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Visual-based Policy Learning with Latent Language Encoding
Jielin Qiu · Mengdi Xu · William Han · Bo Li · Ding Zhao
Event URL: https://openreview.net/forum?id=n0rp37wPsC »

Large Language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable success in assisting robot learning tasks, i.e., complex household planning.However, the performance of pretrained LLMs heavily relies on domain-specific templated text data, which may be infeasible in real-world robot learning tasks with image-based observations. Moreover, existing LLMs with text inputs lack the capability to evolve with non-expert interactions with environments.In this work, we introduce a novel learning paradigm that generates robots’ executable actions in the form of text, derived solely from visual observations, using language-based summarization of these observations as the connecting bridge between both domains. Our proposed paradigm stands apart from previous works, which utilized either language instructions or a combination of language and visual data as inputs. Moreover, our method does not require oracle text summarization of the scene, eliminating the need for human involvement in the learning loop, which makes it more practical for real-world robot learning tasks.Our proposed paradigm consists of two modules: the SUM module, which interprets the environment using visual observations and produces a text summary of the scene, and the APM module, which generates executable action policies based on the natural language descriptions provided by the SUM module. We demonstrate that our proposed method can employ two fine-tuning strategies, including imitation learning and reinforcement learning approaches, to adapt to the target testing tasks effectively.We conducted extensive experiments involving various SUM/APM model selections, environments, and tasks across 7 house layouts in the VirtualHome environment. Our experimental results demonstrate that our method surpasses existing baselines, confirming the effectiveness of this novel learning paradigm.

Author Information

Jielin Qiu (Carnegie Mellon University)
Mengdi Xu (Carnegie Mellon University)
William Han (Carnegie Mellon University; Safe AI Lab)
Bo Li (UIUC)
Bo Li

Dr. Bo Li is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. She is the recipient of the IJCAI Computers and Thought Award, Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, AI’s 10 to Watch, NSF CAREER Award, MIT Technology Review TR-35 Award, Dean's Award for Excellence in Research, C.W. Gear Outstanding Junior Faculty Award, Intel Rising Star award, Symantec Research Labs Fellowship, Rising Star Award, Research Awards from Tech companies such as Amazon, Facebook, Intel, IBM, and eBay, and best paper awards at several top machine learning and security conferences. Her research focuses on both theoretical and practical aspects of trustworthy machine learning, which is at the intersection of machine learning, security, privacy, and game theory. She has designed several scalable frameworks for trustworthy machine learning and privacy-preserving data publishing. Her work has been featured by major publications and media outlets such as Nature, Wired, Fortune, and New York Times.

Ding Zhao (Carnegie Mellon University)

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