A Probabilistic Model for Skill Acquisition with Switching Latent Feedback Controllers

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Zhang, Juyan, Kulic, Dana, Burke, Michael
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Zhang, Juyan
Kulic, Dana
Burke, Michael
author_facet Zhang, Juyan
Kulic, Dana
Burke, Michael
contents Manipulation tasks often consist of subtasks, each representing a distinct skill. Mastering these skills is essential for robots, as it enhances their autonomy, efficiency, adaptability, and ability to work in their environment. Learning from demonstrations allows robots to rapidly acquire new skills without starting from scratch, with demonstrations typically sequencing skills to achieve tasks. Behaviour cloning approaches to learning from demonstration commonly rely on mixture density network output heads to predict robot actions. In this work, we first reinterpret the mixture density network as a library of feedback controllers (or skills) conditioned on latent states. This arises from the observation that a one-layer linear network is functionally equivalent to a classical feedback controller, with network weights corresponding to controller gains. We use this insight to derive a probabilistic graphical model that combines these elements, describing the skill acquisition process as segmentation in a latent space, where each skill policy functions as a feedback control law in this latent space. Our approach significantly improves not only task success rate, but also robustness to observation noise when trained with human demonstrations. Our physical robot experiments further show that the induced robustness improves model deployment on robots.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_14191
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Probabilistic Model for Skill Acquisition with Switching Latent Feedback Controllers
Zhang, Juyan
Kulic, Dana
Burke, Michael
Robotics
Manipulation tasks often consist of subtasks, each representing a distinct skill. Mastering these skills is essential for robots, as it enhances their autonomy, efficiency, adaptability, and ability to work in their environment. Learning from demonstrations allows robots to rapidly acquire new skills without starting from scratch, with demonstrations typically sequencing skills to achieve tasks. Behaviour cloning approaches to learning from demonstration commonly rely on mixture density network output heads to predict robot actions. In this work, we first reinterpret the mixture density network as a library of feedback controllers (or skills) conditioned on latent states. This arises from the observation that a one-layer linear network is functionally equivalent to a classical feedback controller, with network weights corresponding to controller gains. We use this insight to derive a probabilistic graphical model that combines these elements, describing the skill acquisition process as segmentation in a latent space, where each skill policy functions as a feedback control law in this latent space. Our approach significantly improves not only task success rate, but also robustness to observation noise when trained with human demonstrations. Our physical robot experiments further show that the induced robustness improves model deployment on robots.
title A Probabilistic Model for Skill Acquisition with Switching Latent Feedback Controllers
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.14191