GR-2: A Generative Video-Language-Action Model with Web-Scale Knowledge for Robot Manipulation

We present GR-2, a state-of-the-art generalist robot agent for versatile and generalizable robot manipulation. GR-2 is first pre-trained on a vast number of Internet videos to capture the dynamics of the world. This large-scale pre-training, involving 38 million video clips and over 50 billion tokens, equips GR-2 with the ability to generalize across a wide range of robotic tasks and environments during subsequent policy learning. Following this, GR-2 is fine-tuned for both video generation and action prediction using robot trajectories. It exhibits impressive multi-task learning capabilities, achieving an average success rate of 97.7% across more than 100 tasks. Moreover, GR-2 demonstrates exceptional generalization to new, previously unseen scenarios, including novel backgrounds, environments, objects, and tasks. Notably, GR-2 scales effectively with model size, underscoring its potential for continued growth and application. Project page: \url{https://gr2-manipulation.github.io}.

World Model-based Perception for Visual Legged Locomotion

Legged locomotion over various terrains is challenging and requires precise perception of the robot and its surroundings from both proprioception and vision. However, learning directly from high-dimensional visual input is often data-inefficient and intricate. To address this issue, traditional methods attempt to learn a teacher policy with access to privileged information first and then learn a student policy to imitate the teacher's behavior with visual input. Despite some progress, this imitation framework prevents the student policy from achieving optimal performance due to the information gap between inputs. Furthermore, the learning process is unnatural since animals intuitively learn to traverse different terrains based on their understanding of the world without privileged knowledge. Inspired by this natural ability, we propose a simple yet effective method, World Model-based Perception (WMP), which builds a world model of the environment and learns a policy based on the world model. We illustrate that though completely trained in simulation, the world model can make accurate predictions of real-world trajectories, thus providing informative signals for the policy controller. Extensive simulated and real-world experiments demonstrate that WMP outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in traversability and robustness. Videos and Code are available at: https://wmp-loco.github.io/.

GR-MG: Leveraging Partially Annotated Data via Multi-Modal Goal Conditioned Policy

The robotics community has consistently aimed to achieve generalizable robot manipulation with flexible natural language instructions. One of the primary challenges is that obtaining robot data fully annotated with both actions and texts is time-consuming and labor-intensive. However, partially annotated data, such as human activity videos without action labels and robot play data without language labels, is much easier to collect. Can we leverage these data to enhance the generalization capability of robots? In this paper, we propose GR-MG, a novel method which supports conditioning on both a language instruction and a goal image. During training, GR-MG samples goal images from trajectories and conditions on both the text and the goal image or solely on the image when text is unavailable. During inference, where only the text is provided, GR-MG generates the goal image via a diffusion-based image-editing model and condition on both the text and the generated image. This approach enables GR-MG to leverage large amounts of partially annotated data while still using language to flexibly specify tasks. To generate accurate goal images, we propose a novel progress-guided goal image generation model which injects task progress information into the generation process, significantly improving the fidelity and the performance. In simulation experiments, GR-MG improves the average number of tasks completed in a row of 5 from 3.35 to 4.04. In real-robot experiments, GR-MG is able to perform 47 different tasks and improves the success rate from 62.5% to 75.0% and 42.4% to 57.6% in simple and generalization settings, respectively. Code and checkpoints will be available at the project page: https://gr-mg.github.io/.

IRASim: Learning Interactive Real-Robot Action Simulators

Scalable robot learning in the real world is limited by the cost and safety issues of real robots. In addition, rolling out robot trajectories in the real world can be time-consuming and labor-intensive. In this paper, we propose to learn an interactive real-robot action simulator as an alternative. We introduce a novel method, IRASim, which leverages the power of generative models to generate extremely realistic videos of a robot arm that executes a given action trajectory, starting from an initial given frame. To validate the effectiveness of our method, we create a new benchmark, IRASim Benchmark, based on three real-robot datasets and perform extensive experiments on the benchmark. Results show that IRASim outperforms all the baseline methods and is more preferable in human evaluations. We hope that IRASim can serve as an effective and scalable approach to enhance robot learning in the real world. To promote research for generative real-robot action simulators, we open-source code, benchmark, and checkpoints at https: //gen-irasim.github.io.

SInViG: A Self-Evolving Interactive Visual Agent for Human-Robot Interaction

Linguistic ambiguity is ubiquitous in our daily lives. Previous works adopted interaction between robots and humans for language disambiguation. Nevertheless, when interactive robots are deployed in daily environments, there are significant challenges for natural human-robot interaction, stemming from complex and unpredictable visual inputs, open-ended interaction, and diverse user demands. In this paper, we present SInViG, which is a self-evolving interactive visual agent for human-robot interaction based on natural languages, aiming to resolve language ambiguity, if any, through multi-turn visual-language dialogues. It continuously and automatically learns from unlabeled images and large language models, without human intervention, to be more robust against visual and linguistic complexity. Benefiting from self-evolving, it sets new state-of-the-art on several interactive visual grounding benchmarks. Moreover, our human-robot interaction experiments show that the evolved models consistently acquire more and more preferences from human users. Besides, we also deployed our model on a Franka robot for interactive manipulation tasks. Results demonstrate that our model can follow diverse user instructions and interact naturally with humans in natural language, despite the complexity and disturbance of the environment.

Towards Unified Interactive Visual Grounding in The Wild

Interactive visual grounding in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) is challenging yet practical due to the inevitable ambiguity in natural languages. It requires robots to disambiguate the user input by active information gathering. Previous approaches often rely on predefined templates to ask disambiguation questions, resulting in performance reduction in realistic interactive scenarios. In this paper, we propose TiO, an end-to-end system for interactive visual grounding in human-robot interaction. Benefiting from a unified formulation of visual dialogue and grounding, our method can be trained on a joint of extensive public data, and show superior generality to diversified and challenging open-world scenarios. In the experiments, we validate TiO on GuessWhat?! and InViG benchmarks, setting new state-of-the-art performance by a clear margin. Moreover, we conduct HRI experiments on the carefully selected 150 challenging scenes as well as real-robot platforms. Results show that our method demonstrates superior generality to diversified visual and language inputs with a high success rate. Codes and demos are available at https://github.com/jxu124/TiO.

Unleashing Large-Scale Video Generative Pre-training for Visual Robot Manipulation

Generative pre-trained models have demonstrated remarkable effectiveness in language and vision domains by learning useful representations. In this paper, we extend the scope of this effectiveness by showing that visual robot manipulation can significantly benefit from large-scale video generative pre-training. We introduce GR-1, a straightforward GPT-style model designed for multi-task language-conditioned visual robot manipulation. GR-1 takes as inputs a language instruction, a sequence of observation images, and a sequence of robot states. It predicts robot actions as well as future images in an end-to-end manner. Thanks to a flexible design, GR-1 can be seamlessly finetuned on robot data after pre-trained on a large-scale video dataset. We perform extensive experiments on the challenging CALVIN benchmark and a real robot. On CALVIN benchmark, our method outperforms state-of-the-art baseline methods and improves the success rate from 88.9% to 94.9%. In the setting of zero-shot unseen scene generalization, GR-1 improves the success rate from 53.3% to 85.4%. In real robot experiments, GR-1 also outperforms baseline methods and shows strong potentials in generalization to unseen scenes and objects. We provide inaugural evidence that a unified GPT-style transformer, augmented with large-scale video generative pre-training, exhibits remarkable generalization to multi-task visual robot manipulation. Project page: https://GR1-Manipulation.github.io

Vision-Language Foundation Models as Effective Robot Imitators

Recent progress in vision language foundation models has shown their ability to understand multimodal data and resolve complicated vision language tasks, including robotics manipulation. We seek a straightforward way of making use of existing vision-language models (VLMs) with simple fine-tuning on robotics data. To this end, we derive a simple and novel vision-language manipulation framework, dubbed RoboFlamingo, built upon the open-source VLMs, OpenFlamingo. Unlike prior works, RoboFlamingo utilizes pre-trained VLMs for single-step vision-language comprehension, models sequential history information with an explicit policy head, and is slightly fine-tuned by imitation learning only on language-conditioned manipulation datasets. Such a decomposition provides RoboFlamingo the flexibility for open-loop control and deployment on low-performance platforms. By exceeding the state-of-the-art performance with a large margin on the tested benchmark, we show RoboFlamingo can be an effective and competitive alternative to adapt VLMs to robot control. Our extensive experimental results also reveal several interesting conclusions regarding the behavior of different pre-trained VLMs on manipulation tasks. We believe RoboFlamingo has the potential to be a cost-effective and easy-to-use solution for robotics manipulation, empowering everyone with the ability to fine-tune their own robotics policy.

InViG: Benchmarking Interactive Visual Grounding with 500K Human-Robot Interactions

Ambiguity is ubiquitous in human communication. Previous approaches in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) have often relied on predefined interaction templates, leading to reduced performance in realistic and open-ended scenarios. To address these issues, we present a large-scale dataset, \invig, for interactive visual grounding under language ambiguity. Our dataset comprises over 520K images accompanied by open-ended goal-oriented disambiguation dialogues, encompassing millions of object instances and corresponding question-answer pairs. Leveraging the \invig dataset, we conduct extensive studies and propose a set of baseline solutions for end-to-end interactive visual disambiguation and grounding, achieving a 45.6\% success rate during validation. To the best of our knowledge, the \invig dataset is the first large-scale dataset for resolving open-ended interactive visual grounding, presenting a practical yet highly challenging benchmark for ambiguity-aware HRI. Codes and datasets are available at: \href{https://openivg.github.io}{https://openivg.github.io}.

Exploring Visual Pre-training for Robot Manipulation: Datasets, Models and Methods

Visual pre-training with large-scale real-world data has made great progress in recent years, showing great potential in robot learning with pixel observations. However, the recipes of visual pre-training for robot manipulation tasks are yet to be built. In this paper, we thoroughly investigate the effects of visual pre-training strategies on robot manipulation tasks from three fundamental perspectives: pre-training datasets, model architectures and training methods. Several significant experimental findings are provided that are beneficial for robot learning. Further, we propose a visual pre-training scheme for robot manipulation termed Vi-PRoM, which combines self-supervised learning and supervised learning. Concretely, the former employs contrastive learning to acquire underlying patterns from large-scale unlabeled data, while the latter aims learning visual semantics and temporal dynamics. Extensive experiments on robot manipulations in various simulation environments and the real robot demonstrate the superiority of the proposed scheme. Videos and more details can be found on \url{https://explore-pretrain-robot.github.io}.