Related papers: Bayesian Optimization for Sample-Efficient Policy …

We present a modular approach to reinforcement learning that uses a Bayesian representation of the uncertainty over models. The approach, BOSS (Best of Sampled Set), drives exploration by sampling multiple models from the posterior and…

Imitation learning is a promising approach to help robots acquire dexterous manipulation capabilities without the need for a carefully-designed reward or a significant computational effort. However, existing imitation learning approaches…

Model merging aims to combine multiple task-specific expert models into a single model without joint retraining, offering a practical alternative to multi-task learning when data access or computational budget is limited. Existing methods,…

One's ability to learn a generative model of the world without supervision depends on the extent to which one can construct abstract knowledge representations that generalize across experiences. To this end, capturing an accurate…

Classical policy search algorithms for robotics typically require performing extensive explorations, which are time-consuming and expensive to implement with real physical platforms. To facilitate the efficient learning of robot…

Sample efficiency is one of the key factors when applying policy search to real-world problems. In recent years, Bayesian Optimization (BO) has become prominent in the field of robotics due to its sample efficiency and little prior…

Imitation learning has demonstrated strong performance in robotic manipulation by learning from large-scale human demonstrations. While existing models excel at single-task learning, it is observed in practical applications that their…

Mobile manipulation in robotics is challenging due to the need of solving many diverse tasks, such as opening a door or picking-and-placing an object. Typically, a basic first-principles system description of the robot is available, thus…

In this work, we propose algorithms and methods that enable learning dexterous object manipulation using simulated one- or two-armed robots equipped with multi-fingered hand end-effectors. Using a parallel GPU-accelerated physics simulator…

In learning from demonstrations, it is often desirable to adapt the behavior of the robot as a function of the variability retrieved from human demonstrations and the (un)certainty encoded in different parts of the task. In this paper, we…

Learning robot controllers by minimizing a black-box objective cost using Bayesian optimization (BO) can be time-consuming and challenging. It is very often the case that some roll-outs result in failure behaviors, causing premature…

We present an online model-based reinforcement learning algorithm suitable for controlling complex robotic systems directly in the real world. Unlike prevailing sim-to-real pipelines that rely on extensive offline simulation and model-free…

Gaussian process (GP) based Bayesian optimization (BO) is a powerful method for optimizing black-box functions efficiently. The practical performance and theoretical guarantees of this approach depend on having the correct GP hyperparameter…

Amidst the wide popularity of imitation learning algorithms in robotics, their properties regarding hyperparameter sensitivity, ease of training, data efficiency, and performance have not been well-studied in high-precision…

The pursuit of long-term autonomy mandates that machine learning models must continuously adapt to their changing environments and learn to solve new tasks. Continual learning seeks to overcome the challenge of catastrophic forgetting,…

Modeling of physical human-robot collaborations is generally a challenging problem due to the unpredictive nature of human behavior. To address this issue, we present a data-efficient reinforcement learning framework which enables a robot…

We propose the use of Bayesian networks, which provide both a mean value and an uncertainty estimate as output, to enhance the safety of learned control policies under circumstances in which a test-time input differs significantly from the…

Many real-world functions are defined over both categorical and category-specific continuous variables and thus cannot be optimized by traditional Bayesian optimization (BO) methods. To optimize such functions, we propose a new method that…

Affordances are fundamental descriptors of relationships between actions, objects and effects. They provide the means whereby a robot can predict effects, recognize actions, select objects and plan its behavior according to desired goals.…

Bayesian optimization has recently attracted the attention of the automatic machine learning community for its excellent results in hyperparameter tuning. BO is characterized by the sample efficiency with which it can optimize expensive…