2023/04/03 by Jia, Zhiwei, Thumuluri, Vineet, Liu, Fangchen +3 · 2 citations
#Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Machine Learning (cs.LG) #Robotics (cs.RO)
paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2304.00776
We study generalizable policy learning from demonstrations for complex low-level control (e.g., contact-rich object manipulations). We propose a novel hierarchical imitation learning method that utilizes sub-optimal demos. Firstly, we propose an observation space-agnostic approach that efficiently discovers the multi-step subskill decomposition of the demos in an unsupervised manner. By grouping temporarily close and functionally similar actions into subskill-level demo segments, the observations at the segment boundaries constitute a chain of planning steps for the task, which we refer to as the chain-of-thought (CoT). Next, we propose a Transformer-based design that effectively learns to predict the CoT as the subskill-level guidance. We couple action and subskill predictions via learnable prompt tokens and a hybrid masking strategy, which enable dynamically updated guidance at test time and improve feature representation of the trajectory for generalizable policy learning. Our method, Chain-of-Thought Predictive Control (CoTPC), consistently surpasses existing strong baselines on challenging manipulation tasks with sub-optimal demos.