separate buildings for training and
testing and compare against visually blind baseline policies and
state-of-the-art feature learning methods.
