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Robotic affordances, providing information about what actions can be taken in a given situation, can aid robotic manipulation. However, learning about affordances requires expensive large annotated datasets of interactions or demonstrations. In this work, we argue that well-directed interactions with the environment can mitigate this problem and propose an information-based measure to augment the agent's objective and accelerate the affordance discovery process. We provide a theoretical justification of our approach and we empirically validate the approach both in simulation and real-world tasks. Our method, which we dub IDA, enables the efficient discovery of visual affordances for several action primitives, such as grasping, stacking objects, or opening drawers, strongly improving data efficiency in simulation, and it allows us to learn grasping affordances in a small number of interactions, on a real-world setup with a UFACTORY XArm 6 robot arm., Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:2308.14915

Radio signals are well suited for user localization because they are ubiquitous, can operate in the dark and maintain privacy. Many prior works learn mappings between channel state information (CSI) and position fully-supervised. However, that approach relies on position labels which are very expensive to acquire. In this work, this requirement is relaxed by using pseudo-labels during deployment, which are calculated from an inertial measurement unit (IMU). We propose practical algorithms for IMU double integration and training of the localization system. We show decimeter-level accuracy on simulated and challenging real data of 5G measurements. Our IMU-supervised method performs similarly to fully-supervised, but requires much less effort to deploy., Comment: IEEE GLOBECOM 2023

Robotic affordances, providing information about what actions can be taken in a given situation, can aid robotic manipulation. However, learning about affordances requires expensive large annotated datasets of interactions or demonstrations. In this work, we argue that well-directed interactions with the environment can mitigate this problem and propose an information-based measure to augment the agent's objective and accelerate the affordance discovery process. We provide a theoretical justification of our approach and we empirically validate the approach both in simulation and real-world tasks. Our method, which we dub IDA, enables the efficient discovery of visual affordances for several action primitives, such as grasping, stacking objects, or opening drawers, strongly improving data efficiency in simulation, and it allows us to learn grasping affordances in a small number of interactions, on a real-world setup with a UFACTORY XArm 6 robot arm., Comment: restoring 2308.14915v1 which was accidentally replaced with a different paper

Standard imitation learning can fail when the expert demonstrators have different sensory inputs than the imitating agent. This is because partial observability gives rise to hidden confounders in the causal graph. In previous work, to work around the confounding problem, policies have been trained using query access to the expert's policy or inverse reinforcement learning (IRL). However, both approaches have drawbacks as the expert's policy may not be available and IRL can be unstable in practice. Instead, we propose to train a variational inference model to infer the expert's latent information and use it to train a latent-conditional policy. We prove that using this method, under strong assumptions, the identification of the correct imitation learning policy is theoretically possible from expert demonstrations alone. In practice, we focus on a setting with less strong assumptions where we use exploration data for learning the inference model. We show in theory and practice that this algorithm converges to the correct interventional policy, solves the confounding issue, and can under certain assumptions achieve an asymptotically optimal imitation performance.

We introduce WiCluster, a new machine learning (ML) approach for passive indoor positioning using radio frequency (RF) channel state information (CSI). WiCluster can predict both a zone-level position and a precise 2D or 3D position, without using any precise position labels during training. Prior CSI-based indoor positioning work has relied on non-parametric approaches using digital signal-processing (DSP) and, more recently, parametric approaches (e.g., fully supervised ML methods). However these do not handle the complexity of real-world environments well and do not meet requirements for large-scale commercial deployments: the accuracy of DSP-based method deteriorates significantly in non-line-of-sight conditions, while supervised ML methods need large amounts of hard-to-acquire centimeter accuracy position labels. In contrast, WiCluster is precise, requires weaker label-information that can be easily collected, and works well in non-line-of-sight conditions. Our first contribution is a novel dimensionality reduction method for charting. It combines a triplet-loss with a multi-scale clustering-loss to map the high-dimensional CSI representation to a 2D/3D latent space. Our second contribution is two weakly supervised losses that map this latent space into a Cartesian map, resulting in meter-accuracy position results. These losses only require simple to acquire priors: a sketch of the floorplan, approximate access-point locations and a few CSI packets that are labelled with the corresponding zone in the floorplan. Thirdly, we report results and a robustness study for 2D positioning in two single-floor office buildings and 3D positioning in a two-story home., Comment: IEEE Globecom 2021