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Main Authors: Liu, Jingshuai, Andres, Alain, Jiang, Yonghang, Luo, Xichun, Shu, Wenmiao, Tsaftaris, Sotirios A.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.02724
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author Liu, Jingshuai
Andres, Alain
Jiang, Yonghang
Luo, Xichun
Shu, Wenmiao
Tsaftaris, Sotirios A.
author_facet Liu, Jingshuai
Andres, Alain
Jiang, Yonghang
Luo, Xichun
Shu, Wenmiao
Tsaftaris, Sotirios A.
contents Surgical robot task automation has recently attracted great attention due to its potential to benefit both surgeons and patients. Reinforcement learning (RL) based approaches have demonstrated promising ability to provide solutions to automated surgical manipulations on various tasks. To address the exploration challenge, expert demonstrations can be utilized to enhance the learning efficiency via imitation learning (IL) approaches. However, the successes of such methods normally rely on both states and action labels. Unfortunately action labels can be hard to capture or their manual annotation is prohibitively expensive owing to the requirement for expert knowledge. It therefore remains an appealing and open problem to leverage expert demonstrations composed of pure states in RL. In this work, we present an actor-critic RL framework, termed AC-SSIL, to overcome this challenge of learning with state-only demonstrations collected by following an unknown expert policy. It adopts a self-supervised IL method, dubbed SSIL, to effectively incorporate demonstrated states into RL paradigms by retrieving from demonstrates the nearest neighbours of the query state and utilizing the bootstrapping of actor networks. We showcase through experiments on an open-source surgical simulation platform that our method delivers remarkable improvements over the RL baseline and exhibits comparable performance against action based IL methods, which implies the efficacy and potential of our method for expert demonstration-guided learning scenarios.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_02724
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Surgical Task Automation Using Actor-Critic Frameworks and Self-Supervised Imitation Learning
Liu, Jingshuai
Andres, Alain
Jiang, Yonghang
Luo, Xichun
Shu, Wenmiao
Tsaftaris, Sotirios A.
Robotics
Surgical robot task automation has recently attracted great attention due to its potential to benefit both surgeons and patients. Reinforcement learning (RL) based approaches have demonstrated promising ability to provide solutions to automated surgical manipulations on various tasks. To address the exploration challenge, expert demonstrations can be utilized to enhance the learning efficiency via imitation learning (IL) approaches. However, the successes of such methods normally rely on both states and action labels. Unfortunately action labels can be hard to capture or their manual annotation is prohibitively expensive owing to the requirement for expert knowledge. It therefore remains an appealing and open problem to leverage expert demonstrations composed of pure states in RL. In this work, we present an actor-critic RL framework, termed AC-SSIL, to overcome this challenge of learning with state-only demonstrations collected by following an unknown expert policy. It adopts a self-supervised IL method, dubbed SSIL, to effectively incorporate demonstrated states into RL paradigms by retrieving from demonstrates the nearest neighbours of the query state and utilizing the bootstrapping of actor networks. We showcase through experiments on an open-source surgical simulation platform that our method delivers remarkable improvements over the RL baseline and exhibits comparable performance against action based IL methods, which implies the efficacy and potential of our method for expert demonstration-guided learning scenarios.
title Surgical Task Automation Using Actor-Critic Frameworks and Self-Supervised Imitation Learning
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.02724