Decomposing the Generalization Gap in Imitation Learning for Visual
  Robotic Manipulation
Authors: name: Annie Xie; name: Lisa Lee; name: Ted Xiao; name: Chelsea Finn
Published: 2023-07-07 15:26:03

Abstract: What makes generalization hard for imitation learning in visual robotic
manipulation? This question is difficult to approach at face value, but the
environment from the perspective of a robot can often be decomposed into
enumerable factors of variation, such as the lighting conditions or the
placement of the camera. Empirically, generalization to some of these factors
have presented a greater obstacle than others, but existing work sheds little
light on precisely how much each factor contributes to the generalization gap.
Towards an answer to this question, we study imitation learning policies in
simulation and on a real robot language-conditioned manipulation task to
quantify the difficulty of generalization to different (sets of) factors. We
also design a new simulated benchmark of 19 tasks with 11 factors of variation
to facilitate more controlled evaluations of generalization. From our study, we
determine an ordering of factors based on generalization difficulty, that is
consistent across simulation and our real robot setup.