RoboCat: A Self-Improving Foundation Agent for Robotic Manipulation

The ability to leverage heterogeneous robotic experience from different robots and tasks to quickly master novel skills and embodiments has the potential to transform robot learning. Inspired by recent advances in foundation models for vision and language, we propose a foundation agent for robotic manipulation. This agent, named RoboCat, is a visual goal-conditioned decision transformer capable of consuming multi-embodiment action-labelled visual experience. This data spans a large repertoire of motor control skills from simulated and real robotic arms with varying sets of observations and actions. With RoboCat, we demonstrate the ability to generalise to new tasks and robots, both zero-shot as well as through adaptation using only 100--1000 examples for the target task. We also show how a trained model itself can be used to generate data for subsequent training iterations, thus providing a basic building block for an autonomous improvement loop. We investigate the agent's capabilities, with large-scale evaluations both in simulation and on three different real robot embodiments. We find that as we grow and diversify its training data, RoboCat not only shows signs of cross-task transfer, but also becomes more efficient at adapting to new tasks.

Wish you were here: Hindsight Goal Selection for long-horizon dexterous manipulation

Complex sequential tasks in continuous-control settings often require agents to successfully traverse a set of "narrow passages" in their state space. Solving such tasks with a sparse reward in a sample-efficient manner poses a challenge to modern reinforcement learning (RL) due to the associated long-horizon nature of the problem and the lack of sufficient positive signal during learning. Various tools have been applied to address this challenge. When available, large sets of demonstrations can guide agent exploration. Hindsight relabelling on the other hand does not require additional sources of information. However, existing strategies explore based on task-agnostic goal distributions, which can render the solution of long-horizon tasks impractical. In this work, we extend hindsight relabelling mechanisms to guide exploration along task-specific distributions implied by a small set of successful demonstrations. We evaluate the approach on four complex, single and dual arm, robotics manipulation tasks against strong suitable baselines. The method requires far fewer demonstrations to solve all tasks and achieves a significantly higher overall performance as task complexity increases. Finally, we investigate the robustness of the proposed solution with respect to the quality of input representations and the number of demonstrations.

S3K: Self-Supervised Semantic Keypoints for Robotic Manipulation via Multi-View Consistency

A robot's ability to act is fundamentally constrained by what it can perceive. Many existing approaches to visual representation learning utilize general-purpose training criteria, e.g. image reconstruction, smoothness in latent space, or usefulness for control, or else make use of large datasets annotated with specific features (bounding boxes, segmentations, etc.). However, both approaches often struggle to capture the fine-detail required for precision tasks on specific objects, e.g. grasping and mating a plug and socket. We argue that these difficulties arise from a lack of geometric structure in these models. In this work we advocate semantic 3D keypoints as a visual representation, and present a semi-supervised training objective that can allow instance or category-level keypoints to be trained to 1-5 millimeter-accuracy with minimal supervision. Furthermore, unlike local texture-based approaches, our model integrates contextual information from a large area and is therefore robust to occlusion, noise, and lack of discernible texture. We demonstrate that this ability to locate semantic keypoints enables high level scripting of human understandable behaviours. Finally we show that these keypoints provide a good way to define reward functions for reinforcement learning and are a good representation for training agents.

Alpha-Beta Divergence For Variational Inference

This paper introduces a variational approximation framework using direct optimization of what is known as the {\it scale invariant Alpha-Beta divergence} (sAB divergence). This new objective encompasses most variational objectives that use the Kullback-Leibler, the R{\'e}nyi or the gamma divergences. It also gives access to objective functions never exploited before in the context of variational inference. This is achieved via two easy to interpret control parameters, which allow for a smooth interpolation over the divergence space while trading-off properties such as mass-covering of a target distribution and robustness to outliers in the data. Furthermore, the sAB variational objective can be optimized directly by repurposing existing methods for Monte Carlo computation of complex variational objectives, leading to estimates of the divergence instead of variational lower bounds. We show the advantages of this objective on Bayesian models for regression problems.