Meta-Controller: Few-Shot Imitation of Unseen Embodiments and Tasks in Continuous Control
This addresses the challenge of adaptive robotic systems by enabling quick adaptation to new robots and tasks, though it is incremental as it builds on few-shot imitation learning.
The paper tackles the problem of generalizing robotic control across unseen embodiments and tasks using few-shot imitation learning, achieving superior performance over existing methods in the DeepMind Control suite with only five demonstrations.
Generalizing across robot embodiments and tasks is crucial for adaptive robotic systems. Modular policy learning approaches adapt to new embodiments but are limited to specific tasks, while few-shot imitation learning (IL) approaches often focus on a single embodiment. In this paper, we introduce a few-shot behavior cloning framework to simultaneously generalize to unseen embodiments and tasks using a few (\emph{e.g.,} five) reward-free demonstrations. Our framework leverages a joint-level input-output representation to unify the state and action spaces of heterogeneous embodiments and employs a novel structure-motion state encoder that is parameterized to capture both shared knowledge across all embodiments and embodiment-specific knowledge. A matching-based policy network then predicts actions from a few demonstrations, producing an adaptive policy that is robust to over-fitting. Evaluated in the DeepMind Control suite, our framework termed \modelname{} demonstrates superior few-shot generalization to unseen embodiments and tasks over modular policy learning and few-shot IL approaches. Codes are available at \href{https://github.com/SeongwoongCho/meta-controller}{https://github.com/SeongwoongCho/meta-controller}.