Learning to Look: Seeking Information for Decision Making via Policy Factorization

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Dass, Shivin, Hu, Jiaheng, Abbatematteo, Ben, Stone, Peter, Martín-Martín, Roberto
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Dass, Shivin
Hu, Jiaheng
Abbatematteo, Ben
Stone, Peter
Martín-Martín, Roberto
author_facet Dass, Shivin
Hu, Jiaheng
Abbatematteo, Ben
Stone, Peter
Martín-Martín, Roberto
contents Many robot manipulation tasks require active or interactive exploration behavior in order to be performed successfully. Such tasks are ubiquitous in embodied domains, where agents must actively search for the information necessary for each stage of a task, e.g., moving the head of the robot to find information relevant to manipulation, or in multi-robot domains, where one scout robot may search for the information that another robot needs to make informed decisions. We identify these tasks with a new type of problem, factorized Contextual Markov Decision Processes, and propose DISaM, a dual-policy solution composed of an information-seeking policy that explores the environment to find the relevant contextual information and an information-receiving policy that exploits the context to achieve the manipulation goal. This factorization allows us to train both policies separately, using the information-receiving one to provide reward to train the information-seeking policy. At test time, the dual agent balances exploration and exploitation based on the uncertainty the manipulation policy has on what the next best action is. We demonstrate the capabilities of our dual policy solution in five manipulation tasks that require information-seeking behaviors, both in simulation and in the real-world, where DISaM significantly outperforms existing methods. More information at https://robin-lab.cs.utexas.edu/learning2look/.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_18964
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning to Look: Seeking Information for Decision Making via Policy Factorization
Dass, Shivin
Hu, Jiaheng
Abbatematteo, Ben
Stone, Peter
Martín-Martín, Roberto
Robotics
Machine Learning
Many robot manipulation tasks require active or interactive exploration behavior in order to be performed successfully. Such tasks are ubiquitous in embodied domains, where agents must actively search for the information necessary for each stage of a task, e.g., moving the head of the robot to find information relevant to manipulation, or in multi-robot domains, where one scout robot may search for the information that another robot needs to make informed decisions. We identify these tasks with a new type of problem, factorized Contextual Markov Decision Processes, and propose DISaM, a dual-policy solution composed of an information-seeking policy that explores the environment to find the relevant contextual information and an information-receiving policy that exploits the context to achieve the manipulation goal. This factorization allows us to train both policies separately, using the information-receiving one to provide reward to train the information-seeking policy. At test time, the dual agent balances exploration and exploitation based on the uncertainty the manipulation policy has on what the next best action is. We demonstrate the capabilities of our dual policy solution in five manipulation tasks that require information-seeking behaviors, both in simulation and in the real-world, where DISaM significantly outperforms existing methods. More information at https://robin-lab.cs.utexas.edu/learning2look/.
title Learning to Look: Seeking Information for Decision Making via Policy Factorization
topic Robotics
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.18964