LanCon-Learn: Learning With Language to Enable Generalization in Multi-Task Manipulation

Andrew Silva, Nina Moorman, William Silva, Zulfiqar Zaidi, Nakul Gopalan, Matthew C. Gombolay

Abstract: Robots must be capable of learning from previously solved tasks and generalizing that knowledge to quickly perform new tasks to realize the vision of ubiquitous and useful robot assistance in the real world. While multi-task learning research has produced agents capable of performing multiple tasks, these tasks are often encoded as one-hot goals. In contrast, natural language specifications offer an accessible means both for (1) users to describe a set of new tasks to the robot and (2) robots to reason about the similarities and differences among tasks through language-based task embeddings. Until now, multi-task learning with language has been limited to navigation based tasks and has not been applied to continuous manipulation tasks, requiring precision to grasp and move objects. We present <small>LanCon-Learn</small>, a novel attention-based approach to language-conditioned multi-task learning in manipulation domains to enable learning agents to reason about relationships between skills and task objectives through natural language and interaction. We evaluate <small>LanCon-Learn</small> for both reinforcement learning and imitation learning, across multiple virtual robot domains along with a demonstration on a physical robot. <small>LanCon-Learn</small> achieves up to a 200&#x0025; improvement in zero-shot task success rate and transfers known skills to novel tasks faster than non-language-based baselines, demonstrating the utility of language for goal specification.