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VASC Seminar

April

8
Mon
Luca Weihs Research Manager Allen Institute for AI
Monday, April 8
3:30 pm to 4:30 pm
Newell-Simon Hall 3305
Imitating Shortest Paths in Simulation Enables Effective Navigation and Manipulation in the Real World
Abstract:
We show that imitating shortest-path planners in simulation produces Stretch RE-1 robotic agents that, given language instructions, can proficiently navigate, explore, and manipulate objects in both simulation and in the real world using only RGB sensors (no depth maps or GPS coordinates). This surprising result is enabled by our end-to-end, transformer-based, SPOC architecture, powerful visual encoders paired with extensive image augmentation, and the dramatic scale and diversity of our training data: millions of frames of shortest-path-expert trajectories collected inside approximately 200,000 procedurally generated houses containing 40,000 unique 3D assets. All data, code, and pretrained models are open-source and available online.
Bio:
Luca is a research manager on the perceptual reasoning and interaction research (PRIOR) team at the Allen Institute for AI as well as the lead of the AI2-THOR simulator team. Luca’s research focuses on enabling embodied artificial agents to learn from interaction, often in simulation, and act in the real world. Luca received his PhD in Statistics from the University of Washington and was the mathematics valedictorian of his undergraduate class at UC Berkeley.

 

Sponsored in part by:   Meta Reality Labs Pittsburgh