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Title: Hallucinative Topological Memory for Zero-Shot Visual Planning

Paper content:
In visual planning (VP), an agent learns to plan goal-directed behavior from observations of a dynamical system obtained offline, e.g., images obtained from self-supervised robot interaction.
VP algorithms essentially combine data-driven perception and planning, and are important for robotic manipulation and navigation domains, among others.
A recent and promising approach to VP is the semi-parametric topological memory (SPTM) method, where image samples are treated as nodes in a graph, and the connectivity in the graph is learned using deep image classification.
Thus, the learned graph represents the topological connectivity of the data, and planning can be performed using conventional graph search methods.
However, training SPTM necessitates a suitable loss function for the connectivity classifier, which requires non-trivial manual tuning.
More importantly, SPTM is constricted in its ability to generalize to changes in the domain, as its graph is constructed from direct observations and thus requires collecting new samples for planning.
In this paper, we propose Hallucinative Topological Memory (HTM), which overcomes these shortcomings.
In HTM, instead of training a discriminative classifier we train an energy function using contrastive predictive coding.
In addition, we learn a conditional VAE model that generates samples given a context image of the domain, and use these hallucinated samples for building the connectivity graph, allowing for zero-shot generalization to domain changes.
In simulated domains, HTM outperforms conventional SPTM and visual foresight methods in terms of both plan quality and success in long-horizon planning.
For robots to operate in unstructured environments such as homes and hospitals, they need to manipulate objects and solve complex tasks as they perceive the physical world.
While task planning and object manipulation have been studied in the classical AI paradigm [20, 9, 30, 10] , most successes have relied on a human-designed state representation and perception, which can be challenging to obtain in unstructured domains.
While high-dimensional sensory input such as images can be easy to acquire, planning using raw percepts is challenging.
This has motivated the investigation of datadriven approaches for robotic manipulation.
For example, deep reinforcement learning (RL) has made impressive progress in handling high-dimensional sensory inputs and solving complex tasks in recent years [7, 4, 15, 23] .
One of the main challenges in deploying deep RL methods in human-centric environment is interpretability.
For example, before executing a potentially dangerous task, it would be desirable to visualize what the robot is planning to do step by step, and intervene if necessary.
Addressing both data-driven modeling and interpretability, the visual planning (VP) paradigm seeks to learn a model of the environment from raw perception and then produce a visual plan of solving a task before actually executing a robot action.
Recently, several studies in manipulation and navigation [13, 29, 5, 22] have investigated VP approaches that first learn what is possible to do in a particular environment by self-supervised interaction, and then use the learned model to generate a visual plan from the current state to the goal, and finally apply visual servoing to follow the plan.
One particularly promising approach to VP is the semi-parametric topological memory (SPTM) method proposed by Savinov et al. [22] .
In SPTM, images collected offline are treated as nodes in a graph and represent the possible states of the system.
To connect nodes in this graph, an image classifier is trained to predict whether pairs of images were 'close' in the data or not, effectively learning which image transitions are feasible in a small number of steps.
The SPTM graph can then be used to generate a visual plan -a sequence of images between a pair of start and goal images -by directly searching the graph.
SPTM has several advantages, such as producing highly interpretable visual plans and the ability to plan long-horizon behavior.
However, since SPTM builds the visual plan directly from images in the data, when the environment changes -for example, the lighting varies, the camera is slightly moved, or other objects are displaced -SPTM requires recollecting images in the new environment; in this sense, SPTM does not generalize in a zero-shot sense.
Additionally, similar to [5] , we find that training the graph connectivity classifier as originally proposed by [22] requires extensive manual tuning.
Figure 1 : HTM illustration.
Top left: data collection.
In this illustration, the task is to move a green object between gray obstacles.
Data consists of multiple obstacle configurations (contexts), and images of random movement of the object in each configuration.
Bottom left: the elements of HTM.
A CVAE is trained to hallucinate images of the object and obstacles conditioned on the obstacle image context.
A connectivity energy model is trained to score pairs of images based on the feasibility of their transition.
Right: HTM visual planning.
Given a new context image and a pair of start and goal images, we first use the CVAE to hallucinate possible images of the object and obstacles.
Then, a connectivity graph (blue dotted lines) is computed based on the connectivity energy, and we plan for the shortest path from start to goal on this graph (orange solid line).
For executing the plan, a visual servoing controller is later used to track the image sequence.
In this work, we propose to improve both the robustness and zero-shot generalization of SPTM.
To tackle the issue of generalization, we assume that the environment is described using some context vector, which can be an image of the domain or any other observation data that contains enough information to extract a plan (see Figure 1 top left) .
We then train a conditional generative model that hallucinates possible states of the domain conditioned on the context vector.
Thus, given an unseen context, the generative model hallucinates exploration data without requiring actual exploration.
When building the connectivity graph with these hallucinated images, we replace the vanilla classifier used in SPTM with an energy-based model that employs a contrastive loss.
We show that this alteration drastically improves planning robustness and quality.
Finally, for planning, instead of connecting nodes in the graph according to an arbitrary threshold of the connectivity classifier, as in SPTM, we cast the planning as an inference problem, and efficiently search for the shortest path in a graph with weights proportional to the inverse of a proximity score from our energy model.
Empirically, we demonstrate that this provides much smoother plans and barely requires any hyperparameter tuning.
We term our approach Hallucinative Topological Memory (HTM).
A visual overview of our algorithm is presented in Figure 1 .
We evaluate our method on a set of simulated VP problems of moving an object between obstacles, which require long-horizon planning.
In contrast with prior work, which only focused on the success of the method in executing a task, here we also measure the interpretability of visual planning, through mean opinion scores of features such as image fidelity and feasibility of the image sequence.
In both measures, HTM outperforms state-of-the-art data-driven approaches such as visual foresight [4] and the original SPTM.
We propose a method that is visually interpretable and modular -we first hallucinate possible configurations, then compute a connectivity between them, and then plan.
Our HTM can generalize to unseen environments and improve visual plan quality and execution success rate over state-of-the-art VP methods.
Our results suggest that combining classical planning methods with data-driven perception can be helpful for long-horizon visual planning problems, and takes another step in bridging the gap between learning and planning.
In future work, we plan to combine HTM with Visual MPC for handling more complex objects, and use object-oriented planning for handling multiple objects.
Another interesting aspect is to improve planning by hallucinating samples conditioned on the start and goal configurations, which can help reduce the search space during planning.

assistant: text: We propose Hallucinative Topological Memory (HTM), a visual planning algorithm that can perform zero-shot long horizon planning in new environments.