RT-Sketch: Goal-Conditioned Imitation Learning from Hand-Drawn Sketches

Priya Sundaresan, Quan Vuong, Jiayuan Gu, Peng Xu, Ted Xiao, Sean Kirmani, Tianhe Yu, Michael Stark, Ajinkya Jain, Karol Hausman, Dorsa Sadigh, Jeannette Bohg, Stefan Schaal

Primary Area: applications to robotics, autonomy, planning

Code Of Ethics: I acknowledge that I and all co-authors of this work have read and commit to adhering to the ICLR Code of Ethics.

Keywords: robotics, robot learning, robot manipulation, task representation, behavior cloning, multitask imitation learning, goal conditioning

Submission Guidelines: I certify that this submission complies with the submission instructions as described on https://iclr.cc/Conferences/2024/AuthorGuide.

TL;DR: We present a novel framework for goal-conditioned imitation learning from hand-drawn sketches.

Abstract: Natural language and images are commonly used as goal representations in goal-conditioned imitation learning (IL). However, natural language can be ambiguous and images can be over-specified. In this work, we propose hand-drawn sketches as a modality for goal specification in visual imitation learning. Sketches are easy for users to provide on the fly like language, but similar to images they can also help a downstream policy to be spatially-aware and even go beyond images to disambiguate task-relevant from task-irrelevant objects. We present RT-Sketch, a goal-conditioned policy for manipulation that takes a hand-drawn sketch of the desired scene as input, and outputs actions. We train RT-Sketch on a dataset of paired trajectories and corresponding synthetically generated goal sketches. We evaluate this approach on six manipulation skills involving tabletop object rearrangements on an articulated countertop. Experimentally we find that RT-Sketch is able to perform on a similar level to image or language-conditioned agents in straightforward settings, while achieving greater robustness when language goals are ambiguous or visual distractors are present. Additionally, we show that RT-Sketch has the capacity to interpret and act upon sketches with varied levels of specificity, ranging from minimal line drawings to detailed, colored drawings. For supplementary material and videos, please refer to our website: http://rt-sketch-anon.github.io.

Anonymous Url: I certify that there is no URL (e.g., github page) that could be used to find authors' identity.

No Acknowledgement Section: I certify that there is no acknowledgement section in this submission for double blind review.

Submission Number: 6698