Title: DynaMo: In-Domain Dynamics Pretraining for Visuo-Motor Control
Venue: NeurIPS 2024
Accepted: yes
Keywords: Robot learning

representation learning

self-supervised learning
Abstract: Imitation learning has proven to be a powerful tool for training complex visuo-motor policies. However, current methods often require hundreds to thousands of expert demonstrations to handle high-dimensional visual observations. A key reason for this poor data efficiency is that visual representations are predominantly either pretrained on out-of-domain data or trained directly through a behavior cloning objective. In this work, we present DynaMo, a new in-domain, self-supervised method for learning visual representations. Given a set of expert demonstrations, we jointly learn a latent inverse dynamics model and a forward dynamics model over a sequence of image embeddings, predicting the next frame in latent space, without augmentations, contrastive sampling, or access to ground truth actions. Importantly, DynaMo does not require any out-of-domain data such as Internet datasets or cross-embodied datasets. On a suite of six simulated and real environments, we show that representations learned with DynaMo significantly improve downstream imitation learning performance over prior self-supervised learning objectives, and pretrained representations. Gains from using DynaMo hold across policy classes such as Behavior Transformer, Diffusion Policy, MLP, and nearest neighbors. Finally, we ablate over key components of DynaMo and measure its impact on downstream policy performance. Robot videos are best viewed at https://dynamo-ssl.github.io.


Peer reviews:
{"IS_META_REVIEW": false, "comments": "SUMMARY:\nThis paper presents a way of pre-training vision encoder for robot control. Specifically, instead of using vanilla contrastive or masked autoencoder approaches, this method creates two models: 1) an inverse dynamics model that estimates the transition latent (actions) and 2) a forward dynamics model that takes in the current encoded visual latent and the transition latent and predicts the next latent observation. The results suggest that the method improves upon existing visual pre-training methods for robotics.\n\nSTRENGTHS:\n1. Few of the past works on visual pretraining for robotics consider the time / action but only focus on the visual observation aspect. This work presents a method that attempts to improve visual pretraining by modeling the dynamics present in the dataset. \n2. The results suggest that the method improves upon existing visual pre-training baselines\n\nWEAKNESSES:\n1. Prior visual pre-training for robotics operates under the premise that we have an image or video dataset, where we pre-train on these datasets and then finetune for a particular task. However, this method performs pre-training on the task-specific dataset, which is better aligned with the downstream tasks. Instead of having pre-training and fine-tuning using the same dataset and solving the same task, the objective of visual pretraining (exemplified by MAE, MoCo, etc.) is that if we train on a mass amount of data, we can finetune to a specific task (i.e. ImageNet pre-training then COCO segmentation finetuning). \n2. A few prior works [1,2] have tried to model forward and inverse dynamics concurrently. [1] also uses forward and inverse dynamics to train a visual encoder. The key difference between these works is that here action is modeled as a latent variable. Why ground truth action values are not used in pre-training (especially when pre-training and fine-tuning happen on the same task) is not justified in the manuscript. It would be quite convincing if pre-training is done on natural videos, or large-scale robot datasets where action spaces cannot be standardized, and then shows improved finetuning performance. \n\n[1] Agrawal, Pulkit, Ashvin V. Nair, Pieter Abbeel, Jitendra Malik, and Sergey Levine. \"Learning to poke by poking: Experiential learning of intuitive physics.\" Advances in neural information processing systems 29 (2016).\n\n[2] Fragkiadaki, Katerina, Pulkit Agrawal, Sergey Levine, and Jitendra Malik. \"Learning visual predictive models of physics for playing billiards.\" arXiv preprint arXiv:1511.07404 (2015).\n\nQUESTIONS:\nThe reviewer wants to ask for two sets of experiments to address weakness 1:\n1. How do masked pre-training methods compare to DynaMo when they are trained on the same data? I.e. train two networks analogously with the method provided in VC-1 and MVP on the task-specific dataset, and evaluate their task performance. This experiment would demonstrate that even for specific tasks, pre-training with DynaMo outperforms existing visual pre-training methods on task-specific datasets. \n2. How does DynaMo generalize to unseen tasks (in the sense that it can generalize to tasks outside of the dynamics seen in training)? I.e. pre-train DynaMo on (1) Put Yogurt (2) Get yogurt (3) Get Tea and evaluate on (1) Put ketchup (2) Get Water.\n\nLIMITATIONS:\nLimitation section is present.", "TITLE": "Official Review", "RECOMMENDATION": 6, "REVIEWER_CONFIDENCE": 4, "SOUNDNESS_CORRECTNESS": 3, "DATE": "2024-06-23"}

{"IS_META_REVIEW": false, "comments": "SUMMARY:\nThis paper presents a self-supervised model, DynaMo, for pretraining visual encoders adopted for visuo-motor control. The targeted downstream task is imitation learning for robotic manipulation. Instead of using an out-of-domain dataset for pretraining and then transferring to a new domain using alternative techniques, the authors propose exploiting sequences of observations from in-domain demonstrations to pretrain three different models, a visual encoder, a forward and an inverse model. Once this is done a policy can be learned with observations encoded using the pre-trained visual encoder.\n\nSTRENGTHS:\nThe most important benefit of DynaMo is that a visual encoder can be trained with limited risk of suppressing data dimensions necessary for visuomotor control, an otherwise frequently occurring problem.\n\nEven if similar models that combine training of forward and inverse models have existed in literature before, the action representation is assumed unobserved in the proposed model, which has rarely been the case before. The literature on imitation learning from observed state sequences is vast, with little cited in the paper. However, the way this is done for pretraining in the proposed model is innovative and easily applicable to a practical scenario.  \n\nThe experiments are rather exhaustive with five different settings and embodiments tested, two of which are real-world scenarios. In experiments that compare to alternative self-supervised methods and pretrained representations, the proposed visual embeddings are shown to be very competitive. It is also shown that DynaMo can be used to finetune an encoder pre-trained on ImageNet for even better results while being relatively insensitive to the choice of policy class.\n\nWEAKNESSES:\nThe paper is written as if there were no research in the area before the deep learning boom. Only one citation out of 70 citations is older than 10 years. The paper suggests that training exclusively on in-domain data is new, even if this used to be the way it was typically done before the arrival of data-hungry deep-learning-based models, models that forced people to a greater extent to rely on offline training on out-of-domain data with data augmentation, contrastive learning, etc. \n\nThe idea to train pairs of inverse and forward models online has existed in psychology and robotics for at least 25 years, such as in the works of Wolpert et al [1]. Using similar models, imitation learning has been a common theme over the years, with [2] being just an example. Without this connection back to earlier research, this paper gives the impression of trying to reinvent the wheel, and it becomes unclear what the contributions really are. \n\nEven if the experiments suggest that DynaMo can be beneficial also in real-world settings, the presented experiments are too few to be conclusive. The real world is way more diverse with more than just a small selected set of objects that can be manipulated. However, this weakness is pointed out in the conclusions, which makes it less problematic.  \n\n[1] Wolpert and Kawato, “Multiple paired forward and inverse models for motor control”, Neural Networks, 11, 1998.\n\n[2] Demiris and Hayes, “Imitation as a dual-route process featuring predictive and learning components: a biologically plausible computational model”, in Imitation in Animals and Artifacts, MIT Press, 2002.\n\nQUESTIONS:\n* Are the visual encoder, inverse and forward models only trained on the demonstrations from the respective datasets? Even if this is only for pretraining, the demonstrations, at least the real-world ones, are very few compared to the complexity of the tasks learned. Why not exploit all possible sequences available on the same embodiment, even for tasks that will eventually not be of interest? \n* How restrictive is the assumption that forward models are unimodal? Has this become a weakness during the experiments?\n* Since both the inverse and forward models seem to be ignored after pretraining, what is the motivation for a separation between the two? Why not train a network to predict the next encoded observation from earlier ones, essentially with the inverse and forward models merged into one? Why is the latent action representation needed at all?\n\nLIMITATIONS:\nYes, some limitations related the real-world experiments and the unimodality of models are brought up in the conclusions.", "TITLE": "Official Review", "RECOMMENDATION": 6, "REVIEWER_CONFIDENCE": 4, "SOUNDNESS_CORRECTNESS": 3, "DATE": "2024-07-05"}

{"IS_META_REVIEW": false, "comments": "SUMMARY:\nThis paper presents a self-supervised learning method for robot learning that learns representations by using data from demonstrations. The objective is based on learning latent actions from inverse dynamics, and learning forward dynamics model that uses such latent actions as inputs. Several techniques are utilized to prevent the model from finding trivial solutions and thus collapsing. Experiments are conducted in both real-world and simulation environments.\n\nSTRENGTHS:\n- Clear writing with good figures\n- Real-robot experiments!\n- Focuses on the important problem of pre-training representations from demonstrations, as utilizing such limited but in-domain data can be crucial in the context of robot learning where in-domain data is scarse but important especially for fine-grained control tasks.\n\nWEAKNESSES:\n- As other self-supervised learning models are trained on non-standard robotic datasets, it is not clear whether they are trained well with good hyperparameters -- for instance without collapses -- is there a way to ensure that baseline methods are well-tuned?\n- I understand that the main focus of this paper is to introduce a self-supervised learning method and compare its performance to other baselines. But what would the performance look like if you consider the full fine-tuning setup that uses gradients from behavior cloning for updating the encoder? Can we squeeze more information and maybe performance boost from fully fine-tuning the encoder? How would all the methods perform in this setup? This could further strengthen the claims of this paper that we should focus on extracting more information from demonstrations.\n- One important missing baseline is [1] that pre-trains (optionally causal) transformer with masked modelling objective. Even though it uses a pre-trained visual encoder, using features from the causal transformer can be still a baseline Moreover, it's a bit awkward that MAE trained on demonstrations is missing from the baseline even though MVP is selected as a pre-trained representation baseline. Including MAE, maybe optionally its multi-view variant [2], can make results be more convincing.\n\n[1] Radosavovic, Ilija, Baifeng Shi, Letian Fu, Ken Goldberg, Trevor Darrell, and Jitendra Malik. \"Robot learning with sensorimotor pre-training.\" In Conference on Robot Learning, pp. 683-693. PMLR, 2023.\n\n[2] Seo, Younggyo, Junsu Kim, Stephen James, Kimin Lee, Jinwoo Shin, and Pieter Abbeel. \"Multi-view masked world models for visual robotic manipulation.\" In International Conference on Machine Learning, pp. 30613-30632. PMLR, 2023.\n\nQUESTIONS:\nSee Weaknesses\n\nLIMITATIONS:\nN/A", "TITLE": "Official Review", "RECOMMENDATION": 6, "REVIEWER_CONFIDENCE": 4, "SOUNDNESS_CORRECTNESS": 3, "DATE": "2024-07-08"}

{"IS_META_REVIEW": false, "comments": "SUMMARY:\nThis paper presents DynaMo, using in-domain data for self-supervision. It jointly learns a latent inverse dynamics model and a forward dynamics model over a sequence of image embeddings. The\n\nSTRENGTHS:\nThis paper is easy to follow.\n\nWEAKNESSES:\nSimplified Real-World Setup:\nThe real-robot experiments appear overly simplistic. Objects seem to be fixed in place, indicated by the red marker on the table, suggesting a lack of randomization in object placement. This setup makes the task easier for conventional imitation learning methods like diffusion policy and act, potentially allowing them to achieve a 100% success rate.\n\nSuggestion: Introduce spatial randomization to the scene. Conduct additional experiments under these conditions to demonstrate Dynamo's superiority in more complex and varied scenarios.\n\n2) Unfair Comparisons in Simulation: \nIn Table 1, Dynamo is compared with several baselines that use different backbones, which makes the comparison potentially unfair.\nImpact: The difference in backbones could skew the performance results, making it difficult to accurately assess Dynamo's relative performance. \n\nSuggestion: Include more experiments of Dynamo with various backbones such as ViT and ResNet-50. Compare these results against the baselines to provide a fairer and more comprehensive evaluation.\n\n3) The motivation for using SSL in this context is unclear. Typically, SSL is advantageous due to its ability to learn from massive datasets without human labels. However, in the field of robotics, in-domain data are often scarce. This could make the application of SSL less persuasive and potentially less effective.\n\nQUESTIONS:\nCurrently, I believe this paper has significant flaws in its experimental design, both in simulation and real-robot settings. As such, my initial score is 4, with the real-robot experiments being a notable strength. However, the existing experiments do not sufficiently support the claims made in the paper. If the authors can provide additional experiments based on my suggestions above, and if the results substantiate their claims, I would be willing to raise my rating.\n\nLIMITATIONS:\nNo.", "TITLE": "Official Review", "RECOMMENDATION": 4, "REVIEWER_CONFIDENCE": 5, "SOUNDNESS_CORRECTNESS": 2, "DATE": "2024-07-12"}