Proc4Gem: Foundation models for physical agency through procedural generation

In robot learning, it is common to either ignore the environment semantics, focusing on tasks like whole-body control which only require reasoning about robot-environment contacts, or conversely to ignore contact dynamics, focusing on grounding high-level movement in vision and language. In this work, we show that advances in generative modeling, photorealistic rendering, and procedural generation allow us to tackle tasks requiring both. By generating contact-rich trajectories with accurate physics in semantically-diverse simulations, we can distill behaviors into large multimodal models that directly transfer to the real world: a system we call Proc4Gem. Specifically, we show that a foundation model, Gemini, fine-tuned on only simulation data, can be instructed in language to control a quadruped robot to push an object with its body to unseen targets in unseen real-world environments. Our real-world results demonstrate the promise of using simulation to imbue foundation models with physical agency. Videos can be found at our website: https://sites.google.com/view/proc4gem

Learning Robot Soccer from Egocentric Vision with Deep Reinforcement Learning

We apply multi-agent deep reinforcement learning (RL) to train end-to-end robot soccer policies with fully onboard computation and sensing via egocentric RGB vision. This setting reflects many challenges of real-world robotics, including active perception, agile full-body control, and long-horizon planning in a dynamic, partially-observable, multi-agent domain. We rely on large-scale, simulation-based data generation to obtain complex behaviors from egocentric vision which can be successfully transferred to physical robots using low-cost sensors. To achieve adequate visual realism, our simulation combines rigid-body physics with learned, realistic rendering via multiple Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs). We combine teacher-based multi-agent RL and cross-experiment data reuse to enable the discovery of sophisticated soccer strategies. We analyze active-perception behaviors including object tracking and ball seeking that emerge when simply optimizing perception-agnostic soccer play. The agents display equivalent levels of performance and agility as policies with access to privileged, ground-truth state. To our knowledge, this paper constitutes a first demonstration of end-to-end training for multi-agent robot soccer, mapping raw pixel observations to joint-level actions, that can be deployed in the real world. Videos of the game-play and analyses can be seen on our website https://sites.google.com/view/vision-soccer .

Replay across Experiments: A Natural Extension of Off-Policy RL

Replaying data is a principal mechanism underlying the stability and data efficiency of off-policy reinforcement learning (RL). We present an effective yet simple framework to extend the use of replays across multiple experiments, minimally adapting the RL workflow for sizeable improvements in controller performance and research iteration times. At its core, Replay Across Experiments (RaE) involves reusing experience from previous experiments to improve exploration and bootstrap learning while reducing required changes to a minimum in comparison to prior work. We empirically show benefits across a number of RL algorithms and challenging control domains spanning both locomotion and manipulation, including hard exploration tasks from egocentric vision. Through comprehensive ablations, we demonstrate robustness to the quality and amount of data available and various hyperparameter choices. Finally, we discuss how our approach can be applied more broadly across research life cycles and can increase resilience by reloading data across random seeds or hyperparameter variations.

Score-based generative models learn manifold-like structures with constrained mixing

How do score-based generative models (SBMs) learn the data distribution supported on a low-dimensional manifold? We investigate the score model of a trained SBM through its linear approximations and subspaces spanned by local feature vectors. During diffusion as the noise decreases, the local dimensionality increases and becomes more varied between different sample sequences. Importantly, we find that the learned vector field mixes samples by a non-conservative field within the manifold, although it denoises with normal projections as if there is an energy function in off-manifold directions. At each noise level, the subspace spanned by the local features overlap with an effective density function. These observations suggest that SBMs can flexibly mix samples with the learned score field while carefully maintaining a manifold-like structure of the data distribution.

Learning Agile Soccer Skills for a Bipedal Robot with Deep Reinforcement Learning

We investigate whether Deep Reinforcement Learning (Deep RL) is able to synthesize sophisticated and safe movement skills for a low-cost, miniature humanoid robot that can be composed into complex behavioral strategies in dynamic environments. We used Deep RL to train a humanoid robot with 20 actuated joints to play a simplified one-versus-one (1v1) soccer game. We first trained individual skills in isolation and then composed those skills end-to-end in a self-play setting. The resulting policy exhibits robust and dynamic movement skills such as rapid fall recovery, walking, turning, kicking and more; and transitions between them in a smooth, stable, and efficient manner - well beyond what is intuitively expected from the robot. The agents also developed a basic strategic understanding of the game, and learned, for instance, to anticipate ball movements and to block opponent shots. The full range of behaviors emerged from a small set of simple rewards. Our agents were trained in simulation and transferred to real robots zero-shot. We found that a combination of sufficiently high-frequency control, targeted dynamics randomization, and perturbations during training in simulation enabled good-quality transfer, despite significant unmodeled effects and variations across robot instances. Although the robots are inherently fragile, minor hardware modifications together with basic regularization of the behavior during training led the robots to learn safe and effective movements while still performing in a dynamic and agile way. Indeed, even though the agents were optimized for scoring, in experiments they walked 156% faster, took 63% less time to get up, and kicked 24% faster than a scripted baseline, while efficiently combining the skills to achieve the longer term objectives. Examples of the emergent behaviors and full 1v1 matches are available on the supplementary website.

SkillS: Adaptive Skill Sequencing for Efficient Temporally-Extended Exploration

The ability to effectively reuse prior knowledge is a key requirement when building general and flexible Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents. Skill reuse is one of the most common approaches, but current methods have considerable limitations.For example, fine-tuning an existing policy frequently fails, as the policy can degrade rapidly early in training. In a similar vein, distillation of expert behavior can lead to poor results when given sub-optimal experts. We compare several common approaches for skill transfer on multiple domains including changes in task and system dynamics. We identify how existing methods can fail and introduce an alternative approach to mitigate these problems. Our approach learns to sequence existing temporally-extended skills for exploration but learns the final policy directly from the raw experience. This conceptual split enables rapid adaptation and thus efficient data collection but without constraining the final solution.It significantly outperforms many classical methods across a suite of evaluation tasks and we use a broad set of ablations to highlight the importance of differentc omponents of our method.

NeRF2Real: Sim2real Transfer of Vision-guided Bipedal Motion Skills using Neural Radiance Fields

We present a system for applying sim2real approaches to "in the wild" scenes with realistic visuals, and to policies which rely on active perception using RGB cameras. Given a short video of a static scene collected using a generic phone, we learn the scene's contact geometry and a function for novel view synthesis using a Neural Radiance Field (NeRF). We augment the NeRF rendering of the static scene by overlaying the rendering of other dynamic objects (e.g. the robot's own body, a ball). A simulation is then created using the rendering engine in a physics simulator which computes contact dynamics from the static scene geometry (estimated from the NeRF volume density) and the dynamic objects' geometry and physical properties (assumed known). We demonstrate that we can use this simulation to learn vision-based whole body navigation and ball pushing policies for a 20 degrees of freedom humanoid robot with an actuated head-mounted RGB camera, and we successfully transfer these policies to a real robot. Project video is available at https://sites.google.com/view/nerf2real/home

Imitate and Repurpose: Learning Reusable Robot Movement Skills From Human and Animal Behaviors

We investigate the use of prior knowledge of human and animal movement to learn reusable locomotion skills for real legged robots. Our approach builds upon previous work on imitating human or dog Motion Capture (MoCap) data to learn a movement skill module. Once learned, this skill module can be reused for complex downstream tasks. Importantly, due to the prior imposed by the MoCap data, our approach does not require extensive reward engineering to produce sensible and natural looking behavior at the time of reuse. This makes it easy to create well-regularized, task-oriented controllers that are suitable for deployment on real robots. We demonstrate how our skill module can be used for imitation, and train controllable walking and ball dribbling policies for both the ANYmal quadruped and OP3 humanoid. These policies are then deployed on hardware via zero-shot simulation-to-reality transfer. Accompanying videos are available at https://bit.ly/robot-npmp.