E2H: A Two-Stage Non-Invasive Neural Signal Driven Humanoid Robotic Whole-Body Control Framework

Recent advancements in humanoid robotics, including the integration of hierarchical reinforcement learning-based control and the utilization of LLM planning, have significantly enhanced the ability of robots to perform complex tasks. In contrast to the highly developed humanoid robots, the human factors involved remain relatively unexplored. Directly controlling humanoid robots with the brain has already appeared in many science fiction novels, such as Pacific Rim and Gundam. In this work, we present E2H (EEG-to-Humanoid), an innovative framework that pioneers the control of humanoid robots using high-frequency non-invasive neural signals. As the none-invasive signal quality remains low in decoding precise spatial trajectory, we decompose the E2H framework in an innovative two-stage formation: 1) decoding neural signals (EEG) into semantic motion keywords, 2) utilizing LLM facilitated motion generation with a precise motion imitation control policy to realize humanoid robotics control. The method of directly driving robots with brainwave commands offers a novel approach to human-machine collaboration, especially in situations where verbal commands are impractical, such as in cases of speech impairments, space exploration, or underwater exploration, unlocking significant potential. E2H offers an exciting glimpse into the future, holding immense potential for human-computer interaction.

AHA: A Vision-Language-Model for Detecting and Reasoning Over Failures in Robotic Manipulation

Robotic manipulation in open-world settings requires not only task execution but also the ability to detect and learn from failures. While recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) and large language models (LLMs) have improved robots' spatial reasoning and problem-solving abilities, they still struggle with failure recognition, limiting their real-world applicability. We introduce AHA, an open-source VLM designed to detect and reason about failures in robotic manipulation using natural language. By framing failure detection as a free-form reasoning task, AHA identifies failures and provides detailed, adaptable explanations across different robots, tasks, and environments. We fine-tuned AHA using FailGen, a scalable framework that generates the first large-scale dataset of robotic failure trajectories, the AHA dataset. FailGen achieves this by procedurally perturbing successful demonstrations from simulation. Despite being trained solely on the AHA dataset, AHA generalizes effectively to real-world failure datasets, robotic systems, and unseen tasks. It surpasses the second-best model (GPT-4o in-context learning) by 10.3% and exceeds the average performance of six compared models including five state-of-the-art VLMs by 35.3% across multiple metrics and datasets. We integrate AHA into three manipulation frameworks that utilize LLMs/VLMs for reinforcement learning, task and motion planning, and zero-shot trajectory generation. AHA's failure feedback enhances these policies' performances by refining dense reward functions, optimizing task planning, and improving sub-task verification, boosting task success rates by an average of 21.4% across all three tasks compared to GPT-4 models.

Mamba Policy: Towards Efficient 3D Diffusion Policy with Hybrid Selective State Models

Diffusion models have been widely employed in the field of 3D manipulation due to their efficient capability to learn distributions, allowing for precise prediction of action trajectories. However, diffusion models typically rely on large parameter UNet backbones as policy networks, which can be challenging to deploy on resource-constrained devices. Recently, the Mamba model has emerged as a promising solution for efficient modeling, offering low computational complexity and strong performance in sequence modeling. In this work, we propose the Mamba Policy, a lighter but stronger policy that reduces the parameter count by over 80% compared to the original policy network while achieving superior performance. Specifically, we introduce the XMamba Block, which effectively integrates input information with conditional features and leverages a combination of Mamba and Attention mechanisms for deep feature extraction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the Mamba Policy excels on the Adroit, Dexart, and MetaWorld datasets, requiring significantly fewer computational resources. Additionally, we highlight the Mamba Policy's enhanced robustness in long-horizon scenarios compared to baseline methods and explore the performance of various Mamba variants within the Mamba Policy framework. Our project page is in https://andycao1125.github.io/mamba_policy/.

RVT-2: Learning Precise Manipulation from Few Demonstrations

In this work, we study how to build a robotic system that can solve multiple 3D manipulation tasks given language instructions. To be useful in industrial and household domains, such a system should be capable of learning new tasks with few demonstrations and solving them precisely. Prior works, like PerAct and RVT, have studied this problem, however, they often struggle with tasks requiring high precision. We study how to make them more effective, precise, and fast. Using a combination of architectural and system-level improvements, we propose RVT-2, a multitask 3D manipulation model that is 6X faster in training and 2X faster in inference than its predecessor RVT. RVT-2 achieves a new state-of-the-art on RLBench, improving the success rate from 65% to 82%. RVT-2 is also effective in the real world, where it can learn tasks requiring high precision, like picking up and inserting plugs, with just 10 demonstrations. Visual results, code, and trained model are provided at: https://robotic-view-transformer-2.github.io/.

Mamba as Decision Maker: Exploring Multi-scale Sequence Modeling in Offline Reinforcement Learning

Sequential modeling has demonstrated remarkable capabilities in offline reinforcement learning (RL), with Decision Transformer (DT) being one of the most notable representatives, achieving significant success. However, RL trajectories possess unique properties to be distinguished from the conventional sequence (e.g., text or audio): (1) local correlation, where the next states in RL are theoretically determined solely by current states and actions based on the Markov Decision Process (MDP), and (2) global correlation, where each step's features are related to long-term historical information due to the time-continuous nature of trajectories. In this paper, we propose a novel action sequence predictor, named Mamba Decision Maker (MambaDM), where Mamba is expected to be a promising alternative for sequence modeling paradigms, owing to its efficient modeling of multi-scale dependencies. In particular, we introduce a novel mixer module that proficiently extracts and integrates both global and local features of the input sequence, effectively capturing interrelationships in RL datasets. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MambaDM achieves state-of-the-art performance in Atari and OpenAI Gym datasets. Furthermore, we empirically investigate the scaling laws of MambaDM, finding that increasing model size does not bring performance improvement, but scaling the dataset amount by 2x for MambaDM can obtain up to 33.7% score improvement on Atari dataset. This paper delves into the sequence modeling capabilities of MambaDM in the RL domain, paving the way for future advancements in robust and efficient decision-making systems. Our code will be available at https://github.com/AndyCao1125/MambaDM.

FinePOSE: Fine-Grained Prompt-Driven 3D Human Pose Estimation via Diffusion Models

The 3D Human Pose Estimation (3D HPE) task uses 2D images or videos to predict human joint coordinates in 3D space. Despite recent advancements in deep learning-based methods, they mostly ignore the capability of coupling accessible texts and naturally feasible knowledge of humans, missing out on valuable implicit supervision to guide the 3D HPE task. Moreover, previous efforts often study this task from the perspective of the whole human body, neglecting fine-grained guidance hidden in different body parts. To this end, we present a new Fine-Grained Prompt-Driven Denoiser based on a diffusion model for 3D HPE, named \textbf{FinePOSE}. It consists of three core blocks enhancing the reverse process of the diffusion model: (1) Fine-grained Part-aware Prompt learning (FPP) block constructs fine-grained part-aware prompts via coupling accessible texts and naturally feasible knowledge of body parts with learnable prompts to model implicit guidance. (2) Fine-grained Prompt-pose Communication (FPC) block establishes fine-grained communications between learned part-aware prompts and poses to improve the denoising quality. (3) Prompt-driven Timestamp Stylization (PTS) block integrates learned prompt embedding and temporal information related to the noise level to enable adaptive adjustment at each denoising step. Extensive experiments on public single-human pose estimation datasets show that FinePOSE outperforms state-of-the-art methods. We further extend FinePOSE to multi-human pose estimation. Achieving 34.3mm average MPJPE on the EgoHumans dataset demonstrates the potential of FinePOSE to deal with complex multi-human scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/PKU-ICST-MIPL/FinePOSE_CVPR2024.

Geometric Fabrics: a Safe Guiding Medium for Policy Learning

Robotics policies are always subjected to complex, second order dynamics that entangle their actions with resulting states. In reinforcement learning (RL) contexts, policies have the burden of deciphering these complicated interactions over massive amounts of experience and complex reward functions to learn how to accomplish tasks. Moreover, policies typically issue actions directly to controllers like Operational Space Control (OSC) or joint PD control, which induces straightline motion towards these action targets in task or joint space. However, straightline motion in these spaces for the most part do not capture the rich, nonlinear behavior our robots need to exhibit, shifting the burden of discovering these behaviors more completely to the agent. Unlike these simpler controllers, geometric fabrics capture a much richer and desirable set of behaviors via artificial, second order dynamics grounded in nonlinear geometry. These artificial dynamics shift the uncontrolled dynamics of a robot via an appropriate control law to form behavioral dynamics. Behavioral dynamics unlock a new action space and safe, guiding behavior over which RL policies are trained. Behavioral dynamics enable bang-bang-like RL policy actions that are still safe for real robots, simplify reward engineering, and help sequence real-world, high-performance policies. We describe the framework more generally and create a specific instantiation for the problem of dexterous, in-hand reorientation of a cube by a highly actuated robot hand.

AdaDemo: Data-Efficient Demonstration Expansion for Generalist Robotic Agent

Encouraged by the remarkable achievements of language and vision foundation models, developing generalist robotic agents through imitation learning, using large demonstration datasets, has become a prominent area of interest in robot learning. The efficacy of imitation learning is heavily reliant on the quantity and quality of the demonstration datasets. In this study, we aim to scale up demonstrations in a data-efficient way to facilitate the learning of generalist robotic agents. We introduce AdaDemo (Adaptive Online Demonstration Expansion), a general framework designed to improve multi-task policy learning by actively and continually expanding the demonstration dataset. AdaDemo strategically collects new demonstrations to address the identified weakness in the existing policy, ensuring data efficiency is maximized. Through a comprehensive evaluation on a total of 22 tasks across two robotic manipulation benchmarks (RLBench and Adroit), we demonstrate AdaDemo's capability to progressively improve policy performance by guiding the generation of high-quality demonstration datasets in a data-efficient manner.

RVT: Robotic View Transformer for 3D Object Manipulation

For 3D object manipulation, methods that build an explicit 3D representation perform better than those relying only on camera images. But using explicit 3D representations like voxels comes at large computing cost, adversely affecting scalability. In this work, we propose RVT, a multi-view transformer for 3D manipulation that is both scalable and accurate. Some key features of RVT are an attention mechanism to aggregate information across views and re-rendering of the camera input from virtual views around the robot workspace. In simulations, we find that a single RVT model works well across 18 RLBench tasks with 249 task variations, achieving 26% higher relative success than the existing state-of-the-art method (PerAct). It also trains 36X faster than PerAct for achieving the same performance and achieves 2.3X the inference speed of PerAct. Further, RVT can perform a variety of manipulation tasks in the real world with just a few ($\sim$10) demonstrations per task. Visual results, code, and trained model are provided at https://robotic-view-transformer.github.io/.

Learning Action Translator for Meta Reinforcement Learning on Sparse-Reward Tasks

Meta reinforcement learning (meta-RL) aims to learn a policy solving a set of training tasks simultaneously and quickly adapting to new tasks. It requires massive amounts of data drawn from training tasks to infer the common structure shared among tasks. Without heavy reward engineering, the sparse rewards in long-horizon tasks exacerbate the problem of sample efficiency in meta-RL. Another challenge in meta-RL is the discrepancy of difficulty level among tasks, which might cause one easy task dominating learning of the shared policy and thus preclude policy adaptation to new tasks. This work introduces a novel objective function to learn an action translator among training tasks. We theoretically verify that the value of the transferred policy with the action translator can be close to the value of the source policy and our objective function (approximately) upper bounds the value difference. We propose to combine the action translator with context-based meta-RL algorithms for better data collection and more efficient exploration during meta-training. Our approach empirically improves the sample efficiency and performance of meta-RL algorithms on sparse-reward tasks.