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The Surprising Effectiveness of Representation Learning for Visual Imitation

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arxiv 2112.01511 v2 pith:GNUBTPFH submitted 2021-12-02 cs.RO cs.AIcs.CVcs.LG

The Surprising Effectiveness of Representation Learning for Visual Imitation

classification cs.RO cs.AIcs.CVcs.LG
keywords learningvisualimitationrepresentationdatademonstrationsactionsdiverse
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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While visual imitation learning offers one of the most effective ways of learning from visual demonstrations, generalizing from them requires either hundreds of diverse demonstrations, task specific priors, or large, hard-to-train parametric models. One reason such complexities arise is because standard visual imitation frameworks try to solve two coupled problems at once: learning a succinct but good representation from the diverse visual data, while simultaneously learning to associate the demonstrated actions with such representations. Such joint learning causes an interdependence between these two problems, which often results in needing large amounts of demonstrations for learning. To address this challenge, we instead propose to decouple representation learning from behavior learning for visual imitation. First, we learn a visual representation encoder from offline data using standard supervised and self-supervised learning methods. Once the representations are trained, we use non-parametric Locally Weighted Regression to predict the actions. We experimentally show that this simple decoupling improves the performance of visual imitation models on both offline demonstration datasets and real-robot door opening compared to prior work in visual imitation. All of our generated data, code, and robot videos are publicly available at https://jyopari.github.io/VINN/.

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Cited by 6 Pith papers

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