Daily Archives: March 21, 2024
Reward-Free Curricula for Training Robust World Models
There has been a recent surge of interest in developing generally-capable agents that can adapt to new tasks without additional training in the environment. Learning world models from reward-free exploration is a promising approach, and enables policies to be trained using imagined experience for new tasks. However, achieving a general agent requires robustness across different environments. In this work, we address the novel problem of generating curricula in the reward-free setting to train robust world models. We consider robustness in terms of minimax regret over all environment instantiations and show that the minimax regret can be connected to minimising the maximum error in the world model across environment instances. This result informs our algorithm, WAKER: Weighted Acquisition of Knowledge across Environments for Robustness. WAKER selects environments for data collection based on the estimated error of the world model for each environment. Our experiments demonstrate that WAKER outperforms several baselines, resulting in improved robustness, efficiency, and generalisation. —Read More
#multi-modal, #reinforcement-learningCovariant Introduces RFM-1 to Give Robots the Human-like Ability to Reason
The key challenge with traditional robotic automation and automation based on manual programming or specialized learned models is the lack of reliability and flexibility in real-world scenarios. To create value at scale, robots must understand how to manipulate an unlimited array of items and scenarios autonomously.
By starting with warehouse pick and place operations, Covariant’s RFM-1 showcases the power of Robotics Foundation Models. In warehouse environments, the technology company’s approach of combining the largest real-world robot production dataset with a massive collection of Internet data is unlocking new levels of robotic productivity and shows a path to broader industry applications ranging from hospitals and homes to factories, stores, restaurants, and more. — Read More