arXiv subjects

Yuke Zhu

Publications and source records attributed to Yuke Zhu.

At least 91 records · Page 5Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

ARDuP: Active Region Video Diffusion for Universal Policies

Sequential decision-making can be formulated as a text-conditioned video generation problem, where a video planner, guided by a text-defined goal, generates future frames visualizing planned actions, from which control actions are subsequently derived. In this work, we introduce Active Region Video Diffusion for Universal Policies (ARDuP), a novel framework for video-based policy learning that emphasizes the generation of active regions, i.e. potential interaction areas, enhancing the conditional policy's focus on interactive areas critical for task execution. This innovative framework integrates active region conditioning with latent diffusion models for video planning and employs latent representations for direct action decoding during inverse dynamic modeling. By utilizing motion cues in videos for automatic active region discovery, our method eliminates the need for manual annotations of active regions. We validate ARDuP's efficacy via extensive experiments on simulator CLIPort and the real-world dataset BridgeData v2, achieving notable improvements in success rates and generating convincingly realistic video plans.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2025

robosuite: A Modular Simulation Framework and Benchmark for Robot Learning

robosuite is a simulation framework for robot learning powered by the MuJoCo physics engine. It offers a modular design for creating robotic tasks as well as a suite of benchmark environments for reproducible research. This paper discusses the key system modules and the benchmark environments of our new release robosuite v1.5.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

LongVILA: Scaling Long-Context Visual Language Models for Long Videos

Long-context capability is critical for multi-modal foundation models, especially for long video understanding. We introduce LongVILA, a full-stack solution for long-context visual-language models by co-designing the algorithm and system. For model training, we upgrade existing VLMs to support long video understanding by incorporating two additional stages, i.e., long context extension and long video supervised fine-tuning. However, training on long video is computationally and memory intensive. We introduce the long-context Multi-Modal Sequence Parallelism (MM-SP) system that efficiently parallelizes long video training and inference, enabling 2M context length training on 256 GPUs without any gradient checkpointing. LongVILA efficiently extends the number of video frames of VILA from 8 to 2048, achieving 99.8% accuracy in 6,000-frame (more than 1 million tokens) video needle-in-a-haystack. LongVILA-7B demonstrates strong accuracy on 9 popular video benchmarks, e.g. 65.1% VideoMME with subtitle. Besides, MM-SP is 2.1x - 5.7x faster than ring style sequence parallelism and 1.1x - 1.4x faster than Megatron with a hybrid context and tensor parallelism. Moreover, it seamlessly integrates with Hugging Face Transformers.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

LOTUS: Continual Imitation Learning for Robot Manipulation Through Unsupervised Skill Discovery

We introduce LOTUS, a continual imitation learning algorithm that empowers a physical robot to continuously and efficiently learn to solve new manipulation tasks throughout its lifespan. The core idea behind LOTUS is constructing an ever-growing skill library from a sequence of new tasks with a small number of human demonstrations. LOTUS starts with a continual skill discovery process using an open-vocabulary vision model, which extracts skills as recurring patterns presented in unsegmented demonstrations. Continual skill discovery updates existing skills to avoid catastrophic forgetting of previous tasks and adds new skills to solve novel tasks. LOTUS trains a meta-controller that flexibly composes various skills to tackle vision-based manipulation tasks in the lifelong learning process. Our comprehensive experiments show that LOTUS outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by over 11% in success rate, showing its superior knowledge transfer ability compared to prior methods. More results and videos can be found on the project website: https://ut-austin-rpl.github.io/Lotus/.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

FocusLLaVA: A Coarse-to-Fine Approach for Efficient and Effective Visual Token Compression

Recent advances on Multi-modal Large Language Models have demonstrated that high-resolution image input is crucial for model capabilities, especially for fine-grained tasks. However, high-resolution images lead to a quadratic increase in the number of visual tokens input into LLMs, resulting in significant computational costs. Current work develop visual token compression methods to achieve efficiency improvements, often at the expense of performance. We argue that removing visual redundancy can simultaneously improve both efficiency and performance. We build a coarse-to-fine visual token compression method, with a vision-guided sampler for compressing redundant regions with low information density, and a text-guided sampler for selecting visual tokens that are strongly correlated with the user instructions.With these two modules, the proposed FocusLLaVA achieves improvements in both efficiency and performance. We validate the effectiveness of our approach on a wide range of evaluation datasets.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

AMAGO-2: Breaking the Multi-Task Barrier in Meta-Reinforcement Learning with Transformers

Language models trained on diverse datasets unlock generalization by in-context learning. Reinforcement Learning (RL) policies can achieve a similar effect by meta-learning within the memory of a sequence model. However, meta-RL research primarily focuses on adapting to minor variations of a single task. It is difficult to scale towards more general behavior without confronting challenges in multi-task optimization, and few solutions are compatible with meta-RL's goal of learning from large training sets of unlabeled tasks. To address this challenge, we revisit the idea that multi-task RL is bottlenecked by imbalanced training losses created by uneven return scales across different tasks. We build upon recent advancements in Transformer-based (in-context) meta-RL and evaluate a simple yet scalable solution where both an agent's actor and critic objectives are converted to classification terms that decouple optimization from the current scale of returns. Large-scale comparisons in Meta-World ML45, Multi-Game Procgen, Multi-Task POPGym, Multi-Game Atari, and BabyAI find that this design unlocks significant progress in online multi-task adaptation and memory problems without explicit task labels.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2024

RT-Affordance: Affordances are Versatile Intermediate Representations for Robot Manipulation

We explore how intermediate policy representations can facilitate generalization by providing guidance on how to perform manipulation tasks. Existing representations such as language, goal images, and trajectory sketches have been shown to be helpful, but these representations either do not provide enough context or provide over-specified context that yields less robust policies. We propose conditioning policies on affordances, which capture the pose of the robot at key stages of the task. Affordances offer expressive yet lightweight abstractions, are easy for users to specify, and facilitate efficient learning by transferring knowledge from large internet datasets. Our method, RT-Affordance, is a hierarchical model that first proposes an affordance plan given the task language, and then conditions the policy on this affordance plan to perform manipulation. Our model can flexibly bridge heterogeneous sources of supervision including large web datasets and robot trajectories. We additionally train our model on cheap-to-collect in-domain affordance images, allowing us to learn new tasks without collecting any additional costly robot trajectories. We show on a diverse set of novel tasks how RT-Affordance exceeds the performance of existing methods by over 50%, and we empirically demonstrate that affordances are robust to novel settings. Videos available at https://snasiriany.me/rt-affordance

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

Multi-Task Interactive Robot Fleet Learning with Visual World Models

Recent advancements in large-scale multi-task robot learning offer the potential for deploying robot fleets in household and industrial settings, enabling them to perform diverse tasks across various environments. However, AI-enabled robots often face challenges with generalization and robustness when exposed to real-world variability and uncertainty. We introduce Sirius-Fleet, a multi-task interactive robot fleet learning framework to address these challenges. Sirius-Fleet monitors robot performance during deployment and involves humans to correct the robot's actions when necessary. We employ a visual world model to predict the outcomes of future actions and build anomaly predictors to predict whether they will likely result in anomalies. As the robot autonomy improves, the anomaly predictors automatically adapt their prediction criteria, leading to fewer requests for human intervention and gradually reducing human workload over time. Evaluations on large-scale benchmarks demonstrate Sirius-Fleet's effectiveness in improving multi-task policy performance and monitoring accuracy. We demonstrate Sirius-Fleet's performance in both RoboCasa in simulation and Mutex in the real world, two diverse, large-scale multi-task benchmarks. More information is available on the project website: https://ut-austin-rpl.github.io/sirius-fleet

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

One-Step Diffusion Policy: Fast Visuomotor Policies via Diffusion Distillation

Diffusion models, praised for their success in generative tasks, are increasingly being applied to robotics, demonstrating exceptional performance in behavior cloning. However, their slow generation process stemming from iterative denoising steps poses a challenge for real-time applications in resource-constrained robotics setups and dynamically changing environments. In this paper, we introduce the One-Step Diffusion Policy (OneDP), a novel approach that distills knowledge from pre-trained diffusion policies into a single-step action generator, significantly accelerating response times for robotic control tasks. We ensure the distilled generator closely aligns with the original policy distribution by minimizing the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence along the diffusion chain, requiring only $2\%$-$10\%$ additional pre-training cost for convergence. We evaluated OneDP on 6 challenging simulation tasks as well as 4 self-designed real-world tasks using the Franka robot. The results demonstrate that OneDP not only achieves state-of-the-art success rates but also delivers an order-of-magnitude improvement in inference speed, boosting action prediction frequency from 1.5 Hz to 62 Hz, establishing its potential for dynamic and computationally constrained robotic applications. We share the project page at https://research.nvidia.com/labs/dir/onedp/.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

Granger Causal Interaction Skill Chains

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has demonstrated promising results in learning policies for complex tasks, but it often suffers from low sample efficiency and limited transferability. Hierarchical RL (HRL) methods aim to address the difficulty of learning long-horizon tasks by decomposing policies into skills, abstracting states, and reusing skills in new tasks. However, many HRL methods require some initial task success to discover useful skills, which paradoxically may be very unlikely without access to useful skills. On the other hand, reward-free HRL methods often need to learn far too many skills to achieve proper coverage in high-dimensional domains. In contrast, we introduce the Chain of Interaction Skills (COInS) algorithm, which focuses on controllability in factored domains to identify a small number of task-agnostic skills that still permit a high degree of control. COInS uses learned detectors to identify interactions between state factors and then trains a chain of skills to control each of these factors successively. We evaluate COInS on a robotic pushing task with obstacles -- a challenging domain where other RL and HRL methods fall short. We also demonstrate the transferability of skills learned by COInS, using variants of Breakout, a common RL benchmark, and show 2-3x improvement in both sample efficiency and final performance compared to standard RL baselines.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2024

Harmon: Whole-Body Motion Generation of Humanoid Robots from Language Descriptions

Humanoid robots, with their human-like embodiment, have the potential to integrate seamlessly into human environments. Critical to their coexistence and cooperation with humans is the ability to understand natural language communications and exhibit human-like behaviors. This work focuses on generating diverse whole-body motions for humanoid robots from language descriptions. We leverage human motion priors from extensive human motion datasets to initialize humanoid motions and employ the commonsense reasoning capabilities of Vision Language Models (VLMs) to edit and refine these motions. Our approach demonstrates the capability to produce natural, expressive, and text-aligned humanoid motions, validated through both simulated and real-world experiments. More videos can be found at https://ut-austin-rpl.github.io/Harmon/.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

OKAMI: Teaching Humanoid Robots Manipulation Skills through Single Video Imitation

We study the problem of teaching humanoid robots manipulation skills by imitating from single video demonstrations. We introduce OKAMI, a method that generates a manipulation plan from a single RGB-D video and derives a policy for execution. At the heart of our approach is object-aware retargeting, which enables the humanoid robot to mimic the human motions in an RGB-D video while adjusting to different object locations during deployment. OKAMI uses open-world vision models to identify task-relevant objects and retarget the body motions and hand poses separately. Our experiments show that OKAMI achieves strong generalizations across varying visual and spatial conditions, outperforming the state-of-the-art baseline on open-world imitation from observation. Furthermore, OKAMI rollout trajectories are leveraged to train closed-loop visuomotor policies, which achieve an average success rate of 79.2% without the need for labor-intensive teleoperation. More videos can be found on our website https://ut-austin-rpl.github.io/OKAMI/.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

BUMBLE: Unifying Reasoning and Acting with Vision-Language Models for Building-wide Mobile Manipulation

To operate at a building scale, service robots must perform very long-horizon mobile manipulation tasks by navigating to different rooms, accessing different floors, and interacting with a wide and unseen range of everyday objects. We refer to these tasks as Building-wide Mobile Manipulation. To tackle these inherently long-horizon tasks, we introduce BUMBLE, a unified Vision-Language Model (VLM)-based framework integrating open-world RGBD perception, a wide spectrum of gross-to-fine motor skills, and dual-layered memory. Our extensive evaluation (90+ hours) indicates that BUMBLE outperforms multiple baselines in long-horizon building-wide tasks that require sequencing up to 12 ground truth skills spanning 15 minutes per trial. BUMBLE achieves 47.1% success rate averaged over 70 trials in different buildings, tasks, and scene layouts from different starting rooms and floors. Our user study demonstrates 22% higher satisfaction with our method than state-of-the-art mobile manipulation methods. Finally, we demonstrate the potential of using increasingly-capable foundation models to push performance further. For more information, see https://robin-lab.cs.utexas.edu/BUMBLE/

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

An AI-aided algorithm for multivariate polynomial reconstruction on Cartesian grids and the PLG finite difference method

Polynomial reconstruction on Cartesian grids is fundamental in many scientific and engineering applications, yet it is still an open problem how to construct for a finite subset $K$ of $\mathbb{Z}^{\textsf{D}}$ a lattice $\mathcal{T}\subset K$ so that multivariate polynomial interpolation on this lattice is unisolvent. In this work, we solve this open problem of poised lattice generation (PLG) via an interdisciplinary research of approximation theory, abstract algebra, and artificial intelligence (AI). Specifically, we focus on the triangular lattices in approximation theory, study group actions of permutations upon triangular lattices, prove an isomorphism between the group of permutations and that of triangular lattices, and dynamically organize the AI state space of permutations so that a depth-first search of poised lattices has optimal efficiency. Based on this algorithm, we further develop the PLG finite difference method that retains the simplicity of Cartesian grids yet overcomes the disadvantage of legacy finite difference methods in handling irregular geometries. Results of various numerical tests demonstrate the effectiveness of our algorithm and the simplicity, efficiency, and fourth-order accuracy of the PLG finite difference method.

math.NA↗

arXiv2024

KinScene: Model-Based Mobile Manipulation of Articulated Scenes

Sequentially interacting with articulated objects is crucial for a mobile manipulator to operate effectively in everyday environments. To enable long-horizon tasks involving articulated objects, this study explores building scene-level articulation models for indoor scenes through autonomous exploration. While previous research has studied mobile manipulation with articulated objects by considering object kinematic constraints, it primarily focuses on individual-object scenarios and lacks extension to a scene-level context for task-level planning. To manipulate multiple object parts sequentially, the robot needs to reason about the resultant motion of each part and anticipate its impact on future actions. We introduce KinScene, a full-stack approach for long-horizon manipulation tasks with articulated objects. The robot maps the scene, detects and physically interacts with articulated objects, collects observations, and infers the articulation properties. For sequential tasks, the robot plans a feasible series of object interactions based on the inferred articulation model. We demonstrate that our approach repeatably constructs accurate scene-level kinematic and geometric models, enabling long-horizon mobile manipulation in a real-world scene. Code and additional results are available at https://chengchunhsu.github.io/KinScene/

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

PRIME: Scaffolding Manipulation Tasks with Behavior Primitives for Data-Efficient Imitation Learning

Imitation learning has shown great potential for enabling robots to acquire complex manipulation behaviors. However, these algorithms suffer from high sample complexity in long-horizon tasks, where compounding errors accumulate over the task horizons. We present PRIME (PRimitive-based IMitation with data Efficiency), a behavior primitive-based framework designed for improving the data efficiency of imitation learning. PRIME scaffolds robot tasks by decomposing task demonstrations into primitive sequences, followed by learning a high-level control policy to sequence primitives through imitation learning. Our experiments demonstrate that PRIME achieves a significant performance improvement in multi-stage manipulation tasks, with 10-34% higher success rates in simulation over state-of-the-art baselines and 20-48% on physical hardware.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

DrEureka: Language Model Guided Sim-To-Real Transfer

Transferring policies learned in simulation to the real world is a promising strategy for acquiring robot skills at scale. However, sim-to-real approaches typically rely on manual design and tuning of the task reward function as well as the simulation physics parameters, rendering the process slow and human-labor intensive. In this paper, we investigate using Large Language Models (LLMs) to automate and accelerate sim-to-real design. Our LLM-guided sim-to-real approach, DrEureka, requires only the physics simulation for the target task and automatically constructs suitable reward functions and domain randomization distributions to support real-world transfer. We first demonstrate that our approach can discover sim-to-real configurations that are competitive with existing human-designed ones on quadruped locomotion and dexterous manipulation tasks. Then, we showcase that our approach is capable of solving novel robot tasks, such as quadruped balancing and walking atop a yoga ball, without iterative manual design.

cs.RO↗

arXiv2024

RoboCasa: Large-Scale Simulation of Everyday Tasks for Generalist Robots

Recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) have largely been propelled by scaling. In Robotics, scaling is hindered by the lack of access to massive robot datasets. We advocate using realistic physical simulation as a means to scale environments, tasks, and datasets for robot learning methods. We present RoboCasa, a large-scale simulation framework for training generalist robots in everyday environments. RoboCasa features realistic and diverse scenes focusing on kitchen environments. We provide thousands of 3D assets across over 150 object categories and dozens of interactable furniture and appliances. We enrich the realism and diversity of our simulation with generative AI tools, such as object assets from text-to-3D models and environment textures from text-to-image models. We design a set of 100 tasks for systematic evaluation, including composite tasks generated by the guidance of large language models. To facilitate learning, we provide high-quality human demonstrations and integrate automated trajectory generation methods to substantially enlarge our datasets with minimal human burden. Our experiments show a clear scaling trend in using synthetically generated robot data for large-scale imitation learning and show great promise in harnessing simulation data in real-world tasks. Videos and open-source code are available at https://robocasa.ai/

cs.RO↗