SCALE: Causal Learning and Discovery
of Robot Manipulation Skills using Simulation
Tabitha Edith Lee*, Shivam Vats*, Siddharth Girdhar, and Oliver Kroemer
The Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University
*Equal contribution
Accepted to the 7th Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL 2023).
Abstract:
We propose SCALE, an approach for discovering and learning a diverse set of interpretable robot skills from a limited dataset. Rather than learning a single skill which may fail to capture all the modes in the data, we first identify the different modes via causal reasoning and learn a separate skill for each of them. Our main insight is to associate each mode with a unique set of causally relevant context variables that are discovered by performing causal interventions in simulation. This enables data partitioning based on the causal processes that generated the data, and then compressed skills that ignore the irrelevant variables can be trained. We model each robot skill as a Regional Compressed Option, which extends the options framework by associating a causal process and its relevant variables with the option. Modeled as the skill Data Generating Region, each causal process is local in nature and hence valid over only a subset of the context space. We demonstrate our approach for two representative manipulation tasks: block stacking and peg-in-hole insertion under uncertainty. Our experiments show that our approach yields diverse skills that are compact, robust to domain shifts, and suitable for sim-to-real transfer.
In SCALE, the robot discovers skills in simulation using causal learning. (a) The simulation is used to solve task instances and conduct interventions to determine causally relevant context variables. (b) Simulation data are used to train a library of skills, (c) which are suitable for sim-to-real transfer learning. (d) Each skill that is learned is parameterized by the relevant variables selected in simulation. Here, red context variables are unnecessary for the skill policy and can be safely ignored. The boundary encircling the policy represents the skill DGR and precondition, which are also learned.
An overview of the SCALE skill discovery algorithm as applied to a block stacking task. The robot is given a context space, control policy, task simulator, and task reward. The robot samples a set of contexts to create task instances, which it subsequently solves for that instance. The robot then applies interventions on the contexts to identify skill-relevant parameters. Contexts with the same set of policy-relevant parameters come from the same causal model and are hence combined to form data generation regions. Each region is then used to learn a separate skill policy with the corresponding set of policy-relevant parameters. For each skill, we finally learn a set of preconditions within the context space to determine where the skill can ultimately be applied. The pairs of policies and preconditions are then combined to create a skill library for completing the given task.