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Bridge Data: Boosting Generalization of Robotic Skills with Cross-Domain Datasets
Frederik Ebert · Yanlai Yang · Karl Schmeckpeper · Bernadette Bucher · Kostas Daniilidis · Chelsea Finn · Sergey Levine

@
in 4th Robot Learning Workshop: Self-Supervised and Lifelong Learning »

Robot learning holds the promise of learning policies that generalize broadly. However, such generalization requires sufficiently diverse datasets of the task of interest, which can be prohibitively expensive to collect. In this paper, we ask: what would it take to enable practical data reuse in robotics for end-to-end skill learning? We hypothesize that the key is to use datasets with multiple tasks and multiple domains, such that a new user that wants to train their robot to perform a new task in a new domain can include this dataset in their training process and benefit from cross-task and cross-domain generalization. To evaluate this hypothesis, we collect a large multi-domain and multi-task dataset, with 7,200 demonstrations constituting 71 tasks across 10 environments, and empirically study how this data can improve the learning of new tasks in new environments. We find that jointly training with the proposed dataset and 50 demonstrations of a never-before-seen task in a new domain on average leads to a 2x improvement in success rate compared to using target domain data alone. We also find that data for only a few tasks in a new domain can bridge the domain gap and make it possible for a robot to perform a variety of prior tasks that were only seen in other domains.

Author Information

Frederik Ebert (UC Berkeley)
Yanlai Yang (UC Berkeley)
Karl Schmeckpeper (University of Pennsylvania)
Bernadette Bucher (University of Pennsylvania)
Kostas Daniilidis (University of Pennsylvania)
Chelsea Finn (Stanford)
Sergey Levine (UC Berkeley)
Sergey Levine

Sergey Levine received a BS and MS in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2009, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2014. He joined the faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at UC Berkeley in fall 2016. His work focuses on machine learning for decision making and control, with an emphasis on deep learning and reinforcement learning algorithms. Applications of his work include autonomous robots and vehicles, as well as applications in other decision-making domains. His research includes developing algorithms for end-to-end training of deep neural network policies that combine perception and control, scalable algorithms for inverse reinforcement learning, deep reinforcement learning algorithms, and more

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