Problem Space Transformations for Out-of-Distribution Generalisation in Behavioural Cloning

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Doshi, Kiran, Bagatella, Marco, Coros, Stelian
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Doshi, Kiran
Bagatella, Marco
Coros, Stelian
author_facet Doshi, Kiran
Bagatella, Marco
Coros, Stelian
contents The combination of behavioural cloning and neural networks has driven significant progress in robotic manipulation. As these algorithms may require a large number of demonstrations for each task of interest, they remain fundamentally inefficient in complex scenarios, in which finite datasets can hardly cover the state space. One of the remaining challenges is thus out-of-distribution (OOD) generalisation, i.e. the ability to predict correct actions for states with a low likelihood with respect to the state occupancy induced by the dataset. This issue is aggravated when the system to control is treated as a black-box, ignoring its physical properties. This work highlights widespread properties of robotic manipulation, specifically pose equivariance and locality. We investigate the effect of the choice of problem space on OOD performance of BC policies and how transformations arising from characteristic properties of manipulation can be employed for its improvement. Through controlled, simulated and real-world experiments, we empirically demonstrate that these transformations allow behaviour cloning policies, using either standard MLP-based one-step action prediction or diffusion-based action-sequence prediction, to generalise better to certain OOD problem instances. Code is available at https://github.com/kirandoshi/pst_ood_gen.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_04056
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Problem Space Transformations for Out-of-Distribution Generalisation in Behavioural Cloning
Doshi, Kiran
Bagatella, Marco
Coros, Stelian
Robotics
Machine Learning
The combination of behavioural cloning and neural networks has driven significant progress in robotic manipulation. As these algorithms may require a large number of demonstrations for each task of interest, they remain fundamentally inefficient in complex scenarios, in which finite datasets can hardly cover the state space. One of the remaining challenges is thus out-of-distribution (OOD) generalisation, i.e. the ability to predict correct actions for states with a low likelihood with respect to the state occupancy induced by the dataset. This issue is aggravated when the system to control is treated as a black-box, ignoring its physical properties. This work highlights widespread properties of robotic manipulation, specifically pose equivariance and locality. We investigate the effect of the choice of problem space on OOD performance of BC policies and how transformations arising from characteristic properties of manipulation can be employed for its improvement. Through controlled, simulated and real-world experiments, we empirically demonstrate that these transformations allow behaviour cloning policies, using either standard MLP-based one-step action prediction or diffusion-based action-sequence prediction, to generalise better to certain OOD problem instances. Code is available at https://github.com/kirandoshi/pst_ood_gen.
title Problem Space Transformations for Out-of-Distribution Generalisation in Behavioural Cloning
topic Robotics
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.04056