Austin V. Stone

Klaus Greff, Francois Belletti, Lucas Beyer et al. · deepmind, mila

Data is the driving force of machine learning, with the amount and quality of training data often being more important for the performance of a system than architecture and training details. But collecting, processing and annotating real data at scale is difficult, expensive, and frequently raises additional privacy, fairness and legal concerns. Synthetic data is a powerful tool with the potential to address these shortcomings: 1) it is cheap 2) supports rich ground-truth annotations 3) offers full control over data and 4) can circumvent or mitigate problems regarding bias, privacy and licensing. Unfortunately, software tools for effective data generation are less mature than those for architecture design and training, which leads to fragmented generation efforts. To address these problems we introduce Kubric, an open-source Python framework that interfaces with PyBullet and Blender to generate photo-realistic scenes, with rich annotations, and seamlessly scales to large jobs distributed over thousands of machines, and generating TBs of data. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Kubric by presenting a series of 13 different generated datasets for tasks ranging from studying 3D NeRF models to optical flow estimation. We release Kubric, the used assets, all of the generation code, as well as the rendered datasets for reuse and modification.

Boyuan Chen, Fei Xia, Brian Ichter et al. · mit

Large language models (LLMs) have unlocked new capabilities of task planning from human instructions. However, prior attempts to apply LLMs to real-world robotic tasks are limited by the lack of grounding in the surrounding scene. In this paper, we develop NLMap, an open-vocabulary and queryable scene representation to address this problem. NLMap serves as a framework to gather and integrate contextual information into LLM planners, allowing them to see and query available objects in the scene before generating a context-conditioned plan. NLMap first establishes a natural language queryable scene representation with Visual Language models (VLMs). An LLM based object proposal module parses instructions and proposes involved objects to query the scene representation for object availability and location. An LLM planner then plans with such information about the scene. NLMap allows robots to operate without a fixed list of objects nor executable options, enabling real robot operation unachievable by previous methods. Project website: https://nlmap-saycan.github.io

Anthony Brohan, Noah Brown, Justice Carbajal et al.

By transferring knowledge from large, diverse, task-agnostic datasets, modern machine learning models can solve specific downstream tasks either zero-shot or with small task-specific datasets to a high level of performance. While this capability has been demonstrated in other fields such as computer vision, natural language processing or speech recognition, it remains to be shown in robotics, where the generalization capabilities of the models are particularly critical due to the difficulty of collecting real-world robotic data. We argue that one of the keys to the success of such general robotic models lies with open-ended task-agnostic training, combined with high-capacity architectures that can absorb all of the diverse, robotic data. In this paper, we present a model class, dubbed Robotics Transformer, that exhibits promising scalable model properties. We verify our conclusions in a study of different model classes and their ability to generalize as a function of the data size, model size, and data diversity based on a large-scale data collection on real robots performing real-world tasks. The project's website and videos can be found at robotics-transformer1.github.io

Michael S. Ryoo, Keerthana Gopalakrishnan, Kumara Kahatapitiya et al.

We propose Token Turing Machines (TTM), a sequential, autoregressive Transformer model with memory for real-world sequential visual understanding. Our model is inspired by the seminal Neural Turing Machine, and has an external memory consisting of a set of tokens which summarise the previous history (i.e., frames). This memory is efficiently addressed, read and written using a Transformer as the processing unit/controller at each step. The model's memory module ensures that a new observation will only be processed with the contents of the memory (and not the entire history), meaning that it can efficiently process long sequences with a bounded computational cost at each step. We show that TTM outperforms other alternatives, such as other Transformer models designed for long sequences and recurrent neural networks, on two real-world sequential visual understanding tasks: online temporal activity detection from videos and vision-based robot action policy learning. Code is publicly available at: https://github.com/google-research/scenic/tree/main/scenic/projects/token_turing

Austin Stone, Ted Xiao, Yao Lu et al.

For robots to follow instructions from people, they must be able to connect the rich semantic information in human vocabulary, e.g. "can you get me the pink stuffed whale?" to their sensory observations and actions. This brings up a notably difficult challenge for robots: while robot learning approaches allow robots to learn many different behaviors from first-hand experience, it is impractical for robots to have first-hand experiences that span all of this semantic information. We would like a robot's policy to be able to perceive and pick up the pink stuffed whale, even if it has never seen any data interacting with a stuffed whale before. Fortunately, static data on the internet has vast semantic information, and this information is captured in pre-trained vision-language models. In this paper, we study whether we can interface robot policies with these pre-trained models, with the aim of allowing robots to complete instructions involving object categories that the robot has never seen first-hand. We develop a simple approach, which we call Manipulation of Open-World Objects (MOO), which leverages a pre-trained vision-language model to extract object-identifying information from the language command and image, and conditions the robot policy on the current image, the instruction, and the extracted object information. In a variety of experiments on a real mobile manipulator, we find that MOO generalizes zero-shot to a wide range of novel object categories and environments. In addition, we show how MOO generalizes to other, non-language-based input modalities to specify the object of interest such as finger pointing, and how it can be further extended to enable open-world navigation and manipulation. The project's website and evaluation videos can be found at https://robot-moo.github.io/

Matthias Minderer, Alexey Gritsenko, Austin Stone et al.

Combining simple architectures with large-scale pre-training has led to massive improvements in image classification. For object detection, pre-training and scaling approaches are less well established, especially in the long-tailed and open-vocabulary setting, where training data is relatively scarce. In this paper, we propose a strong recipe for transferring image-text models to open-vocabulary object detection. We use a standard Vision Transformer architecture with minimal modifications, contrastive image-text pre-training, and end-to-end detection fine-tuning. Our analysis of the scaling properties of this setup shows that increasing image-level pre-training and model size yield consistent improvements on the downstream detection task. We provide the adaptation strategies and regularizations needed to attain very strong performance on zero-shot text-conditioned and one-shot image-conditioned object detection. Code and models are available on GitHub.

Tianhe Yu, Ted Xiao, Austin Stone et al.

Recent advances in robot learning have shown promise in enabling robots to perform a variety of manipulation tasks and generalize to novel scenarios. One of the key contributing factors to this progress is the scale of robot data used to train the models. To obtain large-scale datasets, prior approaches have relied on either demonstrations requiring high human involvement or engineering-heavy autonomous data collection schemes, both of which are challenging to scale. To mitigate this issue, we propose an alternative route and leverage text-to-image foundation models widely used in computer vision and natural language processing to obtain meaningful data for robot learning without requiring additional robot data. We term our method Robot Learning with Semantically Imagened Experience (ROSIE). Specifically, we make use of the state of the art text-to-image diffusion models and perform aggressive data augmentation on top of our existing robotic manipulation datasets via inpainting various unseen objects for manipulation, backgrounds, and distractors with text guidance. Through extensive real-world experiments, we show that manipulation policies trained on data augmented this way are able to solve completely unseen tasks with new objects and can behave more robustly w.r.t. novel distractors. In addition, we find that we can improve the robustness and generalization of high-level robot learning tasks such as success detection through training with the diffusion-based data augmentation. The project's website and videos can be found at diffusion-rosie.github.io

Hsin-Ping Huang, Charles Herrmann, Junhwa Hur et al.

Recently, AutoFlow has shown promising results on learning a training set for optical flow, but requires ground truth labels in the target domain to compute its search metric. Observing a strong correlation between the ground truth search metric and self-supervised losses, we introduce self-supervised AutoFlow to handle real-world videos without ground truth labels. Using self-supervised loss as the search metric, our self-supervised AutoFlow performs on par with AutoFlow on Sintel and KITTI where ground truth is available, and performs better on the real-world DAVIS dataset. We further explore using self-supervised AutoFlow in the (semi-)supervised setting and obtain competitive results against the state of the art.

Robert Geirhos, Priyank Jaini, Austin Stone et al.

Training a neural network is a monolithic endeavor, akin to carving knowledge into stone: once the process is completed, editing the knowledge in a network is hard, since all information is distributed across the network's weights. We here explore a simple, compelling alternative by marrying the representational power of deep neural networks with the flexibility of a database. Decomposing the task of image classification into image similarity (from a pre-trained embedding) and search (via fast nearest neighbor retrieval from a knowledge database), we build on well-established components to construct a simple and flexible visual memory that has the following key capabilities: (1.) The ability to flexibly add data across scales: from individual samples all the way to entire classes and billion-scale data; (2.) The ability to remove data through unlearning and memory pruning; (3.) An interpretable decision-mechanism on which we can intervene to control its behavior. Taken together, these capabilities comprehensively demonstrate the benefits of an explicit visual memory. We hope that it might contribute to a conversation on how knowledge should be represented in deep vision models -- beyond carving it in "stone" weights.

Austin Stone, Daniel Maurer, Alper Ayvaci et al.

We present SMURF, a method for unsupervised learning of optical flow that improves state of the art on all benchmarks by $36\%$ to $40\%$ (over the prior best method UFlow) and even outperforms several supervised approaches such as PWC-Net and FlowNet2. Our method integrates architecture improvements from supervised optical flow, i.e. the RAFT model, with new ideas for unsupervised learning that include a sequence-aware self-supervision loss, a technique for handling out-of-frame motion, and an approach for learning effectively from multi-frame video data while still only requiring two frames for inference.

Austin Stone, Oscar Ramirez, Kurt Konolige et al.

Robots have to face challenging perceptual settings, including changes in viewpoint, lighting, and background. Current simulated reinforcement learning (RL) benchmarks such as DM Control provide visual input without such complexity, which limits the transfer of well-performing methods to the real world. In this paper, we extend DM Control with three kinds of visual distractions (variations in background, color, and camera pose) to produce a new challenging benchmark for vision-based control, and we analyze state of the art RL algorithms in these settings. Our experiments show that current RL methods for vision-based control perform poorly under distractions, and that their performance decreases with increasing distraction complexity, showing that new methods are needed to cope with the visual complexities of the real world. We also find that combinations of multiple distraction types are more difficult than a mere combination of their individual effects.

Ayzaan Wahid, Austin Stone, Kevin Chen et al.

Object navigation is defined as navigating to an object of a given label in a complex, unexplored environment. In its general form, this problem poses several challenges for Robotics: semantic exploration of unknown environments in search of an object and low-level control. In this work we study object-guided exploration and low-level control, and present an end-to-end trained navigation policy achieving a success rate of 0.68 and SPL of 0.58 on unseen, visually complex scans of real homes. We propose a highly scalable implementation of an off-policy Reinforcement Learning algorithm, distributed Soft Actor Critic, which allows the system to utilize 98M experience steps in 24 hours on 8 GPUs. Our system learns to control a differential drive mobile base in simulation from a stack of high dimensional observations commonly used on robotic platforms. The learned policy is capable of object-guided exploratory behaviors and low-level control learned from pure experiences in realistic environments.