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Body Transformer: Leveraging Robot Embodiment for Policy Learning

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arxiv 2408.06316 v1 pith:3B6T6SNR submitted 2024-08-12 cs.RO cs.AIcs.LG

classification cs.ROcs.AIcs.LG
keywords learningarchitecturerobottransformerbodyembodimentvanillaactuators
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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In recent years, the transformer architecture has become the de facto standard for machine learning algorithms applied to natural language processing and computer vision. Despite notable evidence of successful deployment of this architecture in the context of robot learning, we claim that vanilla transformers do not fully exploit the structure of the robot learning problem. Therefore, we propose Body Transformer (BoT), an architecture that leverages the robot embodiment by providing an inductive bias that guides the learning process. We represent the robot body as a graph of sensors and actuators, and rely on masked attention to pool information throughout the architecture. The resulting architecture outperforms the vanilla transformer, as well as the classical multilayer perceptron, in terms of task completion, scaling properties, and computational efficiency when representing either imitation or reinforcement learning policies. Additional material including the open-source code is available at https://sferrazza.cc/bot_site.

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Cited by 5 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. UMI-on-Air: Embodiment-Aware Guidance for Embodiment-Agnostic Visuomotor Policies

    cs.RO 2025-10 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Embodiment-Aware Diffusion Policy steers a UMI-trained diffusion policy with controller tracking-cost gradients at inference time, improving aerial manipulation success in simulation and real flights.

  2. Arnold: a generalist muscle transformer policy

    cs.RO 2025-08 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    A single transformer policy with a compositional sensorimotor vocabulary achieves expert or super-expert performance on 14 musculoskeletal control tasks spanning four embodiments.

  3. AnyBody: A Benchmark Suite for Cross-Embodiment Manipulation

    cs.RO 2025-05 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    AnyBody is a benchmark suite that tests cross-embodiment manipulation generalization along interpolation, extrapolation, and composition axes, and finds zero-shot generalization to unseen robot bodies remains difficult.

  4. SPI-BoTER: Error Compensation for Industrial Robots via Sparse Attention Masking and Hybrid Loss with Spatial-Physical Information

    cs.RO 2025-06 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    SPI-BoTER, a physics-informed Transformer with sparse attention masks and a distance-matrix loss, reports 0.2515 mm mean 3D positioning error for UR5 robot arm error compensation, a 35.16% reduction over a standard DNN.

  5. McARL:Morphology-Control-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Generalizable Quadrupedal Locomotion

    cs.RO 2025-05 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    A morphology-conditioned PPO policy trained only on the Unitree Go1 transfers zero-shot in simulation to Go2, A1 and Mini Cheetah, with the best variant reaching 3.5 m/s on the Go2.

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