about
Render and Diffuse: Aligning Image and Action for Behaviour Cloning (arxiv.org)
1 point by geox on Jun 17, 2024 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Instead of turning camera images into robot joint commands, this approach draws a virtual picture of the robot in the image and repeatedly updates it until it becomes the action. It handled new positions better and needed less data than the usual image-to-action approach.

Abstract · Render and Diffuse: Aligning Image and Action Spaces for Diffusion-based Behaviour Cloning

In the field of Robot Learning, the complex mapping between high-dimensional observations such as RGB images and low-level robotic actions, two inherently very different spaces, constitutes a complex learning problem, especially with limited amounts of data. In this work, we introduce Render and Diffuse (R&D) a method that unifies low-level robot actions and RGB observations within the image space using virtual renders of the 3D model of the robot. Using this joint observation-action representation it computes low-level robot actions using a learnt diffusion process that iteratively updates the virtual renders of the robot. This space unification simplifies the learning problem and introduces inductive biases that are crucial for sample efficiency and spatial generalisation. We thoroughly evaluate several variants of R&D in simulation and showcase their applicability on six everyday tasks in the real world. Our results show that R&D exhibits strong spatial generalisation capabilities and is more sample efficient than more common image-to-action methods.

Vitalis Vosylius, Younggyo Seo, Jafar Uruç, Stephen James
arXiv:2405.18196 · cs.RO, cs.AI, cs.CV, cs.LG · submitted May 28, 2024
abstract · pdf · html · Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2024. Videos are available on our project webpage at https://vv19.github.io/render-and-diffuse/

add comment on HN