Towards Generalist Robot Learning from Internet Video: A Survey

This survey presents an overview of methods for learning from video (LfV) in the context of reinforcement learning (RL) and robotics. We focus on methods capable of scaling to large internet video datasets and, in the process, extracting foundational knowledge about the world's dynamics and physical human behaviour. Such methods hold great promise for developing general-purpose robots. We open with an overview of fundamental concepts relevant to the LfV-for-robotics setting. This includes a discussion of the exciting benefits LfV methods can offer (e.g., improved generalization beyond the available robot data) and commentary on key LfV challenges (e.g., challenges related to missing information in video and LfV distribution shifts). Our literature review begins with an analysis of video foundation model techniques that can extract knowledge from large, heterogeneous video datasets. Next, we review methods that specifically leverage video data for robot learning. Here, we categorise work according to which RL knowledge modality benefits from the use of video data. We additionally highlight techniques for mitigating LfV challenges, including reviewing action representations that address the issue of missing action labels in video. Finally, we examine LfV datasets and benchmarks, before concluding the survey by discussing challenges and opportunities in LfV. Here, we advocate for scalable approaches that can leverage the full range of available data and that target the key benefits of LfV. Overall, we hope this survey will serve as a comprehensive reference for the emerging field of LfV, catalysing further research in the area, and ultimately facilitating progress towards obtaining general-purpose robots.

Value Functions are Control Barrier Functions: Verification of Safe Policies using Control Theory

Guaranteeing safe behaviour of reinforcement learning (RL) policies poses significant challenges for safety-critical applications, despite RL's generality and scalability. To address this, we propose a new approach to apply verification methods from control theory to learned value functions. By analyzing task structures for safety preservation, we formalize original theorems that establish links between value functions and control barrier functions. Further, we propose novel metrics for verifying value functions in safe control tasks and practical implementation details to improve learning. Our work presents a novel method for certificate learning, which unlocks a diversity of verification techniques from control theory for RL policies, and marks a significant step towards a formal framework for the general, scalable, and verifiable design of RL-based control systems.