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Quan Vuong

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SARA-RT: Scaling up Robotics Transformers with Self-Adaptive Robust Attention

Dec 04, 2023
Isabel Leal, Krzysztof Choromanski, Deepali Jain, Avinava Dubey, Jake Varley, Michael Ryoo, Yao Lu, Frederick Liu, Vikas Sindhwani, Quan Vuong, Tamas Sarlos, Ken Oslund, Karol Hausman, Kanishka Rao

We present Self-Adaptive Robust Attention for Robotics Transformers (SARA-RT): a new paradigm for addressing the emerging challenge of scaling up Robotics Transformers (RT) for on-robot deployment. SARA-RT relies on the new method of fine-tuning proposed by us, called up-training. It converts pre-trained or already fine-tuned Transformer-based robotic policies of quadratic time complexity (including massive billion-parameter vision-language-action models or VLAs), into their efficient linear-attention counterparts maintaining high quality. We demonstrate the effectiveness of SARA-RT by speeding up: (a) the class of recently introduced RT-2 models, the first VLA robotic policies pre-trained on internet-scale data, as well as (b) Point Cloud Transformer (PCT) robotic policies operating on large point clouds. We complement our results with the rigorous mathematical analysis providing deeper insight into the phenomenon of SARA.

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RT-Trajectory: Robotic Task Generalization via Hindsight Trajectory Sketches

Nov 06, 2023
Jiayuan Gu, Sean Kirmani, Paul Wohlhart, Yao Lu, Montserrat Gonzalez Arenas, Kanishka Rao, Wenhao Yu, Chuyuan Fu, Keerthana Gopalakrishnan, Zhuo Xu, Priya Sundaresan, Peng Xu, Hao Su, Karol Hausman, Chelsea Finn, Quan Vuong, Ted Xiao

Generalization remains one of the most important desiderata for robust robot learning systems. While recently proposed approaches show promise in generalization to novel objects, semantic concepts, or visual distribution shifts, generalization to new tasks remains challenging. For example, a language-conditioned policy trained on pick-and-place tasks will not be able to generalize to a folding task, even if the arm trajectory of folding is similar to pick-and-place. Our key insight is that this kind of generalization becomes feasible if we represent the task through rough trajectory sketches. We propose a policy conditioning method using such rough trajectory sketches, which we call RT-Trajectory, that is practical, easy to specify, and allows the policy to effectively perform new tasks that would otherwise be challenging to perform. We find that trajectory sketches strike a balance between being detailed enough to express low-level motion-centric guidance while being coarse enough to allow the learned policy to interpret the trajectory sketch in the context of situational visual observations. In addition, we show how trajectory sketches can provide a useful interface to communicate with robotic policies: they can be specified through simple human inputs like drawings or videos, or through automated methods such as modern image-generating or waypoint-generating methods. We evaluate RT-Trajectory at scale on a variety of real-world robotic tasks, and find that RT-Trajectory is able to perform a wider range of tasks compared to language-conditioned and goal-conditioned policies, when provided the same training data.

* Evaluation videos can be found at https://rt-trajectory.github.io/ 
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Open X-Embodiment: Robotic Learning Datasets and RT-X Models

Oct 17, 2023
Open X-Embodiment Collaboration, Abhishek Padalkar, Acorn Pooley, Ajinkya Jain, Alex Bewley, Alex Herzog, Alex Irpan, Alexander Khazatsky, Anant Rai, Anikait Singh, Anthony Brohan, Antonin Raffin, Ayzaan Wahid, Ben Burgess-Limerick, Beomjoon Kim, Bernhard Schölkopf, Brian Ichter, Cewu Lu, Charles Xu, Chelsea Finn, Chenfeng Xu, Cheng Chi, Chenguang Huang, Christine Chan, Chuer Pan, Chuyuan Fu, Coline Devin, Danny Driess, Deepak Pathak, Dhruv Shah, Dieter Büchler, Dmitry Kalashnikov, Dorsa Sadigh, Edward Johns, Federico Ceola, Fei Xia, Freek Stulp, Gaoyue Zhou, Gaurav S. Sukhatme, Gautam Salhotra, Ge Yan, Giulio Schiavi, Gregory Kahn, Hao Su, Hao-Shu Fang, Haochen Shi, Heni Ben Amor, Henrik I Christensen, Hiroki Furuta, Homer Walke, Hongjie Fang, Igor Mordatch, Ilija Radosavovic, Isabel Leal, Jacky Liang, Jad Abou-Chakra, Jaehyung Kim, Jan Peters, Jan Schneider, Jasmine Hsu, Jeannette Bohg, Jeffrey Bingham, Jiajun Wu, Jialin Wu, Jianlan Luo, Jiayuan Gu, Jie Tan, Jihoon Oh, Jitendra Malik, Jonathan Tompson, Jonathan Yang, Joseph J. Lim, João Silvério, Junhyek Han, Kanishka Rao, Karl Pertsch, Karol Hausman, Keegan Go, Keerthana Gopalakrishnan, Ken Goldberg, Kendra Byrne, Kenneth Oslund, Kento Kawaharazuka, Kevin Zhang, Krishan Rana, Krishnan Srinivasan, Lawrence Yunliang Chen, Lerrel Pinto, Liam Tan, Lionel Ott, Lisa Lee, Masayoshi Tomizuka, Maximilian Du, Michael Ahn, Mingtong Zhang, Mingyu Ding, Mohan Kumar Srirama, Mohit Sharma, Moo Jin Kim, Naoaki Kanazawa, Nicklas Hansen, Nicolas Heess, Nikhil J Joshi, Niko Suenderhauf, Norman Di Palo, Nur Muhammad Mahi Shafiullah, Oier Mees, Oliver Kroemer, Pannag R Sanketi, Paul Wohlhart, Peng Xu, Pierre Sermanet, Priya Sundaresan, Quan Vuong, Rafael Rafailov, Ran Tian, Ria Doshi, Roberto Martín-Martín, Russell Mendonca, Rutav Shah, Ryan Hoque, Ryan Julian, Samuel Bustamante, Sean Kirmani, Sergey Levine, Sherry Moore, Shikhar Bahl, Shivin Dass, Shubham Sonawani, Shuran Song, Sichun Xu, Siddhant Haldar, Simeon Adebola, Simon Guist, Soroush Nasiriany, Stefan Schaal, Stefan Welker, Stephen Tian, Sudeep Dasari, Suneel Belkhale, Takayuki Osa, Tatsuya Harada, Tatsuya Matsushima, Ted Xiao, Tianhe Yu, Tianli Ding, Todor Davchev, Tony Z. Zhao, Travis Armstrong, Trevor Darrell, Vidhi Jain, Vincent Vanhoucke, Wei Zhan, Wenxuan Zhou, Wolfram Burgard, Xi Chen, Xiaolong Wang, Xinghao Zhu, Xuanlin Li, Yao Lu, Yevgen Chebotar, Yifan Zhou, Yifeng Zhu, Ying Xu, Yixuan Wang, Yonatan Bisk, Yoonyoung Cho, Youngwoon Lee, Yuchen Cui, Yueh-Hua Wu, Yujin Tang, Yuke Zhu, Yunzhu Li, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yutaka Matsuo, Zhuo Xu, Zichen Jeff Cui

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Large, high-capacity models trained on diverse datasets have shown remarkable successes on efficiently tackling downstream applications. In domains from NLP to Computer Vision, this has led to a consolidation of pretrained models, with general pretrained backbones serving as a starting point for many applications. Can such a consolidation happen in robotics? Conventionally, robotic learning methods train a separate model for every application, every robot, and even every environment. Can we instead train generalist X-robot policy that can be adapted efficiently to new robots, tasks, and environments? In this paper, we provide datasets in standardized data formats and models to make it possible to explore this possibility in the context of robotic manipulation, alongside experimental results that provide an example of effective X-robot policies. We assemble a dataset from 22 different robots collected through a collaboration between 21 institutions, demonstrating 527 skills (160266 tasks). We show that a high-capacity model trained on this data, which we call RT-X, exhibits positive transfer and improves the capabilities of multiple robots by leveraging experience from other platforms. More details can be found on the project website $\href{https://robotics-transformer-x.github.io}{\text{robotics-transformer-x.github.io}}$.

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Robotic Offline RL from Internet Videos via Value-Function Pre-Training

Sep 22, 2023
Chethan Bhateja, Derek Guo, Dibya Ghosh, Anikait Singh, Manan Tomar, Quan Vuong, Yevgen Chebotar, Sergey Levine, Aviral Kumar

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Pre-training on Internet data has proven to be a key ingredient for broad generalization in many modern ML systems. What would it take to enable such capabilities in robotic reinforcement learning (RL)? Offline RL methods, which learn from datasets of robot experience, offer one way to leverage prior data into the robotic learning pipeline. However, these methods have a "type mismatch" with video data (such as Ego4D), the largest prior datasets available for robotics, since video offers observation-only experience without the action or reward annotations needed for RL methods. In this paper, we develop a system for leveraging large-scale human video datasets in robotic offline RL, based entirely on learning value functions via temporal-difference learning. We show that value learning on video datasets learns representations that are more conducive to downstream robotic offline RL than other approaches for learning from video data. Our system, called V-PTR, combines the benefits of pre-training on video data with robotic offline RL approaches that train on diverse robot data, resulting in value functions and policies for manipulation tasks that perform better, act robustly, and generalize broadly. On several manipulation tasks on a real WidowX robot, our framework produces policies that greatly improve over prior methods. Our video and additional details can be found at https://dibyaghosh.com/vptr/

* First three authors contributed equally 
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Q-Transformer: Scalable Offline Reinforcement Learning via Autoregressive Q-Functions

Sep 18, 2023
Yevgen Chebotar, Quan Vuong, Alex Irpan, Karol Hausman, Fei Xia, Yao Lu, Aviral Kumar, Tianhe Yu, Alexander Herzog, Karl Pertsch, Keerthana Gopalakrishnan, Julian Ibarz, Ofir Nachum, Sumedh Sontakke, Grecia Salazar, Huong T Tran, Jodilyn Peralta, Clayton Tan, Deeksha Manjunath, Jaspiar Singht, Brianna Zitkovich, Tomas Jackson, Kanishka Rao, Chelsea Finn, Sergey Levine

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In this work, we present a scalable reinforcement learning method for training multi-task policies from large offline datasets that can leverage both human demonstrations and autonomously collected data. Our method uses a Transformer to provide a scalable representation for Q-functions trained via offline temporal difference backups. We therefore refer to the method as Q-Transformer. By discretizing each action dimension and representing the Q-value of each action dimension as separate tokens, we can apply effective high-capacity sequence modeling techniques for Q-learning. We present several design decisions that enable good performance with offline RL training, and show that Q-Transformer outperforms prior offline RL algorithms and imitation learning techniques on a large diverse real-world robotic manipulation task suite. The project's website and videos can be found at https://q-transformer.github.io

* See website at https://q-transformer.github.io 
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BridgeData V2: A Dataset for Robot Learning at Scale

Aug 24, 2023
Homer Walke, Kevin Black, Abraham Lee, Moo Jin Kim, Max Du, Chongyi Zheng, Tony Zhao, Philippe Hansen-Estruch, Quan Vuong, Andre He, Vivek Myers, Kuan Fang, Chelsea Finn, Sergey Levine

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We introduce BridgeData V2, a large and diverse dataset of robotic manipulation behaviors designed to facilitate research on scalable robot learning. BridgeData V2 contains 60,096 trajectories collected across 24 environments on a publicly available low-cost robot. BridgeData V2 provides extensive task and environment variability, leading to skills that can generalize across environments, domains, and institutions, making the dataset a useful resource for a broad range of researchers. Additionally, the dataset is compatible with a wide variety of open-vocabulary, multi-task learning methods conditioned on goal images or natural language instructions. In our experiments, we train 6 state-of-the-art imitation learning and offline reinforcement learning methods on our dataset, and find that they succeed on a suite of tasks requiring varying amounts of generalization. We also demonstrate that the performance of these methods improves with more data and higher capacity models, and that training on a greater variety of skills leads to improved generalization. By publicly sharing BridgeData V2 and our pre-trained models, we aim to accelerate research in scalable robot learning methods. Project page at https://rail-berkeley.github.io/bridgedata

* 9 pages 
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RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Control

Jul 28, 2023
Anthony Brohan, Noah Brown, Justice Carbajal, Yevgen Chebotar, Xi Chen, Krzysztof Choromanski, Tianli Ding, Danny Driess, Avinava Dubey, Chelsea Finn, Pete Florence, Chuyuan Fu, Montse Gonzalez Arenas, Keerthana Gopalakrishnan, Kehang Han, Karol Hausman, Alexander Herzog, Jasmine Hsu, Brian Ichter, Alex Irpan, Nikhil Joshi, Ryan Julian, Dmitry Kalashnikov, Yuheng Kuang, Isabel Leal, Lisa Lee, Tsang-Wei Edward Lee, Sergey Levine, Yao Lu, Henryk Michalewski, Igor Mordatch, Karl Pertsch, Kanishka Rao, Krista Reymann, Michael Ryoo, Grecia Salazar, Pannag Sanketi, Pierre Sermanet, Jaspiar Singh, Anikait Singh, Radu Soricut, Huong Tran, Vincent Vanhoucke, Quan Vuong, Ayzaan Wahid, Stefan Welker, Paul Wohlhart, Jialin Wu, Fei Xia, Ted Xiao, Peng Xu, Sichun Xu, Tianhe Yu, Brianna Zitkovich

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We study how vision-language models trained on Internet-scale data can be incorporated directly into end-to-end robotic control to boost generalization and enable emergent semantic reasoning. Our goal is to enable a single end-to-end trained model to both learn to map robot observations to actions and enjoy the benefits of large-scale pretraining on language and vision-language data from the web. To this end, we propose to co-fine-tune state-of-the-art vision-language models on both robotic trajectory data and Internet-scale vision-language tasks, such as visual question answering. In contrast to other approaches, we propose a simple, general recipe to achieve this goal: in order to fit both natural language responses and robotic actions into the same format, we express the actions as text tokens and incorporate them directly into the training set of the model in the same way as natural language tokens. We refer to such category of models as vision-language-action models (VLA) and instantiate an example of such a model, which we call RT-2. Our extensive evaluation (6k evaluation trials) shows that our approach leads to performant robotic policies and enables RT-2 to obtain a range of emergent capabilities from Internet-scale training. This includes significantly improved generalization to novel objects, the ability to interpret commands not present in the robot training data (such as placing an object onto a particular number or icon), and the ability to perform rudimentary reasoning in response to user commands (such as picking up the smallest or largest object, or the one closest to another object). We further show that incorporating chain of thought reasoning allows RT-2 to perform multi-stage semantic reasoning, for example figuring out which object to pick up for use as an improvised hammer (a rock), or which type of drink is best suited for someone who is tired (an energy drink).

* Website: https://robotics-transformer.github.io/ 
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PaLM-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Model

Mar 06, 2023
Danny Driess, Fei Xia, Mehdi S. M. Sajjadi, Corey Lynch, Aakanksha Chowdhery, Brian Ichter, Ayzaan Wahid, Jonathan Tompson, Quan Vuong, Tianhe Yu, Wenlong Huang, Yevgen Chebotar, Pierre Sermanet, Daniel Duckworth, Sergey Levine, Vincent Vanhoucke, Karol Hausman, Marc Toussaint, Klaus Greff, Andy Zeng, Igor Mordatch, Pete Florence

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Large language models excel at a wide range of complex tasks. However, enabling general inference in the real world, e.g., for robotics problems, raises the challenge of grounding. We propose embodied language models to directly incorporate real-world continuous sensor modalities into language models and thereby establish the link between words and percepts. Input to our embodied language model are multi-modal sentences that interleave visual, continuous state estimation, and textual input encodings. We train these encodings end-to-end, in conjunction with a pre-trained large language model, for multiple embodied tasks including sequential robotic manipulation planning, visual question answering, and captioning. Our evaluations show that PaLM-E, a single large embodied multimodal model, can address a variety of embodied reasoning tasks, from a variety of observation modalities, on multiple embodiments, and further, exhibits positive transfer: the model benefits from diverse joint training across internet-scale language, vision, and visual-language domains. Our largest model, PaLM-E-562B with 562B parameters, in addition to being trained on robotics tasks, is a visual-language generalist with state-of-the-art performance on OK-VQA, and retains generalist language capabilities with increasing scale.

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