Problem Space Transformations for Generalisation in Behavioural Cloning

Kiran Doshi, Marco Bagatella, Stelian Coros

Keywords: behavioural cloning, out-of-distribution generalisation, behavioral cloning

Abstract: The combination of behavioural cloning and neural networks has driven significant progress in robotic manipulation. As these algorithms may require a large number of demonstrations for each task of interest, they remain fundamentally inefficient in complex scenarios. This issue is aggravated when the system is treated as a black-box, ignoring its physical properties. This work characterises widespread properties of robotic manipulation, such as pose equivariance and locality. We empirically demonstrate that transformations arising from each of these properties allow neural policies trained with behavioural cloning to better generalise to out-of-distribution problem instances.

Submission Number: 34