Prediction with Action: Visual Policy Learning via Joint Denoising Process

Diffusion models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in image generation tasks, including image editing and video creation, representing a good understanding of the physical world. On the other line, diffusion models have also shown promise in robotic control tasks by denoising actions, known as diffusion policy. Although the diffusion generative model and diffusion policy exhibit distinct capabilities--image prediction and robotic action, respectively--they technically follow a similar denoising process. In robotic tasks, the ability to predict future images and generate actions is highly correlated since they share the same underlying dynamics of the physical world. Building on this insight, we introduce PAD, a novel visual policy learning framework that unifies image Prediction and robot Action within a joint Denoising process. Specifically, PAD utilizes Diffusion Transformers (DiT) to seamlessly integrate images and robot states, enabling the simultaneous prediction of future images and robot actions. Additionally, PAD supports co-training on both robotic demonstrations and large-scale video datasets and can be easily extended to other robotic modalities, such as depth images. PAD outperforms previous methods, achieving a significant 26.3% relative improvement on the full Metaworld benchmark, by utilizing a single text-conditioned visual policy within a data-efficient imitation learning setting. Furthermore, PAD demonstrates superior generalization to unseen tasks in real-world robot manipulation settings with 28.0% success rate increase compared to the strongest baseline. Project page at https://sites.google.com/view/pad-paper

Learning Smooth Humanoid Locomotion through Lipschitz-Constrained Policies

Reinforcement learning combined with sim-to-real transfer offers a general framework for developing locomotion controllers for legged robots. To facilitate successful deployment in the real world, smoothing techniques, such as low-pass filters and smoothness rewards, are often employed to develop policies with smooth behaviors. However, because these techniques are non-differentiable and usually require tedious tuning of a large set of hyperparameters, they tend to require extensive manual tuning for each robotic platform. To address this challenge and establish a general technique for enforcing smooth behaviors, we propose a simple and effective method that imposes a Lipschitz constraint on a learned policy, which we refer to as Lipschitz-Constrained Policies (LCP). We show that the Lipschitz constraint can be implemented in the form of a gradient penalty, which provides a differentiable objective that can be easily incorporated with automatic differentiation frameworks. We demonstrate that LCP effectively replaces the need for smoothing rewards or low-pass filters and can be easily integrated into training frameworks for many distinct humanoid robots. We extensively evaluate LCP in both simulation and real-world humanoid robots, producing smooth and robust locomotion controllers. All simulation and deployment code, along with complete checkpoints, is available on our project page: https://lipschitz-constrained-policy.github.io.

Advancing Humanoid Locomotion: Mastering Challenging Terrains with Denoising World Model Learning

Humanoid robots, with their human-like skeletal structure, are especially suited for tasks in human-centric environments. However, this structure is accompanied by additional challenges in locomotion controller design, especially in complex real-world environments. As a result, existing humanoid robots are limited to relatively simple terrains, either with model-based control or model-free reinforcement learning. In this work, we introduce Denoising World Model Learning (DWL), an end-to-end reinforcement learning framework for humanoid locomotion control, which demonstrates the world's first humanoid robot to master real-world challenging terrains such as snowy and inclined land in the wild, up and down stairs, and extremely uneven terrains. All scenarios run the same learned neural network with zero-shot sim-to-real transfer, indicating the superior robustness and generalization capability of the proposed method.

Humanoid-Gym: Reinforcement Learning for Humanoid Robot with Zero-Shot Sim2Real Transfer

Humanoid-Gym is an easy-to-use reinforcement learning (RL) framework based on Nvidia Isaac Gym, designed to train locomotion skills for humanoid robots, emphasizing zero-shot transfer from simulation to the real-world environment. Humanoid-Gym also integrates a sim-to-sim framework from Isaac Gym to Mujoco that allows users to verify the trained policies in different physical simulations to ensure the robustness and generalization of the policies. This framework is verified by RobotEra's XBot-S (1.2-meter tall humanoid robot) and XBot-L (1.65-meter tall humanoid robot) in a real-world environment with zero-shot sim-to-real transfer. The project website and source code can be found at: https://sites.google.com/view/humanoid-gym/.

Prompt a Robot to Walk with Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) pre-trained on vast internet-scale data have showcased remarkable capabilities across diverse domains. Recently, there has been escalating interest in deploying LLMs for robotics, aiming to harness the power of foundation models in real-world settings. However, this approach faces significant challenges, particularly in grounding these models in the physical world and in generating dynamic robot motions. To address these issues, we introduce a novel paradigm in which we use few-shot prompts collected from the physical environment, enabling the LLM to autoregressively generate low-level control commands for robots without task-specific fine-tuning. Experiments across various robots and environments validate that our method can effectively prompt a robot to walk. We thus illustrate how LLMs can proficiently function as low-level feedback controllers for dynamic motion control even in high-dimensional robotic systems. The project website and source code can be found at: https://prompt2walk.github.io/ .

DoReMi: Grounding Language Model by Detecting and Recovering from Plan-Execution Misalignment

Large language models encode a vast amount of semantic knowledge and possess remarkable understanding and reasoning capabilities. Previous research has explored how to ground language models in robotic tasks to ensure that the sequences generated by the language model are both logically correct and practically executable. However, low-level execution may deviate from the high-level plan due to environmental perturbations or imperfect controller design. In this paper, we propose DoReMi, a novel language model grounding framework that enables immediate Detection and Recovery from Misalignments between plan and execution. Specifically, during low-level skill execution, we use a vision question answering (VQA) model to regularly detect plan-execution misalignments. If certain misalignment occurs, our method will call the language model to re-plan in order to recover from misalignments. Experiments on various complex tasks including robot arms and humanoid robots demonstrate that our method can lead to higher task success rates and shorter task completion times. Videos of DoReMi are available at https://sites.google.com/view/doremi-paper.

Decentralized Motor Skill Learning for Complex Robotic Systems

Reinforcement learning (RL) has achieved remarkable success in complex robotic systems (eg. quadruped locomotion). In previous works, the RL-based controller was typically implemented as a single neural network with concatenated observation input. However, the corresponding learned policy is highly task-specific. Since all motors are controlled in a centralized way, out-of-distribution local observations can impact global motors through the single coupled neural network policy. In contrast, animals and humans can control their limbs separately. Inspired by this biological phenomenon, we propose a Decentralized motor skill (DEMOS) learning algorithm to automatically discover motor groups that can be decoupled from each other while preserving essential connections and then learn a decentralized motor control policy. Our method improves the robustness and generalization of the policy without sacrificing performance. Experiments on quadruped and humanoid robots demonstrate that the learned policy is robust against local motor malfunctions and can be transferred to new tasks.