Analysing the Interplay of Vision and Touch for Dexterous Insertion Tasks

Robotic insertion tasks remain challenging due to uncertainties in perception and the need for precise control, particularly in unstructured environments. While humans seamlessly combine vision and touch for such tasks, effectively integrating these modalities in robotic systems is still an open problem. Our work presents an extensive analysis of the interplay between visual and tactile feedback during dexterous insertion tasks, showing that tactile sensing can greatly enhance success rates on challenging insertions with tight tolerances and varied hole orientations that vision alone cannot solve. These findings provide valuable insights for designing more effective multi-modal robotic control systems and highlight the critical role of tactile feedback in contact-rich manipulation tasks.

Learning Tactile Insertion in the Real World

Humans have exceptional tactile sensing capabilities, which they can leverage to solve challenging, partially observable tasks that cannot be solved from visual observation alone. Research in tactile sensing attempts to unlock this new input modality for robots. Lately, these sensors have become cheaper and, thus, widely available. At the same time, the question of how to integrate them into control loops is still an active area of research, with central challenges being partial observability and the contact-rich nature of manipulation tasks. In this study, we propose to use Reinforcement Learning to learn an end-to-end policy, mapping directly from tactile sensor readings to actions. Specifically, we use Dreamer-v3 on a challenging, partially observable robotic insertion task with a Franka Research 3, both in simulation and on a real system. For the real setup, we built a robotic platform capable of resetting itself fully autonomously, allowing for extensive training runs without human supervision. Our preliminary results indicate that Dreamer is capable of utilizing tactile inputs to solve robotic manipulation tasks in simulation and reality. Furthermore, we find that providing the robot with tactile feedback generally improves task performance, though, in our setup, we do not yet include other sensing modalities. In the future, we plan to utilize our platform to evaluate a wide range of other Reinforcement Learning algorithms on tactile tasks.

Iterated $Q$-Network: Beyond the One-Step Bellman Operator

Value-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods rely on the application of the Bellman operator, which needs to be approximated from samples. Most approaches consist of an iterative scheme alternating the application of the Bellman operator and a subsequent projection step onto a considered function space. However, we observe that these algorithms can be improved by considering multiple iterations of the Bellman operator at once. Thus, we introduce iterated $Q$-Networks (iQN), a novel approach that learns a sequence of $Q$-function approximations where each $Q$-function serves as the target for the next one in a chain of consecutive Bellman iterations. We demonstrate that iQN is theoretically sound and show how it can be seamlessly used in value-based and actor-critic methods. We empirically demonstrate its advantages on Atari $2600$ games and in continuous-control MuJoCo environments.

Pseudo-Likelihood Inference

Simulation-Based Inference (SBI) is a common name for an emerging family of approaches that infer the model parameters when the likelihood is intractable. Existing SBI methods either approximate the likelihood, such as Approximate Bayesian Computation (ABC) or directly model the posterior, such as Sequential Neural Posterior Estimation (SNPE). While ABC is efficient on low-dimensional problems, on higher-dimensional tasks, it is generally outperformed by SNPE, which leverages function approximation. In this paper, we propose Pseudo-Likelihood Inference (PLI), a new method that brings neural approximation into ABC, making it competitive on challenging Bayesian system identification tasks. By utilizing integral probability metrics, we introduce a smooth likelihood kernel with an adaptive bandwidth that is updated based on information-theoretic trust regions. Thanks to this formulation, our method (i) allows for optimizing neural posteriors via gradient descent, (ii) does not rely on summary statistics, and (iii) enables multiple observations as input. In comparison to SNPE, it leads to improved performance when more data is available. The effectiveness of PLI is evaluated on four classical SBI benchmark tasks and on a highly dynamic physical system, showing particular advantages on stochastic simulations and multi-modal posterior landscapes.

Diminishing Return of Value Expansion Methods in Model-Based Reinforcement Learning

Model-based reinforcement learning is one approach to increase sample efficiency. However, the accuracy of the dynamics model and the resulting compounding error over modelled trajectories are commonly regarded as key limitations. A natural question to ask is: How much more sample efficiency can be gained by improving the learned dynamics models? Our paper empirically answers this question for the class of model-based value expansion methods in continuous control problems. Value expansion methods should benefit from increased model accuracy by enabling longer rollout horizons and better value function approximations. Our empirical study, which leverages oracle dynamics models to avoid compounding model errors, shows that (1) longer horizons increase sample efficiency, but the gain in improvement decreases with each additional expansion step, and (2) the increased model accuracy only marginally increases the sample efficiency compared to learned models with identical horizons. Therefore, longer horizons and increased model accuracy yield diminishing returns in terms of sample efficiency. These improvements in sample efficiency are particularly disappointing when compared to model-free value expansion methods. Even though they introduce no computational overhead, we find their performance to be on-par with model-based value expansion methods. Therefore, we conclude that the limitation of model-based value expansion methods is not the model accuracy of the learned models. While higher model accuracy is beneficial, our experiments show that even a perfect model will not provide an un-rivalled sample efficiency but that the bottleneck lies elsewhere.

Revisiting Model-based Value Expansion

Model-based value expansion methods promise to improve the quality of value function targets and, thereby, the effectiveness of value function learning. However, to date, these methods are being outperformed by Dyna-style algorithms with conceptually simpler 1-step value function targets. This shows that in practice, the theoretical justification of value expansion does not seem to hold. We provide a thorough empirical study to shed light on the causes of failure of value expansion methods in practice which is believed to be the compounding model error. By leveraging GPU based physics simulators, we are able to efficiently use the true dynamics for analysis inside the model-based reinforcement learning loop. Performing extensive comparisons between true and learned dynamics sheds light into this black box. This paper provides a better understanding of the actual problems in value expansion. We provide future directions of research by empirically testing the maximum theoretical performance of current approaches.

SMARTS: Scalable Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Training School for Autonomous Driving

Multi-agent interaction is a fundamental aspect of autonomous driving in the real world. Despite more than a decade of research and development, the problem of how to competently interact with diverse road users in diverse scenarios remains largely unsolved. Learning methods have much to offer towards solving this problem. But they require a realistic multi-agent simulator that generates diverse and competent driving interactions. To meet this need, we develop a dedicated simulation platform called SMARTS (Scalable Multi-Agent RL Training School). SMARTS supports the training, accumulation, and use of diverse behavior models of road users. These are in turn used to create increasingly more realistic and diverse interactions that enable deeper and broader research on multi-agent interaction. In this paper, we describe the design goals of SMARTS, explain its basic architecture and its key features, and illustrate its use through concrete multi-agent experiments on interactive scenarios. We open-source the SMARTS platform and the associated benchmark tasks and evaluation metrics to encourage and empower research on multi-agent learning for autonomous driving. Our code is available at https://github.com/huawei-noah/SMARTS.

SAMBA: Safe Model-Based & Active Reinforcement Learning

In this paper, we propose SAMBA, a novel framework for safe reinforcement learning that combines aspects from probabilistic modelling, information theory, and statistics. Our method builds upon PILCO to enable active exploration using novel(semi-)metrics for out-of-sample Gaussian process evaluation optimised through a multi-objective problem that supports conditional-value-at-risk constraints. We evaluate our algorithm on a variety of safe dynamical system benchmarks involving both low and high-dimensional state representations. Our results show orders of magnitude reductions in samples and violations compared to state-of-the-art methods. Lastly, we provide intuition as to the effectiveness of the framework by a detailed analysis of our active metrics and safety constraints.