Oral
in
Workshop: Exploration in AI Today (EXAIT)
Blindfolded Experts Generalize Better: Insights from Robotic Manipulation and Videogames
Ev Zisselman Vanshtein · Mirco Mutti · Shelly Francis-Meretzki · Elisei Shafer · Aviv Tamar
Keywords: [ Robotics ] [ Imitation Learning ] [ Sequential Decision-making ] [ Generalization ] [ Video Games ]
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Abstract
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[ Project Page ]
presentation:
Exploration in AI Today (EXAIT)
Sat 19 Jul 8:30 a.m. PDT — 5:15 p.m. PDT
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OpenReview]
Sat 19 Jul 8:30 a.m. PDT — 5:15 p.m. PDT
Abstract:
Behavioral cloning is a simple yet effective technique for learning sequential decision-making from demonstrations. Recently, it has gained prominence as the core of foundation models for the physical world, where achieving generalization requires countless demonstrations of a multitude of tasks. Typically, a human expert with full information on the task demonstrates a (nearly) optimal behavior. In this paper, we propose to hide some of the task's information from the demonstrator. This ``blindfolded'' expert is compelled to employ non-trivial *exploration* to solve the task. We show that cloning the blindfolded expert generalizes better to unseen tasks than its fully-informed counterpart. We conduct experiments of real-world robot peg insertion tasks with (limited) human demonstrations, alongside a videogame from the Procgen benchmark. Additionally, we support our findings with theoretical analysis, which confirms that the generalization error scales with $\sqrt{I/m}$, where $I$ measures the amount of task information available to the demonstrator, and $m$ is the number of demonstrated tasks. Both theory and practice indicate that cloning blindfolded experts generalizes better with fewer demonstrated tasks. Project page with videos and code: https://sites.google.com/view/blindfoldedexperts/home.
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