Feature Extractor or Decision Maker: Rethinking the Role of Visual Encoders in Visuomotor Policies

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Wang, Ruiyu, Zhuang, Zheyu, Jin, Shutong, Ingelhag, Nils, Kragic, Danica, Pokorny, Florian T.
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Wang, Ruiyu
Zhuang, Zheyu
Jin, Shutong
Ingelhag, Nils
Kragic, Danica
Pokorny, Florian T.
author_facet Wang, Ruiyu
Zhuang, Zheyu
Jin, Shutong
Ingelhag, Nils
Kragic, Danica
Pokorny, Florian T.
contents An end-to-end (E2E) visuomotor policy is typically treated as a unified whole, but recent approaches using out-of-domain (OOD) data to pretrain the visual encoder have cleanly separated the visual encoder from the network, with the remainder referred to as the policy. We propose Visual Alignment Testing, an experimental framework designed to evaluate the validity of this functional separation. Our results indicate that in E2E-trained models, visual encoders actively contribute to decision-making resulting from motor data supervision, contradicting the assumed functional separation. In contrast, OOD-pretrained models, where encoders lack this capability, experience an average performance drop of 42\% in our benchmark results, compared to the state-of-the-art performance achieved by E2E policies. We believe this initial exploration of visual encoders' role can provide a first step towards guiding future pretraining methods to address their decision-making ability, such as developing task-conditioned or context-aware encoders.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2409_20248
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Feature Extractor or Decision Maker: Rethinking the Role of Visual Encoders in Visuomotor Policies
Wang, Ruiyu
Zhuang, Zheyu
Jin, Shutong
Ingelhag, Nils
Kragic, Danica
Pokorny, Florian T.
Robotics
An end-to-end (E2E) visuomotor policy is typically treated as a unified whole, but recent approaches using out-of-domain (OOD) data to pretrain the visual encoder have cleanly separated the visual encoder from the network, with the remainder referred to as the policy. We propose Visual Alignment Testing, an experimental framework designed to evaluate the validity of this functional separation. Our results indicate that in E2E-trained models, visual encoders actively contribute to decision-making resulting from motor data supervision, contradicting the assumed functional separation. In contrast, OOD-pretrained models, where encoders lack this capability, experience an average performance drop of 42\% in our benchmark results, compared to the state-of-the-art performance achieved by E2E policies. We believe this initial exploration of visual encoders' role can provide a first step towards guiding future pretraining methods to address their decision-making ability, such as developing task-conditioned or context-aware encoders.
title Feature Extractor or Decision Maker: Rethinking the Role of Visual Encoders in Visuomotor Policies
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.20248