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Decomposing the Generalization Gap in Imitation Learning for Visual Robotic Manipulation

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arxiv 2307.03659 v1 pith:7PCKNQPW submitted 2023-07-07 cs.RO cs.AI

Decomposing the Generalization Gap in Imitation Learning for Visual Robotic Manipulation

classification cs.RO cs.AI
keywords generalizationfactorsimitationlearningmanipulationrobotdifficultyquestion
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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What makes generalization hard for imitation learning in visual robotic manipulation? This question is difficult to approach at face value, but the environment from the perspective of a robot can often be decomposed into enumerable factors of variation, such as the lighting conditions or the placement of the camera. Empirically, generalization to some of these factors have presented a greater obstacle than others, but existing work sheds little light on precisely how much each factor contributes to the generalization gap. Towards an answer to this question, we study imitation learning policies in simulation and on a real robot language-conditioned manipulation task to quantify the difficulty of generalization to different (sets of) factors. We also design a new simulated benchmark of 19 tasks with 11 factors of variation to facilitate more controlled evaluations of generalization. From our study, we determine an ordering of factors based on generalization difficulty, that is consistent across simulation and our real robot setup.

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Cited by 7 Pith papers

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

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