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Scott Reed

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8 papers

1 author row

TMLR Journal 2024 Journal Article

RoboCat: A Self-Improving Generalist Agent for Robotic Manipulation

Konstantinos Bousmalis
Giulia Vezzani
Dushyant Rao
Coline Manon Devin
Alex X. Lee
Maria Bauza Villalonga
Todor Davchev
Yuxiang Zhou

The ability to leverage heterogeneous robotic experience from different robots and tasks to quickly master novel skills and embodiments has the potential to transform robot learning. Inspired by recent advances in foundation models for vision and language, we propose a multi-embodiment, multi-task generalist agent for robotic manipulation. This agent, named RoboCat, is a visual goal-conditioned decision transformer capable of consuming action-labelled visual experience. This data spans a large repertoire of motor control skills from simulated and real robotic arms with varying sets of observations and actions. With RoboCat, we demonstrate the ability to generalise to new tasks and robots, both zero-shot as well as through adaptation using only 100–1000 examples for the target task. We also show how a trained model itself can be used to generate data for subsequent training iterations, thus providing a basic building block for an autonomous improvement loop. We investigate the agent’s capabilities, with large-scale evaluations both in simulation and on three different real robot embodiments. We find that as we grow and diversify its training data, RoboCat not only shows signs of cross-task transfer, but also becomes more efficient at adapting to new tasks.

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TMLR Journal 2022 Journal Article

A Generalist Agent

Scott Reed
Konrad Zolna
Emilio Parisotto
Sergio Gómez Colmenarejo
Alexander Novikov
Gabriel Barth-maron
Mai Giménez
Yury Sulsky

Inspired by progress in large-scale language modeling, we apply a similar approach towards building a single generalist agent beyond the realm of text outputs. The agent, which we refer to as Gato, works as a multi-modal, multi-task, multi-embodiment generalist policy. The same network with the same weights can play Atari, caption images, chat, stack blocks with a real robot arm and much more, deciding based on its context whether to output text, joint torques, button presses, or other tokens. In this report we describe the model and the data, and document the current capabilities of Gato.

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NeurIPS Conference 2019 Conference Paper

Learning Compositional Neural Programs with Recursive Tree Search and Planning

Thomas PIERROT
Guillaume Ligner
Scott Reed
Olivier Sigaud
Nicolas Perrin
Alexandre Laterre
David Kas
Karim Beguir

We propose a novel reinforcement learning algorithm, AlphaNPI, that incorpo- rates the strengths of Neural Programmer-Interpreters (NPI) and AlphaZero. NPI contributes structural biases in the form of modularity, hierarchy and recursion, which are helpful to reduce sample complexity, improve generalization and in- crease interpretability. AlphaZero contributes powerful neural network guided search algorithms, which we augment with recursion. AlphaNPI only assumes a hierarchical program specification with sparse rewards: 1 when the program execution satisfies the specification, and 0 otherwise. This specification enables us to overcome the need for strong supervision in the form of execution traces and consequently train NPI models effectively with reinforcement learning. The experiments show that AlphaNPI can sort as well as previous strongly supervised NPI variants. The AlphaNPI agent is also trained on a Tower of Hanoi puzzle with two disks and is shown to generalize to puzzles with an arbitrary number of disks. The experiments also show that when deploying our neural network policies, it is advantageous to do planning with guided Monte Carlo tree search.

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NeurIPS Conference 2018 Conference Paper

Neural Arithmetic Logic Units

Andrew Trask
Felix Hill
Scott Reed
Jack Rae
Chris Dyer
Phil Blunsom

Neural networks can learn to represent and manipulate numerical information, but they seldom generalize well outside of the range of numerical values encountered during training. To encourage more systematic numerical extrapolation, we propose an architecture that represents numerical quantities as linear activations which are manipulated using primitive arithmetic operators, controlled by learned gates. We call this module a neural arithmetic logic unit (NALU), by analogy to the arithmetic logic unit in traditional processors. Experiments show that NALU-enhanced neural networks can learn to track time, perform arithmetic over images of numbers, translate numerical language into real-valued scalars, execute computer code, and count objects in images. In contrast to conventional architectures, we obtain substantially better generalization both inside and outside of the range of numerical values encountered during training, often extrapolating orders of magnitude beyond trained numerical ranges.

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NeurIPS Conference 2017 Conference Paper

Robust Imitation of Diverse Behaviors

Ziyu Wang
Josh Merel
Scott Reed
Nando de Freitas
Gregory Wayne
Nicolas Heess

Deep generative models have recently shown great promise in imitation learning for motor control. Given enough data, even supervised approaches can do one-shot imitation learning; however, they are vulnerable to cascading failures when the agent trajectory diverges from the demonstrations. Compared to purely supervised methods, Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning (GAIL) can learn more robust controllers from fewer demonstrations, but is inherently mode-seeking and more difficult to train. In this paper, we show how to combine the favourable aspects of these two approaches. The base of our model is a new type of variational autoencoder on demonstration trajectories that learns semantic policy embeddings. We show that these embeddings can be learned on a 9 DoF Jaco robot arm in reaching tasks, and then smoothly interpolated with a resulting smooth interpolation of reaching behavior. Leveraging these policy representations, we develop a new version of GAIL that (1) is much more robust than the purely-supervised controller, especially with few demonstrations, and (2) avoids mode collapse, capturing many diverse behaviors when GAIL on its own does not. We demonstrate our approach on learning diverse gaits from demonstration on a 2D biped and a 62 DoF 3D humanoid in the MuJoCo physics environment.

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NeurIPS Conference 2016 Conference Paper

Learning What and Where to Draw

Scott Reed
Zeynep Akata
Santosh Mohan
Samuel Tenka
Bernt Schiele
Honglak Lee

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have recently demonstrated the capability to synthesize compelling real-world images, such as room interiors, album covers, manga, faces, birds, and flowers. While existing models can synthesize images based on global constraints such as a class label or caption, they do not provide control over pose or object location. We propose a new model, the Generative Adversarial What-Where Network (GAWWN), that synthesizes images given instructions describing what content to draw in which location. We show high-quality 128 × 128 image synthesis on the Caltech-UCSD Birds dataset, conditioned on both informal text descriptions and also object location. Our system exposes control over both the bounding box around the bird and its constituent parts. By modeling the conditional distributions over part locations, our system also enables conditioning on arbitrary subsets of parts (e. g. only the beak and tail), yielding an efficient interface for picking part locations.

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NeurIPS Conference 2015 Conference Paper

Deep Visual Analogy-Making

Scott Reed
Yi Zhang
Yuting Zhang
Honglak Lee

In addition to identifying the content within a single image, relating images and generating related images are critical tasks for image understanding. Recently, deep convolutional networks have yielded breakthroughs in producing image labels, annotations and captions, but have only just begun to be used for producing high-quality image outputs. In this paper we develop a novel deep network trained end-to-end to perform visual analogy making, which is the task of transforming a query image according to an example pair of related images. Solving this problem requires both accurately recognizing a visual relationship and generating a transformed query image accordingly. Inspired by recent advances in language modeling, we propose to solve visual analogies by learning to map images to a neural embedding in which analogical reasoning is simple, such as by vector subtraction and addition. In experiments, our model effectively models visual analogies on several datasets: 2D shapes, animated video game sprites, and 3D car models.

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NeurIPS Conference 2015 Conference Paper

Weakly-supervised Disentangling with Recurrent Transformations for 3D View Synthesis

Jimei Yang
Scott Reed
Ming-Hsuan Yang
Honglak Lee

An important problem for both graphics and vision is to synthesize novel views of a 3D object from a single image. This is in particular challenging due to the partial observability inherent in projecting a 3D object onto the image space, and the ill-posedness of inferring object shape and pose. However, we can train a neural network to address the problem if we restrict our attention to specific object classes (in our case faces and chairs) for which we can gather ample training data. In this paper, we propose a novel recurrent convolutional encoder-decoder network that is trained end-to-end on the task of rendering rotated objects starting from a single image. The recurrent structure allows our model to capture long- term dependencies along a sequence of transformations, and we demonstrate the quality of its predictions for human faces on the Multi-PIE dataset and for a dataset of 3D chair models, and also show its ability of disentangling latent data factors without using object class labels.

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