View-Invariant Policy Learning via Zero-Shot Novel View Synthesis
This addresses the challenge of generalizable manipulation across diverse observational viewpoints for robotics, representing an incremental improvement through a novel application of existing synthesis models.
The paper tackles the problem of learning viewpoint-invariant visuomotor policies for robotic manipulation by using zero-shot novel view synthesis models to augment single-viewpoint demonstration data, resulting in policies that outperform baselines on out-of-distribution camera viewpoints in simulated and real-world tasks.
Large-scale visuomotor policy learning is a promising approach toward developing generalizable manipulation systems. Yet, policies that can be deployed on diverse embodiments, environments, and observational modalities remain elusive. In this work, we investigate how knowledge from large-scale visual data of the world may be used to address one axis of variation for generalizable manipulation: observational viewpoint. Specifically, we study single-image novel view synthesis models, which learn 3D-aware scene-level priors by rendering images of the same scene from alternate camera viewpoints given a single input image. For practical application to diverse robotic data, these models must operate zero-shot, performing view synthesis on unseen tasks and environments. We empirically analyze view synthesis models within a simple data-augmentation scheme that we call View Synthesis Augmentation (VISTA) to understand their capabilities for learning viewpoint-invariant policies from single-viewpoint demonstration data. Upon evaluating the robustness of policies trained with our method to out-of-distribution camera viewpoints, we find that they outperform baselines in both simulated and real-world manipulation tasks. Videos and additional visualizations are available at https://s-tian.github.io/projects/vista.