View-Invariant Policy Learning via Zero-Shot Novel View Synthesis

Stephen Tian, Blake Wulfe, Kyle Sargent, Katherine Liu, Sergey Zakharov, Vitor Campagnolo Guizilini, Jiajun Wu

Keywords: generalization, visual imitation learning, view synthesis

TL;DR: We describe and evaluate a simple yet effective method for making visuomotor policies robust to changes in camera pose by leveraging zero-shot novel view synthesis methods.

Abstract: Large-scale visuomotor policy learning is a promising approach toward developing generalizable manipulation systems. Yet, policies that can be deployed on diverse embodiments, environments, and observational modalities remain elusive. In this work, we investigate how knowledge from large-scale visual data of the world may be used to address one axis of variation for generalizable manipulation: observational viewpoint. Specifically, we study single-image novel view synthesis models, which learn 3D-aware scene-level priors by rendering images of the same scene from alternate camera viewpoints given a single input image. For practical application to diverse robotic data, these models must operate zero-shot, performing view synthesis on unseen tasks and environments. We empirically analyze view synthesis models within a simple data-augmentation scheme that we call View Synthesis Augmentation (VISTA) to understand their capabilities for learning viewpoint-invariant policies from single-viewpoint demonstration data. Upon evaluating the robustness of policies trained with our method to out-of-distribution camera viewpoints, we find that they outperform baselines in both simulated and real-world manipulation tasks.

Previous Publication: Yes

Submission Number: 9