Learning with Language-Guided State Abstractions

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Peng, Andi, Sucholutsky, Ilia, Li, Belinda Z., Sumers, Theodore R., Griffiths, Thomas L., Andreas, Jacob, Shah, Julie A.
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Peng, Andi
Sucholutsky, Ilia
Li, Belinda Z.
Sumers, Theodore R.
Griffiths, Thomas L.
Andreas, Jacob
Shah, Julie A.
author_facet Peng, Andi
Sucholutsky, Ilia
Li, Belinda Z.
Sumers, Theodore R.
Griffiths, Thomas L.
Andreas, Jacob
Shah, Julie A.
contents We describe a framework for using natural language to design state abstractions for imitation learning. Generalizable policy learning in high-dimensional observation spaces is facilitated by well-designed state representations, which can surface important features of an environment and hide irrelevant ones. These state representations are typically manually specified, or derived from other labor-intensive labeling procedures. Our method, LGA (language-guided abstraction), uses a combination of natural language supervision and background knowledge from language models (LMs) to automatically build state representations tailored to unseen tasks. In LGA, a user first provides a (possibly incomplete) description of a target task in natural language; next, a pre-trained LM translates this task description into a state abstraction function that masks out irrelevant features; finally, an imitation policy is trained using a small number of demonstrations and LGA-generated abstract states. Experiments on simulated robotic tasks show that LGA yields state abstractions similar to those designed by humans, but in a fraction of the time, and that these abstractions improve generalization and robustness in the presence of spurious correlations and ambiguous specifications. We illustrate the utility of the learned abstractions on mobile manipulation tasks with a Spot robot.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2402_18759
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning with Language-Guided State Abstractions
Peng, Andi
Sucholutsky, Ilia
Li, Belinda Z.
Sumers, Theodore R.
Griffiths, Thomas L.
Andreas, Jacob
Shah, Julie A.
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
We describe a framework for using natural language to design state abstractions for imitation learning. Generalizable policy learning in high-dimensional observation spaces is facilitated by well-designed state representations, which can surface important features of an environment and hide irrelevant ones. These state representations are typically manually specified, or derived from other labor-intensive labeling procedures. Our method, LGA (language-guided abstraction), uses a combination of natural language supervision and background knowledge from language models (LMs) to automatically build state representations tailored to unseen tasks. In LGA, a user first provides a (possibly incomplete) description of a target task in natural language; next, a pre-trained LM translates this task description into a state abstraction function that masks out irrelevant features; finally, an imitation policy is trained using a small number of demonstrations and LGA-generated abstract states. Experiments on simulated robotic tasks show that LGA yields state abstractions similar to those designed by humans, but in a fraction of the time, and that these abstractions improve generalization and robustness in the presence of spurious correlations and ambiguous specifications. We illustrate the utility of the learned abstractions on mobile manipulation tasks with a Spot robot.
title Learning with Language-Guided State Abstractions
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.18759