Actionable Models: Unsupervised Offline Learning of Robotic Skills

Benjamin Eysenbach
Chelsea Finn
Dmitry Kalashnikov
Jake Varley
Karol Hausman
Sergey Levine
Yao Lu
Yevgen Chebotar
International Conference on Machine Learning 2021 (2021)
Google Scholar

Abstract

We consider the problem of learning useful robotic skills from previously collected offline data without access to manually specified rewards or additional online exploration, a setting that is becoming increasingly important for scaling robot learning by reusing past robotic data. In particular, we propose the objective of learning a functional understanding of the environment by learning to reach any goal state in a given dataset. We employ goal-conditioned Q-learning with hindsight relabeling and develop several techniques that enable training in a particularly challenging offline setting. We find that our method can operate on high-dimensional camera images and learn a variety of skills on real robots that generalize to previously unseen scenes and objects. We also show that our method can learn to reach long-horizon goals across multiple episodes, and learn rich representations that can help with downstream tasks through pre-training or auxiliary objectives.

Research Areas