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Summary
lila-thumbnail.movAbstract
Abstract
We introduce Language-Informed Latent Actions (LILA), a framework for learning natural language interfaces in the context of human-robot collaboration. LILA falls under the shared autonomy paradigm: in addition to providing discrete language inputs, humans are given a low-dimensional controller – e.g., a 2 degree-of-freedom (DoF) joystick that moves left/right or up/down – for operating the robot.
LILA learns to use language to modulate this controller, providing users with a language-informed control space: given an instruction like "place the cereal bowl on the tray," LILA might learn a 2-DoF control space where one dimension controls the distance from the robot's end-effector to the bowl, and the other dimension controls the robot's end-effector pose relative to the grasp point on the bowl.
We evaluate LILA with real-world user studies pairing users with a 7-DoF Franka Emika Panda Arm, with the goal of using our language-informed controller to complete a series of complex manipulation tasks. LILA models are not only more sample efficient and performant than imitation learning and end-effector control baselines, but are also qualitatively preferred by users.
LILA at a Glance
LILA at a Glance
LILA falls within the shared autonomy paradigm wherein a human provides continuous input while being "assisted" by a robot; rather than enforce a sharp divide in agency, the human user and robot complete tasks together, sharing the load. In this work, we look at shared autonomy through the lens of assistive teleoperation, where a human user with a low-DoF control interface (e.g., a 2-DoF joystick) is trying to operate a high-DoF (7-DoF) robot manipulator.
Below, you see an example of our setup, and our key contribution: using language within an assistive teleoperation framework (Learned Latent Actions) to specify and disambiguate a wide variety of tasks.
The above figure presents a top-down overview of LILA; a user, equipped with a low-dimensional controller (the 2-DoF joystick in black) is attempting to operate the 7-DoF Franka Emika Panda Arm (left) to perform a series of tasks.
To enable "intuitive" control, we use the build atop of the Learned Latent Actions paradigm to learn low-dimensional "latent action" spaces via dimensionality reduction – in our case, training an auto-encoder to compress, and decode task-specific demonstrations. One of our key contributions is adding natural language to this loop, enabling linguistically-aware models that users can use to complete a wide variety of diverse tasks.
Specifically, users can use natural language to switch into an intuitive control mode for completing a task!
Learning with LILA
Learning with LILA
Driving LILA is a conditional autoencoder (CAE) with two components – an Encoder (left) and a Decoder (right). The encoder takes in a (state, language, action) tuple, and predicts a latent "action" z. Similarly the decoder takes in the (state, language, latent action) tuple and tries to reproduce the high-dimensional (high-DoF) action a'.
Crucially, we use Feature-Wise Linear Modulation (or FiLM) layers to incorporate language information - check out our paper and appendix for more information. When embedding language, we use a version of Distil-RoBERTa to obtain sentence representations that are passed to these FiLM layers.
At test time, to prevent drift from the training distribution, we use nearest-neighbors based retrieval to "project" new user utterances onto similar examples from the test set; not only is this easier to reason about, but leads to better sample efficiency as well!
LILA in Action – User Studies
LILA in Action – User Studies
Here we include videos from our user studies (anonymized), comparing LILA with Imitation Learning and End-Effector Control baselines.
lila_banana.mp4il_bowl.mp4endeff_cup.mp4LILA
Instruction: "Lift up the banana and place it in the purple basket."
Imitation Learning
Instruction: "Pick up the green bowl and put it on the tray."
End-Effector Control
No Instruction!
Goal: Pour(BlueCup, BlackMug)
The following shows 3 examples of users completing a single task with each strategy (each row denotes the same exact user)!
User-1-LILA.mp4User-1-Imitation.mp4User-1-EndEff.mp4User 1 - LILA
Instruction: "Pick up the banana and put it in the purple basket."
User 1 - Imitation Learning
Instruction:
"Move left and grab the banana.
Move left one inch.
Move right one inch.
Move forward one inch.
Move upper diagonally.
Move to the side.
Move one inch."
User 1 - End-Effector Control
No Instruction!
Goal: Put(Banana, FruitBasket)
User-2-LILA.mp4User-2-Imitation.mp4User-2-EndEff.mp4User 2 - LILA
Instruction: "Pick up the clear cup with the marbles in it and pour it in the black mug with the coffee beans in it."
User 2 - Imitation Learning
Instruction: "Pick up the clear container with the marbles in it and pour it into the mug with the coffee."
User 2 - End-Effector Control
No Instruction!
Goal: Pour(BlueCup, BlackMug)
User-3-LILA.mp4User-3-Imitation.mp4User-3-EndEff.mp4User 3 - LILA
Instruction: "Grab the bowl and place it on the tray."
User 3 - Imitation Learning
Instruction: "Grab the cereal bowl and place it on the tray."
User 3 - End-Effector Control
No Instruction!
Goal: Put(CerealBowl, Tray)
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