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Spotlight
Language-Conditioned Imitation Learning for Robot Manipulation Tasks
Simon Stepputtis · Joseph Campbell · Mariano Phielipp · Stefan Lee · Chitta Baral · Heni Ben Amor

Tue Dec 08 07:20 PM -- 07:30 PM (PST) @ Orals & Spotlights: Reinforcement Learning
in Orals & Spotlights Track 14: Reinforcement Learning »

Imitation learning is a popular approach for teaching motor skills to robots. However, most approaches focus on extracting policy parameters from execution traces alone (i.e., motion trajectories and perceptual data). No adequate communication channel exists between the human expert and the robot to describe critical aspects of the task, such as the properties of the target object or the intended shape of the motion. Motivated by insights into the human teaching process, we introduce a method for incorporating unstructured natural language into imitation learning. At training time, the expert can provide demonstrations along with verbal descriptions in order to describe the underlying intent (e.g., "go to the large green bowl"). The training process then interrelates these two modalities to encode the correlations between language, perception, and motion. The resulting language-conditioned visuomotor policies can be conditioned at runtime on new human commands and instructions, which allows for more fine-grained control over the trained policies while also reducing situational ambiguity. We demonstrate in a set of simulation experiments how our approach can learn language-conditioned manipulation policies for a seven-degree-of-freedom robot arm and compare the results to a variety of alternative methods.

Author Information

Simon Stepputtis (Arizona State University)
Joseph Campbell (Arizona State University)
Mariano Phielipp (Intel AI Labs)

Dr. Mariano Phielipp works at the Intel AI Lab inside the Intel Artificial Intelligence Products Group. His work includes research and development in deep learning, deep reinforcement learning, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. Since joining Intel, Dr. Phielipp has developed and worked on Computer Vision, Face Recognition, Face Detection, Object Categorization, Recommendation Systems, Online Learning, Automatic Rule Learning, Natural Language Processing, Knowledge Representation, Energy Based Algorithms, and other Machine Learning and AI-related efforts. Dr. Phielipp has also contributed to different disclosure committees, won an Intel division award related to Robotics, and has a large number of patents and pending patents. He has published on NeuriPS, ICML, ICLR, AAAI, IROS, IEEE, SPIE, IASTED, and EUROGRAPHICS-IEEE Conferences and Workshops.

Stefan Lee (Oregon State University)
Chitta Baral (Arizona State University)
Heni Ben Amor (Arizona State University)

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