ACORN: Adaptive Contrastive Optimization for Safe and Robust Fine-Grained Robotic Manipulation

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Zhou, Zhongquan, Li, Shuhao, Yue, Zixian
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Zhou, Zhongquan
Li, Shuhao
Yue, Zixian
author_facet Zhou, Zhongquan
Li, Shuhao
Yue, Zixian
contents Embodied AI research has traditionally emphasized performance metrics such as success rate and cumulative reward, overlooking critical robustness and safety considerations that emerge during real-world deployment. In actual environments, agents continuously encounter unpredicted situations and distribution shifts, causing seemingly reliable policies to experience catastrophic failures, particularly in manipulation tasks. To address this gap, we introduce four novel safety-centric metrics that quantify an agent's resilience to environmental perturbations. Building on these metrics, we present Adaptive Contrastive Optimization for Robust Manipulation (ACORN), a plug-and-play algorithm that enhances policy robustness without sacrificing performance. ACORN leverages contrastive learning to simultaneously align trajectories with expert demonstrations while diverging from potentially unsafe behaviors. Our approach efficiently generates informative negative samples through structured Gaussian noise injection, employing a double perturbation technique that maintains sample diversity while minimizing computational overhead. Comprehensive experiments across diverse manipulation environments validate ACORN's effectiveness, yielding improvements of up to 23% in safety metrics under disturbance compared to baseline methods. These findings underscore ACORN's significant potential for enabling reliable deployment of embodied agents in safety-critical real-world applications.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_06628
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle ACORN: Adaptive Contrastive Optimization for Safe and Robust Fine-Grained Robotic Manipulation
Zhou, Zhongquan
Li, Shuhao
Yue, Zixian
Robotics
Embodied AI research has traditionally emphasized performance metrics such as success rate and cumulative reward, overlooking critical robustness and safety considerations that emerge during real-world deployment. In actual environments, agents continuously encounter unpredicted situations and distribution shifts, causing seemingly reliable policies to experience catastrophic failures, particularly in manipulation tasks. To address this gap, we introduce four novel safety-centric metrics that quantify an agent's resilience to environmental perturbations. Building on these metrics, we present Adaptive Contrastive Optimization for Robust Manipulation (ACORN), a plug-and-play algorithm that enhances policy robustness without sacrificing performance. ACORN leverages contrastive learning to simultaneously align trajectories with expert demonstrations while diverging from potentially unsafe behaviors. Our approach efficiently generates informative negative samples through structured Gaussian noise injection, employing a double perturbation technique that maintains sample diversity while minimizing computational overhead. Comprehensive experiments across diverse manipulation environments validate ACORN's effectiveness, yielding improvements of up to 23% in safety metrics under disturbance compared to baseline methods. These findings underscore ACORN's significant potential for enabling reliable deployment of embodied agents in safety-critical real-world applications.
title ACORN: Adaptive Contrastive Optimization for Safe and Robust Fine-Grained Robotic Manipulation
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.06628