English

KINet: Unsupervised Forward Models for Robotic Pushing Manipulation

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2023-08-08 v3 Machine Learning Robotics Machine Learning

Abstract

Object-centric representation is an essential abstraction for forward prediction. Most existing forward models learn this representation through extensive supervision (e.g., object class and bounding box) although such ground-truth information is not readily accessible in reality. To address this, we introduce KINet (Keypoint Interaction Network) -- an end-to-end unsupervised framework to reason about object interactions based on a keypoint representation. Using visual observations, our model learns to associate objects with keypoint coordinates and discovers a graph representation of the system as a set of keypoint embeddings and their relations. It then learns an action-conditioned forward model using contrastive estimation to predict future keypoint states. By learning to perform physical reasoning in the keypoint space, our model automatically generalizes to scenarios with a different number of objects, novel backgrounds, and unseen object geometries. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in accurately performing forward prediction and learning plannable object-centric representations for downstream robotic pushing manipulation tasks.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2202.09006,
  title  = {KINet: Unsupervised Forward Models for Robotic Pushing Manipulation},
  author = {Alireza Rezazadeh and Changhyun Choi},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2202.09006},
  year   = {2023}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-24T09:43:47.121Z