Towards Multi-Morphology Controllers with Diversity and Knowledge Distillation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Mertan, Alican, Cheney, Nick
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Mertan, Alican
Cheney, Nick
author_facet Mertan, Alican
Cheney, Nick
contents Finding controllers that perform well across multiple morphologies is an important milestone for large-scale robotics, in line with recent advances via foundation models in other areas of machine learning. However, the challenges of learning a single controller to control multiple morphologies make the `one robot one task' paradigm dominant in the field. To alleviate these challenges, we present a pipeline that: (1) leverages Quality Diversity algorithms like MAP-Elites to create a dataset of many single-task/single-morphology teacher controllers, then (2) distills those diverse controllers into a single multi-morphology controller that performs well across many different body plans by mimicking the sensory-action patterns of the teacher controllers via supervised learning. The distilled controller scales well with the number of teachers/morphologies and shows emergent properties. It generalizes to unseen morphologies in a zero-shot manner, providing robustness to morphological perturbations and instant damage recovery. Lastly, the distilled controller is also independent of the teacher controllers -- we can distill the teacher's knowledge into any controller model, making our approach synergistic with architectural improvements and existing training algorithms for teacher controllers.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_14625
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Towards Multi-Morphology Controllers with Diversity and Knowledge Distillation
Mertan, Alican
Cheney, Nick
Robotics
Machine Learning
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
Finding controllers that perform well across multiple morphologies is an important milestone for large-scale robotics, in line with recent advances via foundation models in other areas of machine learning. However, the challenges of learning a single controller to control multiple morphologies make the `one robot one task' paradigm dominant in the field. To alleviate these challenges, we present a pipeline that: (1) leverages Quality Diversity algorithms like MAP-Elites to create a dataset of many single-task/single-morphology teacher controllers, then (2) distills those diverse controllers into a single multi-morphology controller that performs well across many different body plans by mimicking the sensory-action patterns of the teacher controllers via supervised learning. The distilled controller scales well with the number of teachers/morphologies and shows emergent properties. It generalizes to unseen morphologies in a zero-shot manner, providing robustness to morphological perturbations and instant damage recovery. Lastly, the distilled controller is also independent of the teacher controllers -- we can distill the teacher's knowledge into any controller model, making our approach synergistic with architectural improvements and existing training algorithms for teacher controllers.
title Towards Multi-Morphology Controllers with Diversity and Knowledge Distillation
topic Robotics
Machine Learning
Neural and Evolutionary Computing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.14625