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Title: Neural Probabilistic Motor Primitives for Humanoid Control

Paper content:
We focus on the problem of learning a single motor module that can flexibly express a range of behaviors for the control of high-dimensional physically simulated humanoids.
To do this, we propose a motor architecture that has the general structure of an inverse model with a latent-variable bottleneck.
We show that it is possible to train this model entirely offline to compress thousands of expert policies and learn a motor primitive embedding space.
The trained neural probabilistic motor primitive system can perform one-shot imitation of whole-body humanoid behaviors, robustly mimicking unseen trajectories.
Additionally, we demonstrate that it is also straightforward to train controllers to reuse the learned motor primitive space to solve tasks, and the resulting movements are relatively naturalistic.
To support the training of our model, we compare two approaches for offline policy cloning, including an experience efficient method which we call linear feedback policy cloning.
We encourage readers to view a supplementary video (https://youtu.be/CaDEf-QcKwA ) summarizing our results.
A broad challenge in machine learning for control and robotics is to produce policies capable of general, flexible, and adaptive behavior of complex, physical bodies.
To build policies that can effectively control simulated humanoid bodies, researchers must simultaneously overcome foundational challenges related to high-dimensional control, body balance, and locomotion.
Recent progress in deep reinforcement learning has raised hopes that such behaviors can be learned end-to-end with minimal manual intervention.
Yet, even though significant progress has been made thanks to better algorithms, training regimes, and computational infrastructure, the resulting behaviors still tend to exhibit significant idiosyncrasies (e.g. BID2 .One
advantage of working with humanoids in this context is that motion capture data is widely available and can serve to help design controllers that produce apparently humanlike movement. Indeed
, recent developments are now allowing for the production of highly specialized expert policies which robustly, albeit narrowly, reproduce single motion capture clips (e.g. BID18 ; BID30 ).A remaining
challenge on the way to truly flexible and general purpose control is to be able to sequence and generalize individual movements or "skills" in a task-directed manner. Achieving this
goal requires not just the ability to acquire individual skills in the first place, but also an architecture and associated training procedure that supports representation, recruitment, and composition of a large number of skills.This paper presents a step in this direction. Specifically,
the setting we focus on will be one in which we have a large number of robust experts that perform single skills well and we wish to transfer these skills into a shared policy that can do what each expert does as well as the expert, while also generalizing to unseen behaviors within the distribution of skills. To this end we
design a system that performs one-shot imitation as well as permits straightforward reuse (or transfer) of skills. We require our
approach to scale to a very large number of individual skills while also keeping manual intervention and oversight to a minimum.Our primary contribution is the development of a neural network architecture that can represent and generate many motor behaviors, which we refer to as neural probabilistic motor primitives. This architecture
is designed to perform one-shot imitation, while learning a dense embedding space of a large number of individual motor skills. Once trained, this
module does not just reproduce individual behaviors in the training data, but can sequence and compose these behaviors in a controlled fashion as well as synthesize novel movements consistent with the training data distribution. Empirically, we also
find that training controllers to reuse this learned motor primitive module for new tasks generates surprisingly human-like movement and the behavior generated seems to interpolate the space of behaviors well.In order to facilitate transfer and compression of expert skills at the scale of thousands of behaviors, we wish to avoid closed-loop RL training. We call the general,
offline, functional transfer of policy content policy transfer or policy cloning and consider two approaches. The natural baseline
approach involves the application of behavioral cloning to data gathered by executing experts many times, with noise, and logging intended expert actions, resembling the approach of BID16 . This works well, as
it ensures the student behaves like the expert not only along nominal expert rollouts but also at points arrived at by perturbing the expert. However, this approach
may require many rollouts, which can be costly to obtain in many settings. As a more efficient alternative
we therefore consider a second solution that operates by comprehensively transferring the functional properties of an expert to a student policy by matching the local noise-feedback properties along one or a small number of representative expert reference trajectories. We call this specific proposal
linear feedback policy cloning (LFPC), and we demonstrate that it is competitive with behavioral cloning from many more rollouts in our setting.
In this paper we have described approaches for transfer and compression of control policies.
We have exhibited a motor primitive module that learns to represent and execute motor behaviors for control of a simulated humanoid body.
Using either a variant of behavioral cloning or linear feedback policy cloning we can train the neural probabilistic motor primitive sytem to perform robust one-shotimitation, and with the latter we can use relatively restricted data consisting of only single rollouts from each expert.
While LFPC did not work quite as well in the full-scale model as cloning from noisy rollouts, we consider it remarkable that it is possible in our setting to transfer expert behavior using a single rollout.
We believe LFPC holds promise insofar as it may be useful in settings where rollouts are costly to obtain (e.g. adapted to real-world robotic applications), and there is room for further improvement as we did not carefully tune certain parameters, most saliently the marginal noise distribution ∆.The
resulting neural probabilistic motor primitive module is interpretable and reusable. We
are optimistic that this kind of architecture could serve as a basis for further continual learning of motor skills. This
work has been restricted to motor behaviors which do not involve interactions with objects and where a full set a of behaviors are available in advance. Meaningful
extensions of this work may attempt to greatly enrich the space of behaviors or demonstrate how to perform continual learning and reuse of new skills.

assistant: text: Neural Probabilistic Motor Primitives compress motion capture tracking policies into one flexible model capable of one-shot imitation and reuse as a low-level controller.