Maxwell Svetlik

Roberto Capobianco, Harm van Seijen, Nolan D. Bard et al.

Reinforcement learning has proven to be a valuable tool in the creation of advanced AI and robotic systems, contributing to everything from game playing to robotics to foundation models. Through trial-and-error, these AI systems typically learn one, near-optimal behavior to solve their tasks. However, there are many use cases in which one would like to assert some level of control, preferably in real time, over how the task is solved. We refer to these modifications of a core task as styles. We combine universal value function approximators (UVFAs) with carefully selected training scenarios, learning algorithms, and data augmentation to create a framework for coaching agents that exhibit styles in complex domains. We demonstrate the framework's application in the AAA video games Horizon Forbidden West and Gran Turismo, and in an open-source humanoid test domain. Despite the different nature of the domains -- car racing, stylized game combat, and humanoid walking -- each agent shows strong coherence to the style requests while still satisfying the main task in its domain. Importantly, the techniques outlined in this paper allow an end user to choose the final behavior at run time, giving them flexible control over the final executed performance.

Zhenyu Jiang, Yifeng Zhu, Maxwell Svetlik et al.

Grasp detection in clutter requires the robot to reason about the 3D scene from incomplete and noisy perception. In this work, we draw insight that 3D reconstruction and grasp learning are two intimately connected tasks, both of which require a fine-grained understanding of local geometry details. We thus propose to utilize the synergies between grasp affordance and 3D reconstruction through multi-task learning of a shared representation. Our model takes advantage of deep implicit functions, a continuous and memory-efficient representation, to enable differentiable training of both tasks. We train the model on self-supervised grasp trials data in simulation. Evaluation is conducted on a clutter removal task, where the robot clears cluttered objects by grasping them one at a time. The experimental results in simulation and on the real robot have demonstrated that the use of implicit neural representations and joint learning of grasp affordance and 3D reconstruction have led to state-of-the-art grasping results. Our method outperforms baselines by over 10% in terms of grasp success rate. Additional results and videos can be found at https://sites.google.com/view/rpl-giga2021