Search

Simulation has enabled unprecedented compute-scalable approaches to robot learning. However, many existing simulation frameworks typically support a narrow range of scenes/tasks and lack features critical for scaling generalizable robotics and sim2real. We introduce and open source ManiSkill3, the fastest state-visual GPU parallelized robotics simulator with contact-rich physics targeting generalizable manipulation. ManiSkill3 supports GPU parallelization of many aspects including simulation+rendering, heterogeneous simulation, pointclouds/voxels visual input, and more. Simulation with rendering on ManiSkill3 can run 10-1000x faster with 2-3x less GPU memory usage than other platforms, achieving up to 30,000+ FPS in benchmarked environments due to minimal python/pytorch overhead in the system, simulation on the GPU, and the use of the SAPIEN parallel rendering system. Tasks that used to take hours to train can now take minutes. We further provide the most comprehensive range of GPU parallelized environments/tasks spanning 12 distinct domains including but not limited to mobile manipulation for tasks such as drawing, humanoids, and dextrous manipulation in realistic scenes designed by artists or real-world digital twins. In addition, millions of demonstration frames are provided from motion planning, RL, and teleoperation. ManiSkill3 also provides a comprehensive set of baselines that span popular RL and learning-from-demonstrations algorithms., Comment: Project website: http://maniskill.ai/

Tasks at the intersection of vision and language have had a profound impact in advancing the capabilities of vision-language models such as dialog-based assistants. However, models trained on existing tasks are largely limited to turn-based interactions, where each turn must be stepped (i.e., prompted) by the user. Open-ended, asynchronous interactions where an AI model may proactively deliver timely responses or feedback based on the unfolding situation in real-time are an open challenge. In this work, we present the QEVD benchmark and dataset which explores human-AI interaction in the challenging, yet controlled, real-world domain of fitness coaching - a task which intrinsically requires monitoring live user activity and providing timely feedback. It is the first benchmark that requires assistive vision-language models to recognize complex human actions, identify mistakes grounded in those actions, and provide appropriate feedback. Our experiments reveal the limitations of existing state of the art vision-language models for such asynchronous situated interactions. Motivated by this, we propose a simple end-to-end streaming baseline that can respond asynchronously to human actions with appropriate feedbacks at the appropriate time., Comment: The benchmark and dataset is available here: https://developer.qualcomm.com/software/ai-datasets/qevd

The field of robotics has made significant advances towards generalist robot manipulation policies. However, real-world evaluation of such policies is not scalable and faces reproducibility challenges, which are likely to worsen as policies broaden the spectrum of tasks they can perform. We identify control and visual disparities between real and simulated environments as key challenges for reliable simulated evaluation and propose approaches for mitigating these gaps without needing to craft full-fidelity digital twins of real-world environments. We then employ these approaches to create SIMPLER, a collection of simulated environments for manipulation policy evaluation on common real robot setups. Through paired sim-and-real evaluations of manipulation policies, we demonstrate strong correlation between policy performance in SIMPLER environments and in the real world. Additionally, we find that SIMPLER evaluations accurately reflect real-world policy behavior modes such as sensitivity to various distribution shifts. We open-source all SIMPLER environments along with our workflow for creating new environments at https://simpler-env.github.io to facilitate research on general-purpose manipulation policies and simulated evaluation frameworks.

Open-world 3D part segmentation is pivotal in diverse applications such as robotics and AR/VR. Traditional supervised methods often grapple with limited 3D data availability and struggle to generalize to unseen object categories. PartSLIP, a recent advancement, has made significant strides in zero- and few-shot 3D part segmentation. This is achieved by harnessing the capabilities of the 2D open-vocabulary detection module, GLIP, and introducing a heuristic method for converting and lifting multi-view 2D bounding box predictions into 3D segmentation masks. In this paper, we introduce PartSLIP++, an enhanced version designed to overcome the limitations of its predecessor. Our approach incorporates two major improvements. First, we utilize a pre-trained 2D segmentation model, SAM, to produce pixel-wise 2D segmentations, yielding more precise and accurate annotations than the 2D bounding boxes used in PartSLIP. Second, PartSLIP++ replaces the heuristic 3D conversion process with an innovative modified Expectation-Maximization algorithm. This algorithm conceptualizes 3D instance segmentation as unobserved latent variables, and then iteratively refines them through an alternating process of 2D-3D matching and optimization with gradient descent. Through extensive evaluations, we show that PartSLIP++ demonstrates better performance over PartSLIP in both low-shot 3D semantic and instance-based object part segmentation tasks. Code released at https://github.com/zyc00/PartSLIP2.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved tremendous progress, yet they still often struggle with challenging reasoning problems. Current approaches address this challenge by sampling or searching detailed and low-level reasoning chains. However, these methods are still limited in their exploration capabilities, making it challenging for correct solutions to stand out in the huge solution space. In this work, we unleash LLMs' creative potential for exploring multiple diverse problem solving strategies by framing an LLM as a hierarchical policy via in-context learning. This policy comprises of a visionary leader that proposes multiple diverse high-level problem-solving tactics as hints, accompanied by a follower that executes detailed problem-solving processes following each of the high-level instruction. The follower uses each of the leader's directives as a guide and samples multiple reasoning chains to tackle the problem, generating a solution group for each leader proposal. Additionally, we propose an effective and efficient tournament-based approach to select among these explored solution groups to reach the final answer. Our approach produces meaningful and inspiring hints, enhances problem-solving strategy exploration, and improves the final answer accuracy on challenging problems in the MATH dataset. Code will be released at https://github.com/lz1oceani/LLM-As-Hierarchical-Policy.

Large, high-capacity models trained on diverse datasets have shown remarkable successes on efficiently tackling downstream applications. In domains from NLP to Computer Vision, this has led to a consolidation of pretrained models, with general pretrained backbones serving as a starting point for many applications. Can such a consolidation happen in robotics? Conventionally, robotic learning methods train a separate model for every application, every robot, and even every environment. Can we instead train generalist X-robot policy that can be adapted efficiently to new robots, tasks, and environments? In this paper, we provide datasets in standardized data formats and models to make it possible to explore this possibility in the context of robotic manipulation, alongside experimental results that provide an example of effective X-robot policies. We assemble a dataset from 22 different robots collected through a collaboration between 21 institutions, demonstrating 527 skills (160266 tasks). We show that a high-capacity model trained on this data, which we call RT-X, exhibits positive transfer and improves the capabilities of multiple robots by leveraging experience from other platforms. More details can be found on the project website https://robotics-transformer-x.github.io., Comment: Project website: https://robotics-transformer-x.github.io

We investigate the challenge of parametrizing policies for reinforcement learning (RL) in high-dimensional continuous action spaces. Our objective is to develop a multimodal policy that overcomes limitations inherent in the commonly-used Gaussian parameterization. To achieve this, we propose a principled framework that models the continuous RL policy as a generative model of optimal trajectories. By conditioning the policy on a latent variable, we derive a novel variational bound as the optimization objective, which promotes exploration of the environment. We then present a practical model-based RL method, called Reparameterized Policy Gradient (RPG), which leverages the multimodal policy parameterization and learned world model to achieve strong exploration capabilities and high data efficiency. Empirical results demonstrate that our method can help agents evade local optima in tasks with dense rewards and solve challenging sparse-reward environments by incorporating an object-centric intrinsic reward. Our method consistently outperforms previous approaches across a range of tasks. Code and supplementary materials are available on the project page https://haosulab.github.io/RPG/

Large vision-language models have achieved outstanding performance, but their size and computational requirements make their deployment on resource-constrained devices and time-sensitive tasks impractical. Model distillation, the process of creating smaller, faster models that maintain the performance of larger models, is a promising direction towards the solution. This paper investigates the distillation of visual representations in large teacher vision-language models into lightweight student models using a small- or mid-scale dataset. Notably, this study focuses on open-vocabulary out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization, a challenging problem that has been overlooked in previous model distillation literature. We propose two principles from vision and language modality perspectives to enhance student's OOD generalization: (1) by better imitating teacher's visual representation space, and carefully promoting better coherence in vision-language alignment with the teacher; (2) by enriching the teacher's language representations with informative and finegrained semantic attributes to effectively distinguish between different labels. We propose several metrics and conduct extensive experiments to investigate their techniques. The results demonstrate significant improvements in zero-shot and few-shot student performance on open-vocabulary out-of-distribution classification, highlighting the effectiveness of our proposed approaches. Poster: https://xuanlinli17.github.io/pdfs/iccv23_large_vlm_distillation_poster.pdf Code: https://github.com/xuanlinli17/large_vlm_distillation_ood, Comment: Published at International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) 2023. Poster at https://xuanlinli17.github.io/pdfs/iccv23_large_vlm_distillation_poster.pdf

Recent studies on visual reinforcement learning (visual RL) have explored the use of 3D visual representations. However, none of these work has systematically compared the efficacy of 3D representations with 2D representations across different tasks, nor have they analyzed 3D representations from the perspective of agent-object / object-object relationship reasoning. In this work, we seek answers to the question of when and how do 3D neural networks that learn features in the 3D-native space provide a beneficial inductive bias for visual RL. We specifically focus on 3D point clouds, one of the most common forms of 3D representations. We systematically investigate design choices for 3D point cloud RL, leading to the development of a robust algorithm for various robotic manipulation and control tasks. Furthermore, through comparisons between 2D image vs 3D point cloud RL methods on both minimalist synthetic tasks and complex robotic manipulation tasks, we find that 3D point cloud RL can significantly outperform the 2D counterpart when agent-object / object-object relationship encoding is a key factor.

Large Language Models (LLMs) significantly benefit from Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting in performing various reasoning tasks. While CoT allows models to produce more comprehensive reasoning processes, its emphasis on intermediate reasoning steps can inadvertently introduce hallucinations and accumulated errors, thereby limiting models' ability to solve complex reasoning tasks. Inspired by how humans engage in careful and meticulous deductive logical reasoning processes to solve tasks, we seek to enable language models to perform explicit and rigorous deductive reasoning, and also ensure the trustworthiness of their reasoning process through self-verification. However, directly verifying the validity of an entire deductive reasoning process is challenging, even with advanced models like ChatGPT. In light of this, we propose to decompose a reasoning verification process into a series of step-by-step subprocesses, each only receiving their necessary context and premises. To facilitate this procedure, we propose Natural Program, a natural language-based deductive reasoning format. Our approach enables models to generate precise reasoning steps where subsequent steps are more rigorously grounded on prior steps. It also empowers language models to carry out reasoning self-verification in a step-by-step manner. By integrating this verification process into each deductive reasoning stage, we significantly enhance the rigor and trustfulness of generated reasoning steps. Along this process, we also improve the answer correctness on complex reasoning tasks. Code will be released at https://github.com/lz1oceani/verify_cot., Comment: Published at NeurIPS 2023

We introduce OpenShape, a method for learning multi-modal joint representations of text, image, and point clouds. We adopt the commonly used multi-modal contrastive learning framework for representation alignment, but with a specific focus on scaling up 3D representations to enable open-world 3D shape understanding. To achieve this, we scale up training data by ensembling multiple 3D datasets and propose several strategies to automatically filter and enrich noisy text descriptions. We also explore and compare strategies for scaling 3D backbone networks and introduce a novel hard negative mining module for more efficient training. We evaluate OpenShape on zero-shot 3D classification benchmarks and demonstrate its superior capabilities for open-world recognition. Specifically, OpenShape achieves a zero-shot accuracy of 46.8% on the 1,156-category Objaverse-LVIS benchmark, compared to less than 10% for existing methods. OpenShape also achieves an accuracy of 85.3% on ModelNet40, outperforming previous zero-shot baseline methods by 20% and performing on par with some fully-supervised methods. Furthermore, we show that our learned embeddings encode a wide range of visual and semantic concepts (e.g., subcategories, color, shape, style) and facilitate fine-grained text-3D and image-3D interactions. Due to their alignment with CLIP embeddings, our learned shape representations can also be integrated with off-the-shelf CLIP-based models for various applications, such as point cloud captioning and point cloud-conditioned image generation., Comment: Project Website: https://colin97.github.io/OpenShape/

Generalizable manipulation skills, which can be composed to tackle long-horizon and complex daily chores, are one of the cornerstones of Embodied AI. However, existing benchmarks, mostly composed of a suite of simulatable environments, are insufficient to push cutting-edge research works because they lack object-level topological and geometric variations, are not based on fully dynamic simulation, or are short of native support for multiple types of manipulation tasks. To this end, we present ManiSkill2, the next generation of the SAPIEN ManiSkill benchmark, to address critical pain points often encountered by researchers when using benchmarks for generalizable manipulation skills. ManiSkill2 includes 20 manipulation task families with 2000+ object models and 4M+ demonstration frames, which cover stationary/mobile-base, single/dual-arm, and rigid/soft-body manipulation tasks with 2D/3D-input data simulated by fully dynamic engines. It defines a unified interface and evaluation protocol to support a wide range of algorithms (e.g., classic sense-plan-act, RL, IL), visual observations (point cloud, RGBD), and controllers (e.g., action type and parameterization). Moreover, it empowers fast visual input learning algorithms so that a CNN-based policy can collect samples at about 2000 FPS with 1 GPU and 16 processes on a regular workstation. It implements a render server infrastructure to allow sharing rendering resources across all environments, thereby significantly reducing memory usage. We open-source all codes of our benchmark (simulator, environments, and baselines) and host an online challenge open to interdisciplinary researchers., Comment: Published as a conference paper at ICLR 2023. Project website: https://maniskill2.github.io/

We study how choices of input point cloud coordinate frames impact learning of manipulation skills from 3D point clouds. There exist a variety of coordinate frame choices to normalize captured robot-object-interaction point clouds. We find that different frames have a profound effect on agent learning performance, and the trend is similar across 3D backbone networks. In particular, the end-effector frame and the target-part frame achieve higher training efficiency than the commonly used world frame and robot-base frame in many tasks, intuitively because they provide helpful alignments among point clouds across time steps and thus can simplify visual module learning. Moreover, the well-performing frames vary across tasks, and some tasks may benefit from multiple frame candidates. We thus propose FrameMiners to adaptively select candidate frames and fuse their merits in a task-agnostic manner. Experimentally, FrameMiners achieves on-par or significantly higher performance than the best single-frame version on five fully physical manipulation tasks adapted from ManiSkill and OCRTOC. Without changing existing camera placements or adding extra cameras, point cloud frame mining can serve as a free lunch to improve 3D manipulation learning., Comment: Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) 2022; Project Website: https://colin97.github.io/FrameMining/

Generalization in deep reinforcement learning over unseen environment variations usually requires policy learning over a large set of diverse training variations. We empirically observe that an agent trained on many variations (a generalist) tends to learn faster at the beginning, yet its performance plateaus at a less optimal level for a long time. In contrast, an agent trained only on a few variations (a specialist) can often achieve high returns under a limited computational budget. To have the best of both worlds, we propose a novel generalist-specialist training framework. Specifically, we first train a generalist on all environment variations; when it fails to improve, we launch a large population of specialists with weights cloned from the generalist, each trained to master a selected small subset of variations. We finally resume the training of the generalist with auxiliary rewards induced by demonstrations of all specialists. In particular, we investigate the timing to start specialist training and compare strategies to learn generalists with assistance from specialists. We show that this framework pushes the envelope of policy learning on several challenging and popular benchmarks including Procgen, Meta-World and ManiSkill., Comment: ICML 2022

The predominant approach for language modeling is to process sequences from left to right, but this eliminates a source of information: the order by which the sequence was generated. One strategy to recover this information is to decode both the content and ordering of tokens. Existing approaches supervise content and ordering by designing problem-specific loss functions and pre-training with an ordering pre-selected. Other recent works use iterative search to discover problem-specific orderings for training, but suffer from high time complexity and cannot be efficiently parallelized. We address these limitations with an unsupervised parallelizable learner that discovers high-quality generation orders purely from training data -- no domain knowledge required. The learner contains an encoder network and decoder language model that perform variational inference with autoregressive orders (represented as permutation matrices) as latent variables. The corresponding ELBO is not differentiable, so we develop a practical algorithm for end-to-end optimization using policy gradients. We implement the encoder as a Transformer with non-causal attention that outputs permutations in one forward pass. Permutations then serve as target generation orders for training an insertion-based Transformer language model. Empirical results in language modeling tasks demonstrate that our method is context-aware and discovers orderings that are competitive with or even better than fixed orders., Comment: updated from ICLR 2021, first two authors contributed equally

Object manipulation from 3D visual inputs poses many challenges on building generalizable perception and policy models. However, 3D assets in existing benchmarks mostly lack the diversity of 3D shapes that align with real-world intra-class complexity in topology and geometry. Here we propose SAPIEN Manipulation Skill Benchmark (ManiSkill) to benchmark manipulation skills over diverse objects in a full-physics simulator. 3D assets in ManiSkill include large intra-class topological and geometric variations. Tasks are carefully chosen to cover distinct types of manipulation challenges. Latest progress in 3D vision also makes us believe that we should customize the benchmark so that the challenge is inviting to researchers working on 3D deep learning. To this end, we simulate a moving panoramic camera that returns ego-centric point clouds or RGB-D images. In addition, we would like ManiSkill to serve a broad set of researchers interested in manipulation research. Besides supporting the learning of policies from interactions, we also support learning-from-demonstrations (LfD) methods, by providing a large number of high-quality demonstrations (~36,000 successful trajectories, ~1.5M point cloud/RGB-D frames in total). We provide baselines using 3D deep learning and LfD algorithms. All code of our benchmark (simulator, environment, SDK, and baselines) is open-sourced, and a challenge facing interdisciplinary researchers will be held based on the benchmark., Comment: NeurIPS 2021 Track on Datasets and Benchmarks; code: https://github.com/haosulab/ManiSkill

Deep Reinforcement Learning (Deep RL) has been receiving increasingly more attention thanks to its encouraging performance on a variety of control tasks. Yet, conventional regularization techniques in training neural networks (e.g., $L_2$ regularization, dropout) have been largely ignored in RL methods, possibly because agents are typically trained and evaluated in the same environment, and because the deep RL community focuses more on high-level algorithm designs. In this work, we present the first comprehensive study of regularization techniques with multiple policy optimization algorithms on continuous control tasks. Interestingly, we find conventional regularization techniques on the policy networks can often bring large improvement, especially on harder tasks. Our findings are shown to be robust against training hyperparameter variations. We also compare these techniques with the more widely used entropy regularization. In addition, we study regularizing different components and find that only regularizing the policy network is typically the best. We further analyze why regularization may help generalization in RL from four perspectives - sample complexity, reward distribution, weight norm, and noise robustness. We hope our study provides guidance for future practices in regularizing policy optimization algorithms. Our code is available at https://github.com/xuanlinli17/iclr2021_rlreg ., Comment: Published at ICLR 2021; please cite this paper's ICLR 2021 version at https://github.com/xuanlinli17/iclr2021_rlreg#citation or the arXiv version from "Export Bibtex Citation" on the right, instead of the "2019 OpenReview" version in Google Scholar. Thanks!