VIRT: Vision Instructed Transformer for Robotic Manipulation

Robotic manipulation, owing to its multi-modal nature, often faces significant training ambiguity, necessitating explicit instructions to clearly delineate the manipulation details in tasks. In this work, we highlight that vision instruction is naturally more comprehensible to recent robotic policies than the commonly adopted text instruction, as these policies are born with some vision understanding ability like human infants. Building on this premise and drawing inspiration from cognitive science, we introduce the robotic imagery paradigm, which realizes large-scale robotic data pre-training without text annotations. Additionally, we propose the robotic gaze strategy that emulates the human eye gaze mechanism, thereby guiding subsequent actions and focusing the attention of the policy on the manipulated object. Leveraging these innovations, we develop VIRT, a fully Transformer-based policy. We design comprehensive tasks using both a physical robot and simulated environments to assess the efficacy of VIRT. The results indicate that VIRT can complete very competitive tasks like ``opening the lid of a tightly sealed bottle'', and the proposed techniques boost the success rates of the baseline policy on diverse challenging tasks from nearly 0% to more than 65%.

Personalized Trajectory Prediction via Distribution Discrimination

Trajectory prediction is confronted with the dilemma to capture the multi-modal nature of future dynamics with both diversity and accuracy. In this paper, we present a distribution discrimination (DisDis) method to predict personalized motion patterns by distinguishing the potential distributions. Motivated by that the motion pattern of each person is personalized due to his/her habit, our DisDis learns the latent distribution to represent different motion patterns and optimize it by the contrastive discrimination. This distribution discrimination encourages latent distributions to be more discriminative. Our method can be integrated with existing multi-modal stochastic predictive models as a plug-and-play module to learn the more discriminative latent distribution. To evaluate the latent distribution, we further propose a new metric, probability cumulative minimum distance (PCMD) curve, which cumulatively calculates the minimum distance on the sorted probabilities. Experimental results on the ETH and UCY datasets show the effectiveness of our method.