UniMASK: Unified Inference in Sequential Decision Problems

Randomly masking and predicting word tokens has been a successful approach in pre-training language models for a variety of downstream tasks. In this work, we observe that the same idea also applies naturally to sequential decision making, where many well-studied tasks like behavior cloning, offline reinforcement learning, inverse dynamics, and waypoint conditioning correspond to different sequence maskings over a sequence of states, actions, and returns. We introduce the Uni[MASK] framework, which provides a unified way to specify models which can be trained on many different sequential decision making tasks. We show that a single Uni[MASK] model is often capable of carrying out many tasks with performance similar to or better than single-task models. Additionally, after fine-tuning, our Uni[MASK] models consistently outperform comparable single-task models. Our code is publicly available here.