Understanding the 3-dimensional structure of the world is a core challenge in computer vision and robotics. Neural rendering approaches learn an implicit 3D model by predicting what a camera would see from an arbitrary viewpoint. We extend existing neural rendering to more complex, higher dimensional scenes than previously possible. We propose Epipolar Cross Attention (ECA), an attention mechanism that leverages the geometry of the scene to perform efficient non-local operations, requiring only $O(n)$ comparisons per spatial dimension instead of $O(n^2)$. We introduce three new simulated datasets inspired by real-world robotics and demonstrate that ECA significantly improves the quantitative and qualitative performance of Generative Query Networks (GQN).

Exploration in environments with sparse rewards has been a persistent problem in reinforcement learning (RL). Many tasks are natural to specify with a sparse reward, and manually shaping a reward function can result in suboptimal performance. However, finding a non-zero reward is exponentially more difficult with increasing task horizon or action dimensionality. This puts many real-world tasks out of practical reach of RL methods. In this work, we use demonstrations to overcome the exploration problem and successfully learn to perform long-horizon, multi-step robotics tasks with continuous control such as stacking blocks with a robot arm. Our method, which builds on top of Deep Deterministic Policy Gradients and Hindsight Experience Replay, provides an order of magnitude of speedup over RL on simulated robotics tasks. It is simple to implement and makes only the additional assumption that we can collect a small set of demonstrations. Furthermore, our method is able to solve tasks not solvable by either RL or behavior cloning alone, and often ends up outperforming the demonstrator policy.

Simulations are attractive environments for training agents as they provide an abundant source of data and alleviate certain safety concerns during the training process. But the behaviours developed by agents in simulation are often specific to the characteristics of the simulator. Due to modeling error, strategies that are successful in simulation may not transfer to their real world counterparts. In this paper, we demonstrate a simple method to bridge this “reality gap”. By randomizing the dynamics of the simulator during training, we are able to develop policies that are capable of adapting to very different dynamics, including ones that differ significantly from the dynamics on which the policies were trained. This adaptivity enables the policies to generalize to the dynamics of the real world without any training on the physical system. Our approach is demonstrated on an object pushing task using a robotic arm. Despite being trained exclusively in simulation, our policies are able to maintain a similar level of performance when deployed on a real robot, reliably moving an object to a desired location from random initial configurations. We explore the impact of various design decisions and show that the resulting policies are robust to significant calibration error.

Deep learning-based robotic grasping has made significant progress thanks to algorithmic improvements and increased data availability. However, state-of-the-art models are often trained on as few as hundreds or thousands of unique object instances, and as a result generalization can be a challenge. In this work, we explore a novel data generation pipeline for training a deep neural network to perform grasp planning that applies the idea of domain randomization to object synthesis. We generate millions of unique, unrealistic procedurally generated objects, and train a deep neural network to perform grasp planning on these objects. Since the distribution of successful grasps for a given object can be highly multimodal, we propose an autoregressive grasp planning model that maps sensor inputs of a scene to a probability distribution over possible grasps. This model allows us to sample grasps efficiently at test time (or avoid sampling entirely). We evaluate our model architecture and data generation pipeline in simulation and the real world. We find we can achieve a >90% success rate on previously unseen realistic objects at test time in simulation despite having only been trained on random objects. We also demonstrate an 80% success rate on real-world grasp attempts despite having only been trained on random simulated objects.

Bridging the `reality gap' that separates simulated robotics from experiments on hardware could accelerate robotic research through improved data availability. This paper explores domain randomization, a simple technique for training models on simulated images that transfer to real images by randomizing rendering in the simulator. With enough variability in the simulator, the real world may appear to the model as just another variation. We focus on the task of object localization, which is a stepping stone to general robotic manipulation skills. We find that it is possible to train a real-world object detector that is accurate to 1.5 cm and robust to distractors and partial occlusions using only data from a simulator with non-realistic random textures. To demonstrate the capabilities of our detectors, we show they can be used to perform grasping in a cluttered environment. To our knowledge, this is the first successful transfer of a deep neural network trained only on simulated RGB images (without pre-training on real images) to the real world for the purpose of robotic control.

Dealing with sparse rewards is one of the biggest challenges in Reinforcement Learning (RL). We present a novel technique called Hindsight Experience Replay which allows sample-efficient learning from rewards which are sparse and binary and therefore avoid the need for complicated reward engineering. It can be combined with an arbitrary off-policy RL algorithm and may be seen as a form of implicit curriculum. We demonstrate our approach on the task of manipulating objects with a robotic arm. In particular, we run experiments on three different tasks: pushing, sliding, and pick-and-place, in each case using only binary rewards indicating whether or not the task is completed. Our ablation studies show that Hindsight Experience Replay is a crucial ingredient which makes training possible in these challenging environments. We show that our policies trained on a physics simulation can be deployed on a physical robot and successfully complete the task. The video presenting our experiments is available at https://goo.gl/SMrQnI.

Imitation learning has been commonly applied to solve different tasks in isolation. This usually requires either careful feature engineering, or a significant number of samples. This is far from what we desire: ideally, robots should be able to learn from very few demonstrations of any given task, and instantly generalize to new situations of the same task, without requiring task-specific engineering. In this paper, we propose a meta-learning framework for achieving such capability, which we call one-shot imitation learning. Specifically, we consider the setting where there is a very large (maybe infinite) set of tasks, and each task has many instantiations. For example, a task could be to stack all blocks on a table into a single tower, another task could be to place all blocks on a table into two-block towers, etc. In each case, different instances of the task would consist of different sets of blocks with different initial states. At training time, our algorithm is presented with pairs of demonstrations for a subset of all tasks. A neural net is trained that takes as input one demonstration and the current state (which initially is the initial state of the other demonstration of the pair), and outputs an action with the goal that the resulting sequence of states and actions matches as closely as possible with the second demonstration. At test time, a demonstration of a single instance of a new task is presented, and the neural net is expected to perform well on new instances of this new task. Our experiments show that the use of soft attention allows the model to generalize to conditions and tasks unseen in the training data. We anticipate that by training this model on a much greater variety of tasks and settings, we will obtain a general system that can turn any demonstrations into robust policies that can accomplish an overwhelming variety of tasks.

We present an approach for learning simple algorithms such as copying, multi-digit addition and single digit multiplication directly from examples. Our framework consists of a set of interfaces, accessed by a controller. Typical interfaces are 1-D tapes or 2-D grids that hold the input and output data. For the controller, we explore a range of neural network-based models which vary in their ability to abstract the underlying algorithm from training instances and generalize to test examples with many thousands of digits. The controller is trained using Q-learning with several enhancements and we show that the bottleneck is in the capabilities of the controller rather than in the search incurred by Q-learning.

We present a variety of new architectural features and training procedures that we apply to the generative adversarial networks (GANs) framework. Using our new techniques, we achieve state-of-the-art results in semi-supervised classification on MNIST, CIFAR-10 and SVHN. The generated images are of high quality as confirmed by a visual Turing test: Our model generates MNIST samples that humans cannot distinguish from real data, and CIFAR-10 samples that yield a human error rate of 21.3%. We also present ImageNet samples with unprecedented resolution and show that our methods enable the model to learn recognizable features of ImageNet classes.

Problems of segmentation, denoising, registration and 3d reconstruction are often addressed with the graph cut algorithm. However, solving an unconstrained graph cut problem is NP-hard. For tractable optimization, pairwise potentials have to fulfill the submodularity inequality. In our learning paradigm, pairwise potentials are created as the dot product of a learned vector w with positive feature vectors. In order to constrain such a model to remain tractable, previous approaches have enforced the weight vector to be positive for pairwise potentials in which the labels differ, and set pairwise potentials to zero in the case that the label remains the same. Such constraints are sufficient to guarantee that the resulting pairwise potentials satisfy the submodularity inequality. However, we show that such an approach unnecessarily restricts the capacity of the learned models. Instead, we approach the problem of learning with sub-modularity constraints from a probabilistic setting. Prediction errors may be the result of: learning error, model error, or inference error. Guaranteeing submodularity for all possible inputs, no matter how improbable, reduces inference error to effectively zero, but increases model error. In contrast, we relax the requirement of guaranteed submodularity to solutions that are submodular with high probability. We show that the conceptually simple strategy of enforcing submodularity on the training examples guarantees with low sample complexity that test images will also yield sub-modular pairwise potentials. Results are presented showing substantial improvement from the resulting increased model capacity.

Thang Luong, Ilya Sutskever, Quoc Le, Oriol Vinyals, Wojciech Zaremba. Proceedings of the 53rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 7th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2015.

The Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) is an extremely powerful sequence model that is often difficult to train. The Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) is a specific RNN architecture whose design makes it much easier to train. While wildly successful in practice, the LSTM’s architecture appears to be ad-hoc so it is not clear if it is optimal, and the significance of its individual components is unclear. In this work, we aim to determine whether the LSTM architecture is optimal or whether much better architectures exist. We conducted a thorough architecture search where we evaluated over ten thousand different RNN architectures, and identified an architecture that outperforms both the LSTM and the recently-introduced Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) on some but not all tasks. We found that adding a bias of 1 to the LSTM’s forget gate closes the gap between the LSTM and the GRU.

We propose a family of maximum mean discrepancy (MMD) kernel two-sample tests that have low sample complexity and are consistent. The test has a hyperparameter that allows one to control the tradeoff between sample complexity and computational time. Our family of tests, which we denote as B-tests, is both computationally and statistically efficient, combining favorable properties of previously proposed MMD two-sample tests. It does so by better leveraging samples to produce low variance estimates in the finite sample case, while avoiding a quadratic number of kernel evaluations and complex null-hypothesis approximation as would be required by tests relying on one sample U-statistics. The B-test uses a smaller than quadratic number of kernel evaluations and avoids completely the computational burden of complex null-hypothesis approximation while maintaining consistency and probabilistically conservative thresholds on Type I error. Finally, recent results of combining multiple kernels transfer seamlessly to our hypothesis test, allowing a further increase in discriminative power and decrease in sample complexity.