94 accepted papers
Despite the recent success of modern imitation learning methods in robot manipulation, their performance is often constrained by geometric variations due to limited data diversity. Leveraging powerful 3D generative models and vision foundation models (VFMs), the proposed AffordGen framework overcome
Animatronic faces are a central component of socially interactive robots, enabling rich nonverbal communication through facial articulation. However, state-of-the-art animatronic faces are typically tailored systems: each new facial geometry requires extensive manual mechanical redesign, making larg…
Dynamic manipulation is a key capability for advancing robot performance, enabling skills such as tossing. While recent learning-based approaches have pushed the field forward, most methods still rely on manually designed action parameterizations, limiting their ability to produce the highly coordin…
Data scarcity fundamentally limits the generalization of bimanual dexterous manipulation, as real-world data collection for dexterous hands is expensive and labor-intensive. Human manipulation videos, as a direct carrier of manipulation knowledge, offer significant potential for scaling up robot lea…
We propose ERA, a new paradigm for entropy-constrained policy via output activation. It guarantees minimum sampling entropy by transforming the outputs of the last layer. Our approach demonstrates broad effectiveness across different domains: 1) for large language models~(LLMs), boosting the AIME 20…
Post-training algorithms based on deep reinforcement learning can push the limits of robotic models for specific objectives, such as generalizability, accuracy, and robustness. However, Intervention-requiring Failures (IR Failures) (e.g., a robot spilling water or breaking fragile glass) during real…
We present Galaxy Open-World Dataset, a large-scale, diverse collection of robot behaviors recorded in authentic human living and working environments. All demonstrations are gathered using a consistent robotic embodiment, paired with precise subtask-level language annotations to facilitate both tra…
Visuomotor policy learning has witnessed substantial progress in robotic manipulation, with recent approaches predominantly relying on generative models to model the action distribution. However, these methods often overlook the critical coupling between visual perception and action prediction. In t…
Diffusion policies have emerged as a powerful framework for robotic visuomotor control, yet they often lack the robustness to recover from subtask failures in long-horizon, multi-stage tasks and their learned representations of observations are often difficult to interpret. In this work, we propose …
Cross-embodiment manipulation is crucial for enhancing the scalability of robot manipulation and reducing the high cost of data collection. However, the significant differences between embodiments, such as variations in action spaces and structural disparities, pose challenges for joint training acr…
Dexterous manipulation remains challenging due to the cost of collecting real-robot teleoperation data, the heterogeneity of hand embodiments, and the high dimensionality of control. We present UniDex, a robot foundation suite that couples a large-scale robot-centric dataset with a unified vision-la
General visual representations learned from web-scale datasets for robotics have achieved great success in recent years, enabling data-efficient robot learning on manipulation tasks; yet these pre-trained representations are mostly on 2D images, neglecting the inherent 3D nature of the world. Howeve…
Deep reinforcement learning for continuous control has recently achieved impressive progress. However, existing methods often suffer from primacy bias—a tendency to overfit early experiences stored in the replay buffer—which limits an RL agent’s sample efficiency and generalizability. A common exist…
Catching objects in flight (i.e., thrown objects) is a common daily skill for humans, yet it presents a significant challenge for robots. This task requires a robot with agile and accurate motion, a large spatial workspace, and the ability to interact with diverse objects. In this paper, we build a
Dexterous hand teleoperation plays a pivotal role in enabling robots to achieve human-level manipulation dexterity. However, current teleoperation systems often rely on expensive equipment and lack multi-modal sensory feedback, restricting human operators’ ability to perceive object properties and p…
The development of vision-based tactile sensors has significantly enhanced robots’ perception and manipulation capabilities, especially for tasks requiring contact-rich interactions with objects. In this work, we present DTactive, a novel vision-based tactile sensor with active surfaces. DTactive in
Visuomotor policies have shown great promise in robotic manipulation but often require substantial amounts of human-collected data for effective performance. A key reason underlying the data demands is their limited spatial generalization capability, which necessitates extensive data collection acro…
Imitation learning has shown great promise in robotic manipulation, but the policy’s execution is often unsatisfactorily slow due to commonly tardy demonstrations collected by human operators. In this work, we present DemoSpeedup, a self-supervised method to accelerate visuomotor policy execution vi…
Dense 3D correspondence can enhance robotic manipulation by enabling the generalization of spatial, functional, and dynamic information from one object to an unseen counterpart. Compared to shape correspondence, semantic correspondence is more effective in generalizing across different object catego…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has made significant strides in legged robot control, enabling locomotion across diverse terrains and complex loco-manipulation capabilities. However, the commonly used position or velocity tracking-based objectives are agnostic to forces experienced by the robot, leading…
Legged locomotion is not just about mobility; it also encompasses crucial objectives such as energy efficiency, safety, and user experience, which are vital for real-world applications. However, key factors such as battery power consumption and stepping noise are often inaccurately modeled or missin
Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets), a new family of probabilistic samplers, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities to generate diverse sets of high-reward candidates, in contrast to standard return maximization approaches (e.g., reinforcement learning) which often converge to a single optimal s…
Visual deep reinforcement learning (RL) enables robots to acquire skills from visual input for unstructured tasks. However, current algorithms suffer from low sample efficiency, limiting their practical applicability. In this work, we present MENTOR, a method that improves both the *architecture* an…
Previous animatronic faces struggle to effectively express emotions due to both hardware and software limitations. On the hardware side, earlier approaches either used rigid-driven mechanisms, which provide precise control but are difficult to design within constrained spaces, or tendon-driven mecha…
Humans can accomplish complex contact-rich tasks using vision and touch, with highly reactive capabilities such as quick adjustments to environmental changes and adaptive control of contact forces; however, this remains challenging for robots. Existing visual imitation learning (IL) approaches rely…
Fully leveraging the loco-manipulation capabilities of a quadruped robot equipped with a robotic arm is non-trivial, as it requires controlling all degrees of freedom (DoFs) of the quadruped robot to achieve effective whole-body coordination. In this letter, we propose a novel framework RoboDuet, wh
The pre-training of visual representations has enhanced the efficiency of robot learning. Due to the lack of large-scale in-domain robotic datasets, prior works utilize in-the-wild human videos to pre-train robotic visual representation. Despite their promising results, representations from human vi…
Visual imitation learning methods demonstrate strong performance, yet they lack generalization when faced with visual input perturbations like variations in lighting and textures. This limitation hampers their practical application in real-world settings. To address this, we propose ***Stem-OB*** th…
3D assembly tasks, such as furniture assembly and component fitting, play a crucial role in daily life and represent essential capabilities for future home robots. Existing benchmarks and datasets predominantly focus on assembling geometric fragments or factory parts, which fall short in addressing…
Reinforcement learning struggles in the face of long-horizon tasks and sparse goals due to the difficulty in manual reward specification. While existing methods address this by adding intrinsic rewards, they may fail to provide meaningful guidance in long-horizon decision-making tasks with large sta…
Imitation learning provides an efficient way to teach robots dexterous skills; however, learning complex skills robustly and generalizablely usually consumes large amounts of human demonstrations. To tackle this challenging problem, we present 3D Diffusion Policy (DP3), a novel visual imitation lear…
The advancements in vision-based tactile sensors have boosted the aptitude of robots to perform contact-rich manipulation, particularly when precise positioning and contact state of the manipulated objects are crucial for successful execution. In this work, we present <underline xmlns:mml="http://ww
Dexterous manipulation through imitation learning has gained significant attention in robotics research. The collection of high-quality expert data holds paramount importance when using imitation learning. The existing approaches for acquiring expert data commonly involve utilizing a data glove to c…
The varying significance of distinct primitive behaviors during the policy learning process has been overlooked by prior model-free RL algorithms. Leveraging this insight, we explore the causal relationship between different action dimensions and rewards to evaluate the significance of various primi…
We present ArrayBot, a distributed manipulation system consisting of a 16 × 16 array of vertically sliding pillars integrated with tactile sensors. Functionally, ArrayBot is designed to simultaneously support, perceive, and manipulate the tabletop objects. Towards generalizable distributed manipulat…
Dyna-style model-based reinforcement learning contains two phases: model rollouts to generate sample for policy learning and real environment exploration using current policy for dynamics model learning. However, due to the complex real-world environment, it is inevitable to learn an imperfect dynam…
Manipulating deformable objects is a ubiquitous task in household environments, demanding adequate representation and accurate dynamics prediction due to the objects’ infinite degrees of freedom. This work proposes DeformNet, which utilizes latent space modeling with a learned 3D representation mode…
Robot co-design, where the morphology of a robot is optimized jointly with a learned policy to solve a specific task, is an emerging area of research. It holds particular promise for soft robots, which are amenable to novel manufacturing techniques that can realize learned morphologies and actuators…
Visual reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise in continuous control tasks. Despite its progress, current algorithms are still unsatisfactory in virtually every aspect of the performance such as sample efficiency, asymptotic performance, and their robustness to the choice of random seeds. In t…
Robotic simulation today remains challenging to scale up due to the human efforts required to create diverse simulation tasks and scenes. Simulation-trained policies also face scalability issues as many sim-to-real methods focus on a single task. To address these challenges, this work proposes GenSi…
Collecting large amounts of real-world interaction data to train general robotic policies is often prohibitively expensive, thus motivating the use of simulation data. However, existing methods for data generation have generally focused on scene-level diversity (e.g., object instances and poses) rat…
Detecting 3D keypoints with semantic consistency is widely used in many scenarios such as pose estimation, shape registration and robotics. Currently, most unsupervised 3D keypoint detection methods focus on the rigid-body objects. However, when faced with deformable objects, the keypoints they iden…
Quadruped robots are progressively being integrated into human environments. Despite the growing locomotion capabilities of quadrupedal robots, their interaction with objects in realistic scenes is still limited. While additional robotic arms on quadrupedal robots enable manipulating objects, they a…
Can we endow visuomotor robots with generalization capabilities to operate in diverse open-world scenarios? In this paper, we propose Maniwhere, a generalizable framework tailored for visual reinforcement learning, enabling the trained robot policies to generalize across a combination of multiple vi…
Can we generate a control policy for an agent using just one demonstration of desired behaviors as a prompt, as effortlessly as creating an image from a textual description? In this paper, we present **Make-An-Agent**, a novel policy parameter generator that leverages the power of conditional diffus…
Training reinforcement learning policies using environment interaction data collected from varying policies or dynamics presents a fundamental challenge. Existing works often overlook the distribution discrepancies induced by policy or dynamics shifts, or rely on specialized algorithms with task pri…
Off-policy reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved notable success in tackling many complex real-world tasks, by leveraging previously collected data for policy learning. However, most existing off-policy RL algorithms fail to maximally exploit the information in the replay buffer, limiting sample…
We present Premier-TACO, a multitask feature representation learning approach designed to improve few-shot policy learning efficiency in sequential decision-making tasks. Premier-TACO leverages a subset of multitask offline datasets for pretraining a general feature representation, which captures cr…
Sequential decision-making algorithms such as reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world scenarios inevitably face environments with partial observability. This paper scrutinizes the effectiveness of a popular architecture, namely Transformers, in Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDP…
We present RiEMann, an end-to-end near Real-time SE(3)-Equivariant Robot Manipulation imitation learning framework from scene point cloud input. Compared to previous methods that rely on descriptor field matching, RiEMann directly predicts the target actions for manipulation without any object segme…
Learning high-quality $Q$-value functions plays a key role in the success of many modern off-policy deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. Previous works primarily focus on addressing the value overestimation issue, an outcome of adopting function approximators and off-policy learning. Deviati…
Combining offline and online reinforcement learning (RL) is crucial for efficient and safe learning. However, previous approaches treat offline and online learning as separate procedures, resulting in redundant designs and limited performance. We ask: *Can we achieve straightforward yet effective of…
Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to find a near-optimal policy using pre-collected datasets. Given recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) and their few-shot learning prowess, this paper introduces $\textbf{La}$nguage Models for $\textbf{Mo}$tion Control ($\textbf{LaMo}$), a general…
Despite recent progress in reinforcement learning (RL) from raw pixel data, sample inefficiency continues to present a substantial obstacle. Prior works have attempted to address this challenge by creating self-supervised auxiliary tasks, aiming to enrich the agent's learned representations with co…
In this paper, we present ContExtual Imitation Learning (CEIL), a general and broadly applicable algorithm for imitation learning (IL). Inspired by the formulation of hindsight information matching, we derive CEIL by explicitly learning a hindsight embedding function together with a contextual polic…
Pre-trained text-to-image generative models can produce diverse, semantically rich, and realistic images from natural language descriptions. Compared with language, images usually convey information with more details and less ambiguity. In this study, we propose Learning from the Void (LfVoid), a me…
Vision-based tactile sensors that can measure 3D geometry of the contacting objects are crucial for robots to perform dexterous manipulation tasks. However, the existing sensors are usually complicated to fabricate and delicate to extend. In this work, we novelly take advantage of the reflection pro…
Controlling agents remotely with deep reinforcement learning~(DRL) in the real world is yet to come. One crucial stepping stone is to devise RL algorithms that are robust in the face of dropped information from corrupted communication or malfunctioning sensors. Typical RL methods usually require con…
Bimanual manipulation is important for building intelligent robots that unlock richer skills than single arms. We consider a multi-object bimanual rearrangement task, where a reinforcement learning (RL) agent aims to jointly control two arms to rearrange these objects as fast as possible. Solving th…
Visual imitation learning provides an effective framework to learn skills from demonstrations. However, the quality of the provided demonstrations usually significantly affects the ability of an agent to acquire desired skills. Therefore, the standard visual imitation learning assumes near-optimal d…
Human hands possess remarkable dexterity and have long served as a source of inspiration for robotic manipulation. In this work, we propose a human $\textbf{H}$and-$\textbf{In}$formed visual representation learning framework to solve difficult $\textbf{Dex}$terous manipulation tasks ($\textbf{H-InDe…
Probabilistic dynamics model ensemble is widely used in existing model-based reinforcement learning methods as it outperforms a single dynamics model in both asymptotic performance and sample efficiency. In this paper, we provide both practical and theoretical insights on the empirical success of th…
Visual Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents trained on limited views face significant challenges in generalizing their learned abilities to unseen views. This inherent difficulty is known as the problem of $\textit{view generalization}$. In this work, we systematically categorize this fundamental prob…
In this paper, we examine the effectiveness of pre-training for visuo-motor control tasks. We revisit a simple Learning-from-Scratch (LfS) baseline that incorporates data augmentation and a shallow ConvNet, and find that this baseline is surprisingly competitive with recent approaches (PVR, MVP, R3M…
Visual Reinforcement Learning (Visual RL), coupled with high-dimensional observations, has consistently confronted the long-standing challenge of out-of-distribution generalization. Despite the focus on algorithms aimed at resolving visual generalization problems, we argue that the devil is in the e…
Humans excel in complex long-horizon soft body manipulation tasks via flexible tool use: bread baking requires a knife to slice the dough and a rolling pin to flatten it. Often regarded as a hallmark of human cognition, tool use in autonomous robots remains limited due to challenges in understanding…
Differentiable planning promises end-to-end differentiability and adaptivity. However, an issue prevents it from scaling up to larger-scale problems: they need to differentiate through forward iteration layers to compute gradients, which couples forward computation and backpropagation and needs to b…
The low-level sensory and motor signals in deep reinforcement learning, which exist in high-dimensional spaces such as image observations or motor torques, are inherently challenging to understand or utilize directly for downstream tasks. While sensory representations have been extensively studied,…
Can a robot manipulate intra-category unseen objects in arbitrary poses with the help of a mere demonstration of grasping pose on a single object instance? In this paper, we try to address this intriguing challenge by using USEEK, an unsupervised SE(3)-equivariant keypoints method that enjoys alignm…
One of the key challenges in visual Reinforcement Learning (RL) is to learn policies that can generalize to unseen environments. Recently, data augmentation techniques aiming at enhancing data diversity have demonstrated proven performance in improving the generalization ability of learned policies.…
A critical challenge in multi-agent reinforcement learning(MARL) is for multiple agents to efficiently accomplish complex, long-horizon tasks. The agents often have difficulties in cooperating on common goals, dividing complex tasks, and planning through several stages to make progress. We propose t…
We propose to address quadrupedal locomotion tasks using Reinforcement Learning (RL) with a Transformer-based model that learns to combine proprioceptive information and high-dimensional depth sensor inputs. While learning-based locomotion has made great advances using RL, most methods still rely on…
It has been a recent trend to leverage the power of supervised learning (SL) towards more effective reinforcement learning (RL) methods. We propose a novel phasic solution by alternating online RL and offline SL for tackling sparse-reward goal-conditioned problems. In the online phase, we perform RL…
Conservatism has led to significant progress in offline reinforcement learning (RL) where an agent learns from pre-collected datasets. However, as many real-world scenarios involve interaction among multiple agents, it is important to resolve offline RL in the multi-agent setting. Given the recent s…
Learning generalizable policies that can adapt to unseen environments remains challenging in visual Reinforcement Learning (RL). Existing approaches try to acquire a robust representation via diversifying the appearances of in-domain observations for better generalization. Limited by the specific ob…
Humans use all of their senses to accomplish different tasks in everyday activities. In contrast, existing work on robotic manipulation mostly relies on one, or occasionally two modalities, such as vision and touch. In this work, we systematically study how visual, auditory, and tactile perception c…
As Liszt once said “(a virtuoso) must call up scent and blossom, and breathe the breath of life”, a virtuoso plays the piano with passion, poetry, and extraordinary technical ability. Hence, piano playing, being a task that is quintessentially human, becomes a hallmark for roboticians and artificial…
We propose a simple, general and effective technique, Reward Randomization for discovering diverse strategic policies in complex multi-agent games. Combining reward randomization and policy gradient, we derive a new algorithm, Reward-Randomized Policy Gradient (RPG). RPG is able to discover a set of…
We propose a novel framework for multi-person 3D motion trajectory prediction. Our key observation is that a human's action and behaviors may highly depend on the other persons around. Thus, instead of predicting each human pose trajectory in isolation, we introduce a Multi-Range Transformers model…
Efficient exploration under sparse rewards remains a key challenge in deep reinforcement learning. Previous exploration methods (e.g., RND) have achieved strong results in multiple hard tasks. However, if there are multiple novel areas to explore, these methods often focus quickly on one without suf…
With the increased availability of rich tactile sensors, there is an an equally proportional need for open-source and integrated software capable of efficiently and effectively processing raw touch measurements into high-level signals that can be used for control and decision-making. In this paper,…
We propose a novel learning paradigm, Self-Imitation via Reduction (SIR), for solving compositional reinforcement learning problems. SIR is based on two core ideas: task reduction and self-imitation. Task reduction tackles a hard-to-solve task by actively reducing it to an easier task whose solution…
Synthesizing 3D human motion plays an important role in many graphics applications as well as understanding human activity. While many efforts have been made on generating realistic and natural human motion, most approaches neglect the importance of modeling human-scene interactions and affordances.…
It is a long-standing challenge to enable an intelligent agent to learn in one environment and generalize to an unseen environment without further data collection and finetuning. In this paper, we consider a zero shot generalization problem setup that complies with biological intelligent agents’ lea…
Generating diverse and natural behaviors is one of the long-standing goals for creating intelligent characters in the animated world. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised method for generating long-range, diverse and plausible behaviors to achieve a specific goal location. Our proposed method l…
Imitation learning, followed by reinforcement learning algorithms, is a promising paradigm to solve complex control tasks sample-efficiently. However, learning from demonstrations often suffers from the covariate shift problem, which results in cascading errors of the learned policy. We introduce a…
Multi-task learning is a very challenging problem in reinforcement learning. While training multiple tasks jointly allow the policies to share parameters across different tasks, the optimization problem becomes non-trivial: It remains unclear what parameters in the network should be reused across t…
In video prediction tasks, one major challenge is to capture the multi-modal nature of future contents and dynamics. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective framework that can efficiently predict plausible future states, where the key insight is that the potential distribution of a sequence…
Model-based reinforcement learning (RL) is considered to be a promising approach to reduce the sample complexity that hinders model-free RL. However, the theoretical understanding of such methods has been rather limited. This paper introduces a novel algorithmic framework for designing and analyzing…
A dynamic scene has two types of elements: those that move fluidly and can be predicted from previous frames, and those which are disoccluded (exposed) and cannot be extrapolated. Prior approaches to video prediction typically learn either to warp or to hallucinate future pixels, but not both. In th…
Robust perception-action models should be learned from training data with diverse visual appearances and realistic behaviors, yet current approaches to deep visuomotor policy learning have been generally limited to in-situ models learned from a single vehicle or simulation environment. We advocate l…
In this paper, we address the task of natural language object retrieval, to localize a target object within a given image based on a natural language query of the object. Natural language object retrieval differs from text-based image retrieval task as it involves spatial information about objects w…