$\pi_{0.5}$: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalization

Kevin Black, Noah Brown, James Darpinian, Karan Dhabalia, Danny Driess, Adnan Esmail, Michael Robert Equi, Chelsea Finn, Niccolo Fusai, Manuel Y. Galliker, Dibya Ghosh, Lachy Groom, Karol Hausman, brian ichter, Szymon Jakubczak, Tim Jones, Liyiming Ke, Devin LeBlanc, Sergey Levine, Adrian Li-Bell et al. (15 additional authors not shown)

Keywords: vla, generalization, mobile manipulator

TL;DR: We trained a vision-language-action (VLA) model that can perform long-horizon tasks and generalize to new homes.

Abstract: In order for robots to be useful, they must perform practically relevant tasks in the real world, outside of the lab. While vision-language-action (VLA) models have demonstrated impressive results for end-to-end robot control, it remains an open question how far such models can generalize in the wild. We describe $\pi_{0.5}$, a new model based on $\pi_0$ that uses co-training on heterogeneous tasks to enable broad generalization. $\pi_{0.5}$ uses data from multiple robots, high-level semantic prediction, web data, and other sources to enable broadly generalizable real-world robotic manipulation. Our system uses a combination of co-training and hybrid multi-modal examples that combine image observations, language commands, object detections, semantic subtask prediction, and low-level actions. Our experiments show that this kind of knowledge transfer is essential for effective generalization, and we demonstrate for the first time that an end-to-end learning-enabled robotic system can perform long-horizon and dexterous manipulation skills, such as cleaning a kitchen or bedroom, in entirely new homes.

Submission Number: 439