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Pierre Sermanet

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16 papers

2 author rows

ICRA Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Open X-Embodiment: Robotic Learning Datasets and RT-X Models: Open X-Embodiment Collaboration

Abby O'Neill
Abdul Rehman
Abhiram Maddukuri
Abhishek Gupta 0004
Abhishek Padalkar
Abraham Lee
Acorn Pooley
Agrim Gupta

Large, high-capacity models trained on diverse datasets have shown remarkable successes on efficiently tackling downstream applications. In domains from NLP to Computer Vision, this has led to a consolidation of pretrained models, with general pretrained backbones serving as a starting point for many applications. Can such a consolidation happen in robotics? Conventionally, robotic learning methods train a separate model for every application, every robot, and even every environment. Can we instead train "generalist" X-robot policy that can be adapted efficiently to new robots, tasks, and environments? In this paper, we provide datasets in standardized data formats and models to make it possible to explore this possibility in the context of robotic manipulation, alongside experimental results that provide an example of effective X-robot policies. We assemble a dataset from 22 different robots collected through a collaboration between 21 institutions, demonstrating 527 skills (160266 tasks). We show that a high-capacity model trained on this data, which we call RT-X, exhibits positive transfer and improves the capabilities of multiple robots by leveraging experience from other platforms. The project website is robotics-transformer-x. github.io.

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ICRA Conference 2024 Conference Paper

RoboVQA: Multimodal Long-Horizon Reasoning for Robotics

Pierre Sermanet
Tianli Ding
Jeffrey Zhao
Fei Xia 0002
Debidatta Dwibedi
Keerthana Gopalakrishnan
Christine Chan
Gabriel Dulac-Arnold

We present a scalable, bottom-up and intrinsically diverse data collection scheme that can be used for high-level reasoning with long and medium horizons and that has 2. 2x higher throughput compared to traditional narrow top-down step-by-step collection. We collect realistic data by performing any user requests within the entirety of 3 office buildings and using multiple embodiments (robot, human, human with grasping tool). With this data, we show that models trained on all embodiments perform better than ones trained on the robot data only, even when evaluated solely on robot episodes. We explore the economics of collection costs and find that for a fixed budget it is beneficial to take advantage of the cheaper human collection along with robot collection. We release a large and highly diverse (29, 520 unique instructions) dataset dubbed RoboVQA containing 829, 502 (video, text) pairs for robotics-focused visual question answering. We also demonstrate how evaluating real robot experiments with an intervention mechanism enables performing tasks to completion, making it deployable with human oversight even if imperfect while also providing a single performance metric. We demonstrate a single video-conditioned model named RoboVQA-VideoCoCa trained on our dataset that is capable of performing a variety of grounded high-level reasoning tasks in broad realistic settings with a cognitive intervention rate 46% lower than the zeroshot state of the art visual language model (VLM) baseline and is able to guide real robots through long-horizon tasks. The performance gap with zero-shot state-of-the-art models indicates that a lot of grounded data remains to be collected for real-world deployment, emphasizing the critical need for scalable data collection approaches. Finally, we show that video VLMs significantly outperform single-image VLMs with an average error rate reduction of 19% across all VQA tasks. Thanks to video conditioning and dataset diversity, the model can be used as general video value functions (e. g. success and affordance) in situations where actions needs to be recognized rather than states, expanding capabilities and environment understanding for robots. Data and videos are available at robovqa. github.io

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ICLR Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Video Language Planning

Yilun Du
Sherry Yang 0001
Pete Florence
Fei Xia 0002
Ayzaan Wahid
Brian Ichter
Pierre Sermanet
Tianhe Yu

We are interested in enabling visual planning for complex long-horizon tasks in the space of generated videos and language, leveraging recent advances in large generative models pretrained on Internet-scale data. To this end, we present video language planning (VLP), an algorithm that consists of a tree search procedure, where we train (i) vision-language models to serve as both policies and value functions, and (ii) text-to-video models as dynamics models. VLP takes as input a long-horizon task instruction and current image observation, and outputs a long video plan that provides detailed multimodal (video and language) specifications that describe how to complete the final task. VLP scales with increasing computation budget where more computation time results in improved video plans, and is able to synthesize long-horizon video plans across different robotics domains -- from multi-object rearrangement, to multi-camera bi-arm dexterous manipulation. Generated video plans can be translated into real robot actions via goal-conditioned policies, conditioned on each intermediate frame of the generated video. Experiments show that VLP substantially improves long-horizon task success rates compared to prior methods on both simulated and real robots (across 3 hardware platforms).

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ICML Conference 2023 Conference Paper

PaLM-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Model

Danny Driess
Fei Xia 0002
Mehdi S. M. Sajjadi
Corey Lynch
Aakanksha Chowdhery
Brian Ichter
Ayzaan Wahid
Jonathan Tompson

Large language models excel at a wide range of complex tasks. However, enabling general inference in the real world, e. g. for robotics problems, raises the challenge of grounding. We propose embodied language models to directly incorporate real-world continuous sensor modalities into language models and thereby establish the link between words and percepts. Input to our embodied language model are multimodal sentences that interleave visual, continuous state estimation, and textual input encodings. We train these encodings end-to-end, in conjunction with a pre-trained large language model, for multiple embodied tasks including sequential robotic manipulation planning, visual question answering, and captioning. Our evaluations show that PaLM-E, a single large embodied multimodal model, can address a variety of embodied reasoning tasks, from a variety of observation modalities, on multiple embodiments, and further, exhibits positive transfer: the model benefits from diverse joint training across internet-scale language, vision, and visual-language domains. Our largest model with 562B parameters, in addition to being trained on robotics tasks, is a visual-language generalist with state-of-the-art performance on OK-VQA, and retains generalist language capabilities with increasing scale.

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ICRA Conference 2023 Conference Paper

Visuomotor Control in Multi-Object Scenes Using Object-Aware Representations

Negin Heravi
Ayzaan Wahid
Corey Lynch
Pete Florence
Travis Armstrong
Jonathan Tompson
Pierre Sermanet
Jeannette Bohg

Perceptual understanding of the scene and the relationship between its different components is important for successful completion of robotic tasks. Representation learning has been shown to be a powerful technique for this, but most of the current methodologies learn task specific representations that do not necessarily transfer well to other tasks. Furthermore, representations learned by supervised methods require large, labeled datasets for each task that are expensive to collect in the real-world. Using self-supervised learning to obtain representations from unlabeled data can mitigate this problem. However, current self-supervised representation learning methods are mostly object agnostic, and we demonstrate that the resulting representations are insufficient for general purpose robotics tasks as they fail to capture the complexity of scenes with many components. In this paper, we show the effectiveness of using object-aware representation learning techniques for robotic tasks. Our self-supervised representations are learned by observing the agent freely interacting with different parts of the environment and are queried in two different settings: (i) policy learning and (ii) object location prediction. We show that our model learns control policies in a sample-efficient manner and outperforms state-of-the-art object agnostic techniques as well as methods trained on raw RGB images. Our results show a 20% increase in performance in low data regimes (1000 trajectories) in policy training using implicit behavioral cloning (IBC). Furthermore, our method outperforms the baselines for the task of object localization in multi-object scenes. Further qualitative results are available at https://sites.google.com/view/slots4robots.

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IROS Conference 2022 Conference Paper

Learning High Speed Precision Table Tennis on a Physical Robot

Tianli Ding
Laura Graesser
Saminda Abeyruwan
David B. D'Ambrosio
Anish Shankar
Pierre Sermanet
Pannag R. Sanketi
Corey Lynch

Learning goal conditioned control in the real world is a challenging open problem in robotics. Reinforcement learning systems have the potential to learn autonomously via trial-and-error, but in practice the costs of manual reward design, ensuring safe exploration, and hyperparameter tuning are often enough to preclude real world deployment. Imitation learning approaches, on the other hand, offer a simple way to learn control in the real world, but typically require costly cu-rated demonstration data and lack a mechanism for continuous improvement. Recently, iterative imitation methods have been shown to be effective at relaxing both these constraints, learning goal directed control from undirected demonstration data, and improving continuously via self-supervised goal reaching. These approaches, however, have not yet been shown to scale beyond simple simulated environments. In this work, we present the first evidence that simple iterative imitation learning can scale to goal-directed behavior on a real robot in a dynamic setting: high speed, precision table tennis (e. g. “land the ball on this particular target”). We find that this approach offers a straightforward way to do continuous on-robot learning, without complexities such as reward design, value function learning, or sim-to-real transfer. We also find that this approach is scalable-sample efficient enough to train on a physical robot in just a few hours. In real world evaluations, we find that that the resulting policy can perform on par or better than amateur humans (with players sampled randomly from a robotics lab) at the task of returning the ball to specific targets on the table. Finally, we analyze the effect of an initial undirected bootstrap dataset size on performance, finding that a modest amount of unstructured demonstration data provided up-front drastically speeds up the convergence of a general purpose goal-reaching policy. See supplementary video for examples of the policy on a physical robot.

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ICRA Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Motion2Vec: Semi-Supervised Representation Learning from Surgical Videos

Ajay Kumar Tanwani
Pierre Sermanet
Andy Yan
Raghav Anand
Mariano Phielipp
Ken Goldberg

Learning meaningful visual representations in an embedding space can facilitate generalization in downstream tasks such as action segmentation and imitation. In this paper, we learn a motion-centric representation of surgical video demonstrations by grouping them into action segments/subgoals/options in a semi-supervised manner. We present Motion2Vec, an algorithm that learns a deep embedding feature space from video observations by minimizing a metric learning loss in a Siamese network: images from the same action segment are pulled together while pushed away from randomly sampled images of other segments, while respecting the temporal ordering of the images. The embeddings are iteratively segmented with a recurrent neural network for a given parametrization of the embedding space after pre-training the Siamese network. We only use a small set of labeled video segments to semantically align the embedding space and assign pseudo-labels to the remaining unlabeled data by inference on the learned model parameters. We demonstrate the use of this representation to imitate surgical suturing kinematic motions from publicly available videos of the JIGSAWS dataset. Results give 85. 5% segmentation accuracy on average suggesting performance improvement over several state-of-the-art baselines, while kinematic pose imitation gives 0. 94 centimeter error in position per observation on the test set. Videos, code and data are available at: https://sites.google.com/view/motion2vec.

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ICRA Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Online Learning of Object Representations by Appearance Space Feature Alignment

Sören Pirk
Mohi Khansari
Yunfei Bai
Corey Lynch
Pierre Sermanet

We propose a self-supervised approach for learning representations of objects from monocular videos and demonstrate it is particularly useful for robotics. The main contributions of this paper are: 1) a self-supervised model called Object-Contrastive Network (OCN) that can discover and disentangle object attributes from video without using any labels; 2) we leverage self-supervision for online adaptation: the longer our online model looks at objects in a video, the lower the object identification error, while the offline baseline remains with a large fixed error; 3) we show the usefulness of our approach for a robotic pointing task; a robot can point to objects similar to the one presented in front of it. Videos illustrating online object adaptation and robotic pointing are provided as supplementary material.

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NeurIPS Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Wasserstein Dependency Measure for Representation Learning

Sherjil Ozair
Corey Lynch
Yoshua Bengio
Aaron van den Oord
Sergey Levine
Pierre Sermanet

Mutual information maximization has emerged as a powerful learning objective for unsupervised representation learning obtaining state-of-the-art performance in applications such as object recognition, speech recognition, and reinforcement learning. However, such approaches are fundamentally limited since a tight lower bound on mutual information requires sample size exponential in the mutual information. This limits the applicability of these approaches for prediction tasks with high mutual information, such as in video understanding or reinforcement learning. In these settings, such techniques are prone to overfit, both in theory and in practice, and capture only a few of the relevant factors of variation. This leads to incomplete representations that are not optimal for downstream tasks. In this work, we empirically demonstrate that mutual information-based representation learning approaches do fail to learn complete representations on a number of designed and real-world tasks. To mitigate these problems we introduce the Wasserstein dependency measure, which learns more complete representations by using the Wasserstein distance instead of the KL divergence in the mutual information estimator. We show that a practical approximation to this theoretically motivated solution, constructed using Lipschitz constraint techniques from the GAN literature, achieves substantially improved results on tasks where incomplete representations are a major challenge.

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IROS Conference 2018 Conference Paper

Learning Actionable Representations from Visual Observations

Debidatta Dwibedi
Jonathan Tompson
Corey Lynch
Pierre Sermanet

In this work we explore a new approach for robots to teach themselves about the world simply by observing it. In particular we investigate the effectiveness of learning task-agnostic representations for continuous control tasks. We extend Time-Contrastive Networks (TCN) that learn from visual observations by embedding multiple frames jointly in the embedding space as opposed to a single frame. We show that by doing so, we are now able to encode both position and velocity attributes significantly more accurately. We test the usefulness of this self-supervised approach in a reinforcement learning setting. We show that the representations learned by agents observing themselves take random actions, or other agents perform tasks successfully, can enable the learning of continuous control policies using algorithms like Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) using only the learned embeddings as input. We also demonstrate significant improvements on the real-world Pouring dataset with a relative error reduction of 39. 4% for motion attributes and 11. 1% for static attributes compared to the single-frame baseline. Video results are available at https://sites.google.com/view/actionablerepresentations.

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ICRA Conference 2018 Conference Paper

Time-Contrastive Networks: Self-Supervised Learning from Video

Pierre Sermanet
Corey Lynch
Yevgen Chebotar
Jasmine Hsu
Eric Jang
Stefan Schaal
Sergey Levine

We propose a self-supervised approach for learning representations and robotic behaviors entirely from unlabeled videos recorded from multiple viewpoints, and study how this representation can be used in two robotic imitation settings: imitating object interactions from videos of humans, and imitating human poses. Imitation of human behavior requires a viewpoint-invariant representation that captures the relationships between end-effectors (hands or robot grippers) and the environment, object attributes, and body pose. We train our representations using a triplet loss, where multiple simultaneous viewpoints of the same observation are attracted in the embedding space, while being repelled from temporal neighbors which are often visually similar but functionally different. This signal causes our model to discover attributes that do not change across viewpoint, but do change across time, while ignoring nuisance variables such as occlusions, motion blur, lighting and background. We demonstrate that this representation can be used by a robot to directly mimic human poses without an explicit correspondence, and that it can be used as a reward function within a reinforcement learning algorithm. While representations are learned from an unlabeled collection of task-related videos, robot behaviors such as pouring are learned by watching a single 3rd-person demonstration by a human. Reward functions obtained by following the human demonstrations under the learned representation enable efficient reinforcement learning that is practical for real-world robotic systems. Video results, open-source code and dataset are available at sermanet.github.io/imitate.

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ICLR Conference 2014 Conference Paper

OverFeat: Integrated Recognition, Localization and Detection using Convolutional Networks

Pierre Sermanet
David Eigen
Xiang Zhang 0013
Michaël Mathieu
Rob Fergus
Yann LeCun

We present an integrated framework for using Convolutional Networks for classification, localization and detection. We show how a multiscale and sliding window approach can be efficiently implemented within a ConvNet. We also introduce a novel deep learning approach to localization by learning to predict object boundaries. Bounding boxes are then accumulated rather than suppressed in order to increase detection confidence. We show that different tasks can be learnt simultaneously using a single shared network. This integrated framework is the winner of the localization task of the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge 2013 (ILSVRC2013), and produced near state of the art results for the detection and classifications tasks. Finally, we release a feature extractor from our best model called OverFeat.

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NeurIPS Conference 2010 Conference Paper

Learning Convolutional Feature Hierarchies for Visual Recognition

Koray Kavukcuoglu
Pierre Sermanet
Y-Lan Boureau
Karol Gregor
Michael Mathieu
Yann Cun

We propose an unsupervised method for learning multi-stage hierarchies of sparse convolutional features. While sparse coding has become an increasingly popular method for learning visual features, it is most often trained at the patch level. Applying the resulting filters convolutionally results in highly redundant codes because overlapping patches are encoded in isolation. By training convolutionally over large image windows, our method reduces the redudancy between feature vectors at neighboring locations and improves the efficiency of the overall representation. In addition to a linear decoder that reconstructs the image from sparse features, our method trains an efficient feed-forward encoder that predicts quasi-sparse features from the input. While patch-based training rarely produces anything but oriented edge detectors, we show that convolutional training produces highly diverse filters, including center-surround filters, corner detectors, cross detectors, and oriented grating detectors. We show that using these filters in multi-stage convolutional network architecture improves performance on a number of visual recognition and detection tasks.

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IROS Conference 2008 Conference Paper

Deep belief net learning in a long-range vision system for autonomous off-road driving

Raia Hadsell
Ayse Erkan
Pierre Sermanet
Marco Scoffier
Urs Muller
Yann LeCun

We present a learning-based approach for long-range vision that is able to accurately classify complex terrain at distances up to the horizon, thus allowing high-level strategic planning. A deep belief network is trained with unsupervised data and a reconstruction criterion to extract features from an input image, and the features are used to train a realtime classifier to predict traversability. The online supervision is given by a stereo module that provides robust labels for nearby areas up to 12 meters distant. The approach was developed and tested on the LAGR mobile robot.

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IROS Conference 2008 Conference Paper

Mapping and planning under uncertainty in mobile robots with long-range perception

Pierre Sermanet
Raia Hadsell
Marco Scoffier
Urs Muller
Yann LeCun

Recent advances in self-supervised learning have enabled very long-range visual detection of obstacles and pathways (to 100 meters or more). Unfortunately, the category and range of regions at such large distances come with a considerable amount of uncertainty. We present a mapping and planning system that accurately represents range and category uncertainties, and accumulates the evidence from multiple frames in a principled way. The system relies on a hyperbolicpolar map centered on the robot with a 200m radius. Map cells are histograms that accumulate evidence obtained from a self-supervised object classifier operating on image windows. The performance of the system is demonstrated on the LAGR off-road robot platform.

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IROS Conference 2007 Conference Paper

Adaptive long range vision in unstructured terrain

Ayse Erkan
Raia Hadsell
Pierre Sermanet
Jan Ben
Urs Muller
Yann LeCun

A novel probabilistic online learning framework for autonomous off-road robot navigation is proposed. The system is purely vision-based and is particularly designed for predicting traversability in unknown or rapidly changing environments. It uses self-supervised learning to quickly adapt to novel terrains after processing a small number of frames, and it can recognize terrain elements such as paths, man-made structures, and natural obstacles at ranges up to 30 meters. The system is developed on the LAGR mobile robot platform and the performance is evaluated using multiple metrics, including ground truth.

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