Unpacking Failure Modes of Generative Policies: Runtime Monitoring of Consistency and Progress

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Agia, Christopher, Sinha, Rohan, Yang, Jingyun, Cao, Zi-ang, Antonova, Rika, Pavone, Marco, Bohg, Jeannette
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Agia, Christopher
Sinha, Rohan
Yang, Jingyun
Cao, Zi-ang
Antonova, Rika
Pavone, Marco
Bohg, Jeannette
author_facet Agia, Christopher
Sinha, Rohan
Yang, Jingyun
Cao, Zi-ang
Antonova, Rika
Pavone, Marco
Bohg, Jeannette
contents Robot behavior policies trained via imitation learning are prone to failure under conditions that deviate from their training data. Thus, algorithms that monitor learned policies at test time and provide early warnings of failure are necessary to facilitate scalable deployment. We propose Sentinel, a runtime monitoring framework that splits the detection of failures into two complementary categories: 1) Erratic failures, which we detect using statistical measures of temporal action consistency, and 2) task progression failures, where we use Vision Language Models (VLMs) to detect when the policy confidently and consistently takes actions that do not solve the task. Our approach has two key strengths. First, because learned policies exhibit diverse failure modes, combining complementary detectors leads to significantly higher accuracy at failure detection. Second, using a statistical temporal action consistency measure ensures that we quickly detect when multimodal, generative policies exhibit erratic behavior at negligible computational cost. In contrast, we only use VLMs to detect failure modes that are less time-sensitive. We demonstrate our approach in the context of diffusion policies trained on robotic mobile manipulation domains in both simulation and the real world. By unifying temporal consistency detection and VLM runtime monitoring, Sentinel detects 18% more failures than using either of the two detectors alone and significantly outperforms baselines, thus highlighting the importance of assigning specialized detectors to complementary categories of failure. Qualitative results are made available at https://sites.google.com/stanford.edu/sentinel.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_04640
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Unpacking Failure Modes of Generative Policies: Runtime Monitoring of Consistency and Progress
Agia, Christopher
Sinha, Rohan
Yang, Jingyun
Cao, Zi-ang
Antonova, Rika
Pavone, Marco
Bohg, Jeannette
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
I.2.6; I.2.7; I.2.9; I.2.10
Robot behavior policies trained via imitation learning are prone to failure under conditions that deviate from their training data. Thus, algorithms that monitor learned policies at test time and provide early warnings of failure are necessary to facilitate scalable deployment. We propose Sentinel, a runtime monitoring framework that splits the detection of failures into two complementary categories: 1) Erratic failures, which we detect using statistical measures of temporal action consistency, and 2) task progression failures, where we use Vision Language Models (VLMs) to detect when the policy confidently and consistently takes actions that do not solve the task. Our approach has two key strengths. First, because learned policies exhibit diverse failure modes, combining complementary detectors leads to significantly higher accuracy at failure detection. Second, using a statistical temporal action consistency measure ensures that we quickly detect when multimodal, generative policies exhibit erratic behavior at negligible computational cost. In contrast, we only use VLMs to detect failure modes that are less time-sensitive. We demonstrate our approach in the context of diffusion policies trained on robotic mobile manipulation domains in both simulation and the real world. By unifying temporal consistency detection and VLM runtime monitoring, Sentinel detects 18% more failures than using either of the two detectors alone and significantly outperforms baselines, thus highlighting the importance of assigning specialized detectors to complementary categories of failure. Qualitative results are made available at https://sites.google.com/stanford.edu/sentinel.
title Unpacking Failure Modes of Generative Policies: Runtime Monitoring of Consistency and Progress
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
I.2.6; I.2.7; I.2.9; I.2.10
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.04640