Reinforcement learning (RL) can automate a wide variety of robotic skills, but learning each new skill requires considerable real-world data collection and manual representation engineering to design policy classes or features. Using deep reinforcement learning to train general purpose neural network policies alleviates some of the burden of manual representation engineering by using expressive policy classes, but exacerbates the challenge of data collection, since such methods tend to be less efficient than RL with low-dimensional, hand-designed representations. Transfer learning can mitigate this problem by enabling us to transfer information from one skill to another and even from one robot to another. We show that neural network policies can be decomposed into "task-specific" and "robot-specific" modules, where the task-specific modules are shared across robots, and the robot-specific modules are shared across all tasks on that robot. This allows for sharing task information, such as perception, between robots and sharing robot information, such as dynamics and kinematics, between tasks. We exploit this decomposition to train mix-and-match modules that can solve new robot-task combinations that were not seen during training. Using a novel neural network architecture, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our transfer method for enabling zero-shot generalization with a variety of robots and tasks in simulation for both visual and non-visual tasks. * The first two authors contributed equally to this work.
While learning visuomotor skills in an end-toend manner is appealing, deep neural networks are often uninterpretable and fail in surprising ways. For robotics tasks, such as autonomous driving, models that explicitly represent objects may be more robust to new scenes and provide intuitive visualizations. We describe a taxonomy of "object-centric" models which leverage both object instances and end-to-end learning. In the Grand Theft Auto V simulator, we show that object-centric models outperform object-agnostic methods in scenes with other vehicles and pedestrians, even with an imperfect detector. We also demonstrate that our architectures perform well on real-world environments by evaluating on the Berkeley DeepDrive Video dataset, where an object-centric model outperforms object-agnostic models in the low-data regimes.
Robotic manipulation in complex open-world scenarios requires both reliable physical manipulation skills and effective and generalizable perception. In this paper, we propose a method where general purpose pretrained visual models serve as an object-centric prior for the perception system of a learned policy. We devise an object-level attentional mechanism that can be used to determine relevant objects from a few trajectories or demonstrations, and then immediately incorporate those objects into a learned policy. A task-independent meta-attention locates possible objects in the scene, and a task-specific attention identifies which objects are predictive of the trajectories. The scope of the task-specific attention is easily adjusted by showing demonstrations with distractor objects or with diverse relevant objects. Our results indicate that this approach exhibits good generalization across object instances using very few samples, and can be used to learn a variety of manipulation tasks using reinforcement learning.
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