In this study, we explore the influence of various observation spaces on robot learning, focusing on three predominant modalities: RGB, RGB-D, and point cloud.

Existing vision-and-language navigation models often deviate from the correct trajectory when executing instructions. However, these models lack effective error correction capability, hindering their recovery from errors. To address this challenge, we propose Self-correction Flywheel, a novel post-training paradigm. Instead of considering the model's error trajectories on the training set as a drawback, our paradigm emphasizes their significance as a valuable data source. We have developed a method to identify deviations in these error trajectories and devised innovative techniques to automatically generate self-correction data for perception and action. These self-correction data serve as fuel to power the model's continued training. The brilliance of our paradigm is revealed when we re-evaluate the model on the training set, uncovering new error trajectories. At this time, the self-correction flywheel begins to spin. Through multiple flywheel iterations, we progressively enhance our monocular RGB-based VLA navigation model CorrectNav. Experiments on R2R-CE and RxR-CE benchmarks show CorrectNav achieves new state-of-the-art success rates of 65.1% and 69.3%, surpassing prior best VLA navigation models by 8.2% and 16.4%. Real robot tests in various indoor and outdoor environments demonstrate \method's superior capability of error correction, dynamic obstacle avoidance, and long instruction following.

This paper develops a unifying formalism (a meta-algorithm) for imitation learning in the context of beam search; that is, learning in a beam-search-aware manner with access to an oracle that will tell you the minimum completion cost for any partial state. This formalism exposes a subtle but important corner of the space that has not yet been explored: algorithms that are beam aware, but which do not reset or stop after the gold-standard falls out of the beam, but instead continue along the best possible remaining path. Using this formalism, they are able to develop regret guarantees for this new case, alongside novel guarantees for existing cases where the algorithm stops or resets. They show the case where the algorithm continues to have better regret guarantees. This paper is a masterwork of notation. No symbol is wasted, no symbol is under-explained.

In this study, we explore the influence of different observation spaces on robot learning, focusing on three predominant modalities: RGB, RGB-D, and point cloud. Through extensive experimentation on over 17 varied contact-rich manipulation tasks, conducted across two benchmarks and simulators, we have observed a notable trend: point cloud-based methods, even those with the simplest designs, frequently surpass their RGB and RGB-D counterparts in performance. This remains consistent in both scenarios: training from scratch and utilizing pretraining. Furthermore, our findings indicate that point cloud observations lead to improved policy zero-shot generalization in relation to various geometry and visual clues, including camera viewpoints, lighting conditions, noise levels and background appearance. The outcomes suggest that 3D point cloud is a valuable observation modality for intricate robotic tasks. We will open-source all our codes and checkpoints, hoping that our insights can help design more generalizable and robust robotic models.

Prompt-based learning has emerged as a successful paradigm in natural language processing, where a single general-purpose language model can be instructed to perform any task specified by input prompts. Yet task specification in robotics comes in various forms, such as imitating one-shot demonstrations, following language instructions, and reaching visual goals. They are often considered different tasks and tackled by specialized models. We show that a wide spectrum of robot manipulation tasks can be expressed with multimodal prompts, interleaving textual and visual tokens. Accordingly, we develop a new simulation benchmark that consists of thousands of procedurally-generated tabletop tasks with multimodal prompts, 600K+ expert trajectories for imitation learning, and a four-level evaluation protocol for systematic generalization. We design a transformer-based robot agent, VIMA, that processes these prompts and outputs motor actions autoregressively. VIMA features a recipe that achieves strong model scalability and data efficiency. It outperforms alternative designs in the hardest zero-shot generalization setting by up to $2.9\times$ task success rate given the same training data. With $10\times$ less training data, VIMA still performs $2.7\times$ better than the best competing variant. Code and video demos are available at https://vimalabs.github.io/