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Yijie Guo

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14 papers

2 author rows

ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

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

Jiafei Duan
Wilbert Pumacay
Nishanth Kumar
Yi Ru Wang
Shulin Tian
Wentao Yuan
Ranjay Krishna
Dieter Fox

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. Project page: https://aha-vlm.github.io

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IROS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

Distillation-PPO: A Novel Two-Stage Reinforcement Learning Framework for Humanoid Robot Perceptive Locomotion

Qiang Zhang 0029
Gang Han
Jingkai Sun
Wen Zhao
Chenghao Sun
Jiahang Cao
Jiaxu Wang
Yijie Guo

In recent years, humanoid robots have garnered significant attention from both academia and industry due to their high adaptability to environments and human-like characteristics. With the rapid advancement of reinforcement learning, substantial progress has been made in the walking control of humanoid robots. However, existing methods still face challenges when dealing with complex environments and irregular terrains. In the field of perceptive locomotion, existing approaches are generally divided into two-stage methods and end-to-end methods. Two-stage methods first train a teacher policy in a simulated environment and then use distillation techniques, such as DAgger, to transfer the privileged information learned as latent features or actions to the student policy. End-to-end methods, on the other hand, forgo the learning of privileged information and directly learn policies from a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP) through reinforcement learning. However, due to the lack of supervision from a teacher policy, end-to-end methods often face difficulties in training and exhibit unstable performance in real-world applications. This paper proposes an innovative two-stage perceptive locomotion framework that combines the advantages of teacher policies learned in a fully observable Markov decision process (MDP) to regularize and supervise the student policy. At the same time, it leverages the characteristics of reinforcement learning to ensure that the student policy can continue to learn in a POMDP, thereby enhancing the model’s upper bound. Our experimental results demonstrate that our two-stage training framework achieves higher training efficiency and stability in simulated environments, while also exhibiting better robustness and generalization capabilities in real-world applications.

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IROS Conference 2025 Conference Paper

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

Jiahang Cao
Qiang Zhang 0029
Jingkai Sun
Jiaxu Wang
Hao Cheng 0015
Yulin Li 0001
Jun Ma 0008
Kun Wu 0001

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. Real-world experiments are also conducted to further validate its effectiveness. Our open-source project page can be found at https://andycao1125.github.io/mamba_policy/.

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ICLR Conference 2025 Conference Paper

SRSA: Skill Retrieval and Adaptation for Robotic Assembly Tasks

Yijie Guo
Bingjie Tang
Iretiayo Akinola
Dieter Fox
Abhishek Gupta 0004
Yashraj Narang

Enabling robots to learn novel tasks in a data-efficient manner is a long-standing challenge. Common strategies involve carefully leveraging prior experiences, especially transition data collected on related tasks. Although much progress has been made for general pick-and-place manipulation, far fewer studies have investigated contact-rich assembly tasks, where precise control is essential. We introduce SRSA} (Skill Retrieval and Skill Adaptation), a novel framework designed to address this problem by utilizing a pre-existing skill library containing policies for diverse assembly tasks. The challenge lies in identifying which skill from the library is most relevant for fine-tuning on a new task. Our key hypothesis is that skills showing higher zero-shot success rates on a new task are better suited for rapid and effective fine-tuning on that task. To this end, we propose to predict the transfer success for all skills in the skill library on a novel task, and then use this prediction to guide the skill retrieval process. We establish a framework that jointly captures features of object geometry, physical dynamics, and expert actions to represent the tasks, allowing us to efficiently learn the transfer success predictor. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SRSA significantly outperforms the leading baseline. When retrieving and fine-tuning skills on unseen tasks, SRSA achieves a 19% relative improvement in success rate, exhibits 2.6x lower standard deviation across random seeds, and requires 2.4x fewer transition samples to reach a satisfactory success rate, compared to the baseline. In a continual learning setup, SRSA efficiently learns policies for new tasks and incorporates them into the skill library, enhancing future policy learning. Furthermore, policies trained with SRSA in simulation achieve a 90% mean success rate when deployed in the real world. Please visit our project webpage https://srsa2024.github.io/.

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ICRA Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Geometric Fabrics: a Safe Guiding Medium for Policy Learning

Karl Van Wyk
Ankur Handa
Viktor Makoviychuk
Yijie Guo
Arthur Allshire
Nathan D. Ratliff

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.

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IROS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Reinforcement Learning with Generalizable Gaussian Splatting

Jiaxu Wang
Qiang Zhang 0029
Jingkai Sun
Jiahang Cao
Gang Han
Wen Zhao
Weining Zhang
Yecheng Shao

An excellent representation is crucial for reinforcement learning (RL) performance, especially in vision-based reinforcement learning tasks. The quality of the environment representation directly influences the achievement of the learning task. Previous vision-based RL typically uses explicit or implicit ways to represent environments, such as images, points, voxels, and neural radiance fields. However, these representations contain several drawbacks. They cannot either describe complex local geometries or generalize well to unseen scenes, or require precise foreground masks. Moreover, these implicit neural representations are akin to a "black box", significantly hindering interpretability. 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS), with its explicit scene representation and differentiable rendering nature, is considered a revolutionary change for reconstruction and representation methods. In this paper, we propose a novel Generalizable Gaussian Splatting framework to be the representation of RL tasks, called GSRL. Through validation in the RoboMimic environment, our method achieves better results than other baselines in multiple tasks, improving the performance by 10%, 44%, and 15% compared with baselines on the hardest task. This work is the first attempt to leverage generalizable 3DGS as a representation for RL.

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IROS Conference 2024 Conference Paper

Whole-body Humanoid Robot Locomotion with Human Reference

Qiang Zhang 0029
Peter Cui
David Yan
Jingkai Sun
Yiqun Duan
Gang Han
Wen Zhao
Weining Zhang

Recently, humanoid robots have made significant advances in their ability to perform challenging tasks due to the deployment of Reinforcement Learning (RL), however, the inherent complexity of humanoid robots, including the difficulty of designing complicated reward functions and training entire sophisticated systems, still poses a notable challenge. To conquer these challenges, after many iterations and in-depth investigations, we have meticulously developed a full-size humanoid robot, "Adam", whose innovative structural design greatly improves the efficiency and effectiveness of the imitation learning process. In addition, we have developed a novel imitation learning framework based on an adversarial motion prior, which applies not only to Adam but also to humanoid robots in general. Using the framework, Adam can exhibit unprecedented human-like characteristics in locomotion tasks. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework enables Adam to achieve human-comparable performance in complex locomotion tasks, marking the first time that human locomotion data has been used for imitation learning in a full-size humanoid robot. For more video demonstrations, please visit our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7hK2ySYBa1I

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ICRA Conference 2023 Conference Paper

A Plug-In Weight-Shifting Module That Adds Emotional Expressiveness to Inanimate Objects in Handheld Interaction

Yohei Noguchi 0001
Yijie Guo
Fumihide Tanaka

A plug-in weight-shifting module that can be inserted into a variety of objects is presented. The module is equipped with a movable weight inside its body. Three-dimensional weight shifts are presented by controlling one-dimensional translational and two-dimensional rotational movements. To explore the use case of this weight-shifting module, eight weight shift patterns expressing certain emotions were created through a workshop and a qualitative analysis. User tests, to which three different embodiments and scenarios were applied, examined the following three cases: the weight shift patterns were presented to the user by a) a stuffed toy-style robot that mediated human messaging, b) a cushion that made the user relax, and c) a container that enhanced the user's movie-watching experience. User interviews revealed the feasibility of the module and its weight shift patterns for the user's perception of emotions.

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AAAI Conference 2022 Conference Paper

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

Yijie Guo
Qiucheng Wu
Honglak Lee

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 contextbased 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.

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ICLR Conference 2021 Conference Paper

Batch Reinforcement Learning Through Continuation Method

Yijie Guo
Shengyu Feng
Nicolas Le Roux
Ed H. Chi
Honglak Lee
Minmin Chen

Many real-world applications of reinforcement learning (RL) require the agent to learn from a fixed set of trajectories, without collecting new interactions. Policy optimization under this setting is extremely challenging as: 1) the geometry of the objective function is hard to optimize efficiently; 2) the shift of data distributions causes high noise in the value estimation. In this work, we propose a simple yet effective policy iteration approach to batch RL using global optimization techniques known as continuation. By constraining the difference between the learned policy and the behavior policy that generates the fixed trajectories, and continuously relaxing the constraint, our method 1) helps the agent escape local optima; 2) reduces the error in policy evaluation in the optimization procedure. We present results on a variety of control tasks, game environments, and a recommendation task to empirically demonstrate the efficacy of our proposed method.

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NeurIPS Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Memory Based Trajectory-conditioned Policies for Learning from Sparse Rewards

Yijie Guo
Jongwook Choi
Marcin Moczulski
Shengyu Feng
Samy Bengio
Mohammad Norouzi
Honglak Lee

Reinforcement learning with sparse rewards is challenging because an agent can rarely obtain non-zero rewards and hence, gradient-based optimization of parameterized policies can be incremental and slow. Recent work demonstrated that using a memory buffer of previous successful trajectories can result in more effective policies. However, existing methods may overly exploit past successful experiences, which can encourage the agent to adopt sub-optimal and myopic behaviors. In this work, instead of focusing on good experiences with limited diversity, we propose to learn a trajectory-conditioned policy to follow and expand diverse past trajectories from a memory buffer. Our method allows the agent to reach diverse regions in the state space and improve upon the past trajectories to reach new states. We empirically show that our approach significantly outperforms count-based exploration methods (parametric approach) and self-imitation learning (parametric approach with non-parametric memory) on various complex tasks with local optima. In particular, without using expert demonstrations or resetting to arbitrary states, we achieve the state-of-the-art scores under five billion number of frames, on challenging Atari games such as Montezuma’s Revenge and Pitfall.

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NeurIPS Conference 2020 Conference Paper

Predictive Information Accelerates Learning in RL

Kuang-Huei Lee
Ian Fischer
Anthony Liu
Yijie Guo
Honglak Lee
John Canny
Sergio Guadarrama

The Predictive Information is the mutual information between the past and the future, I(X past; X future). We hypothesize that capturing the predictive information is useful in RL, since the ability to model what will happen next is necessary for success on many tasks. To test our hypothesis, we train Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) agents from pixels with an auxiliary task that learns a compressed representation of the predictive information of the RL environment dynamics using a contrastive version of the Conditional Entropy Bottleneck (CEB) objective. We refer to these as Predictive Information SAC (PI-SAC) agents. We show that PI-SAC agents can substantially improve sample efficiency over challenging baselines on tasks from the DM Control suite of continuous control environments. We evaluate PI-SAC agents by comparing against uncompressed PI-SAC agents, other compressed and uncompressed agents, and SAC agents directly trained from pixels. Our implementation is given on GitHub.

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ICML Conference 2018 Conference Paper

Self-Imitation Learning

Junhyuk Oh
Yijie Guo
Satinder Singh 0001
Honglak Lee

This paper proposes Self-Imitation Learning (SIL), a simple off-policy actor-critic algorithm that learns to reproduce the agent’s past good decisions. This algorithm is designed to verify our hypothesis that exploiting past good experiences can indirectly drive deep exploration. Our empirical results show that SIL significantly improves advantage actor-critic (A2C) on several hard exploration Atari games and is competitive to the state-of-the-art count-based exploration methods. We also show that SIL improves proximal policy optimization (PPO) on MuJoCo tasks.

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NeurIPS Conference 2016 Conference Paper

Perspective Transformer Nets: Learning Single-View 3D Object Reconstruction without 3D Supervision

Xinchen Yan
Jimei Yang
Ersin Yumer
Yijie Guo
Honglak Lee

Understanding the 3D world is a fundamental problem in computer vision. However, learning a good representation of 3D objects is still an open problem due to the high dimensionality of the data and many factors of variation involved. In this work, we investigate the task of single-view 3D object reconstruction from a learning agent's perspective. We formulate the learning process as an interaction between 3D and 2D representations and propose an encoder-decoder network with a novel projection loss defined by the projective transformation. More importantly, the projection loss enables the unsupervised learning using 2D observation without explicit 3D supervision. We demonstrate the ability of the model in generating 3D volume from a single 2D image with three sets of experiments: (1) learning from single-class objects; (2) learning from multi-class objects and (3) testing on novel object classes. Results show superior performance and better generalization ability for 3D object reconstruction when the projection loss is involved.

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