Hierarchical Abstraction for Combinatorial Generalization in Object Rearrangement

Michael Chang, Alyssa Li Dayan, Franziska Meier, Thomas L. Griffiths, Sergey Levine, Amy Zhang

Keywords: objects, combinatorial generalization, abstraction, rearrangement, slot attention, binding, hierarchy, compositionality, symmetry, independence, graph search

TL;DR: We demonstrate how to generalize over a combinatorially large space of rearrangement tasks from only pixel observations by constructing from video demonstrations a factorized transition graph over entity state transitions that we use for control.

Abstract:

Object rearrangement is a challenge for embodied agents because solving these tasks requires generalizing across a combinatorially large set of underlying entities that take the value of object states. Worse, these entities are often unknown and must be inferred from sensory percepts. We present a hierarchical abstraction approach to uncover these underlying entities and achieve combinatorial generalization from unstructured inputs. By constructing a factorized transition graph over clusters of object representations inferred from pixels, we show how to learn a correspondence between intervening on states of entities in the agent's model and acting on objects in the environment.
We use this correspondence to develop a method for control that generalizes to different numbers and configurations of objects, which outperforms current offline deep RL methods when evaluated on a set of simulated rearrangement and stacking tasks.