Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated excellent capabilities in composing various modules together to create programs that can perform complex reasoning tasks on images. In this paper, we propose TANGO, an approach that extends the program composition via LLMs already observed for images, aiming to integrate those capabilities into embodied agents capable of observing and acting in the world. Specifically, by employing a simple PointGoal Navigation model combined with a memory-based exploration policy as a foundational primitive for guiding an agent through the world, we show how a single model can address diverse tasks without additional training. We task an LLM with composing the provided primitives to solve a specific task, using only a few in-context examples in the prompt. We evaluate our approach on three key Embodied AI tasks: Open-Set ObjectGoal Navigation, Multi-Modal Lifelong Navigation, and Open Embodied Question Answering, achieving state-of-the-art results without any specific fine-tuning in challenging zero-shot scenarios.
We contribute the Habitat Synthetic Scene Dataset, a dataset of 211 high-quality 3D scenes, and use it to test navigation agent generalization to realistic 3D environments. Our dataset represents real interiors and contains a diverse set of 18,656 models of real-world objects. We investigate the impact of synthetic 3D scene dataset scale and realism on the task of training embodied agents to find and navigate to objects (ObjectGoal navigation). By comparing to synthetic 3D scene datasets from prior work, we find that scale helps in generalization, but the benefits quickly saturate, making visual fidelity and correlation to real-world scenes more important. Our experiments show that agents trained on our smaller-scale dataset can match or outperform agents trained on much larger datasets. Surprisingly, we observe that agents trained on just 122 scenes from our dataset outperform agents trained on 10,000 scenes from the ProcTHOR-10K dataset in terms of zero-shot generalization in real-world scanned environments.
We study ObjectGoal Navigation -- where a virtual robot situated in a new environment is asked to navigate to an object. Prior work has shown that imitation learning (IL) using behavior cloning (BC) on a dataset of human demonstrations achieves promising results. However, this has limitations -- 1) BC policies generalize poorly to new states, since the training mimics actions not their consequences, and 2) collecting demonstrations is expensive. On the other hand, reinforcement learning (RL) is trivially scalable, but requires careful reward engineering to achieve desirable behavior. We present PIRLNav, a two-stage learning scheme for BC pretraining on human demonstrations followed by RL-finetuning. This leads to a policy that achieves a success rate of $65.0\%$ on ObjectNav ($+5.0\%$ absolute over previous state-of-the-art). Using this BC$\rightarrow$RL training recipe, we present a rigorous empirical analysis of design choices. First, we investigate whether human demonstrations can be replaced with `free' (automatically generated) sources of demonstrations, e.g. shortest paths (SP) or task-agnostic frontier exploration (FE) trajectories. We find that BC$\rightarrow$RL on human demonstrations outperforms BC$\rightarrow$RL on SP and FE trajectories, even when controlled for same BC-pretraining success on train, and even on a subset of val episodes where BC-pretraining success favors the SP or FE policies. Next, we study how RL-finetuning performance scales with the size of the BC pretraining dataset. We find that as we increase the size of BC-pretraining dataset and get to high BC accuracies, improvements from RL-finetuning are smaller, and that $90\%$ of the performance of our best BC$\rightarrow$RL policy can be achieved with less than half the number of BC demonstrations. Finally, we analyze failure modes of our ObjectNav policies, and present guidelines for further improving them.
Efficient ObjectGoal navigation (ObjectNav) in novel environments requires an understanding of the spatial and semantic regularities in environment layouts. In this work, we present a straightforward method for learning these regularities by predicting the locations of unobserved objects from incomplete semantic maps. Our method differs from previous prediction-based navigation methods, such as frontier potential prediction or egocentric map completion, by directly predicting unseen targets while leveraging the global context from all previously explored areas. Our prediction model is lightweight and can be trained in a supervised manner using a relatively small amount of passively collected data. Once trained, the model can be incorporated into a modular pipeline for ObjectNav without the need for any reinforcement learning. We validate the effectiveness of our method on the HM3D and MP3D ObjectNav datasets. We find that it achieves the state-of-the-art on both datasets, despite not using any additional data for training.
We present Variable Experience Rollout (VER), a technique for efficiently scaling batched on-policy reinforcement learning in heterogenous environments (where different environments take vastly different times to generate rollouts) to many GPUs residing on, potentially, many machines. VER combines the strengths of and blurs the line between synchronous and asynchronous on-policy RL methods (SyncOnRL and AsyncOnRL, respectively). VER learns from on-policy experience (like SyncOnRL) and has no synchronization points (like AsyncOnRL). VER leads to significant and consistent speed-ups across a broad range of embodied navigation and mobile manipulation tasks in photorealistic 3D simulation environments. Specifically, for PointGoal navigation and ObjectGoal navigation in Habitat 1.0, VER is 60-100% faster (1.6-2x speedup) than DD-PPO, the current state of art distributed SyncOnRL, with similar sample efficiency. For mobile manipulation tasks (open fridge/cabinet, pick/place objects) in Habitat 2.0 VER is 150% faster (2.5x speedup) on 1 GPU and 170% faster (2.7x speedup) on 8 GPUs than DD-PPO. Compared to SampleFactory (the current state-of-the-art AsyncOnRL), VER matches its speed on 1 GPU, and is 70% faster (1.7x speedup) on 8 GPUs with better sample efficiency. We leverage these speed-ups to train chained skills for GeometricGoal rearrangement tasks in the Home Assistant Benchmark (HAB). We find a surprising emergence of navigation in skills that do not ostensible require any navigation. Specifically, the Pick skill involves a robot picking an object from a table. During training the robot was always spawned close to the table and never needed to navigate. However, we find that if base movement is part of the action space, the robot learns to navigate then pick an object in new environments with 50% success, demonstrating surprisingly high out-of-distribution generalization.
We present a large-scale study of imitating human demonstrations on tasks that require a virtual robot to search for objects in new environments -- (1) ObjectGoal Navigation (e.g. 'find & go to a chair') and (2) Pick&Place (e.g. 'find mug, pick mug, find counter, place mug on counter'). First, we develop a virtual teleoperation data-collection infrastructure -- connecting Habitat simulator running in a web browser to Amazon Mechanical Turk, allowing remote users to teleoperate virtual robots, safely and at scale. We collect 80k demonstrations for ObjectNav and 12k demonstrations for Pick&Place, which is an order of magnitude larger than existing human demonstration datasets in simulation or on real robots. Second, we attempt to answer the question -- how does large-scale imitation learning (IL) (which hasn't been hitherto possible) compare to reinforcement learning (RL) (which is the status quo)? On ObjectNav, we find that IL (with no bells or whistles) using 70k human demonstrations outperforms RL using 240k agent-gathered trajectories. The IL-trained agent demonstrates efficient object-search behavior -- it peeks into rooms, checks corners for small objects, turns in place to get a panoramic view -- none of these are exhibited as prominently by the RL agent, and to induce these behaviors via RL would require tedious reward engineering. Finally, accuracy vs. training data size plots show promising scaling behavior, suggesting that simply collecting more demonstrations is likely to advance the state of art further. On Pick&Place, the comparison is starker -- IL agents achieve ${\sim}$18% success on episodes with new object-receptacle locations when trained with 9.5k human demonstrations, while RL agents fail to get beyond 0%. Overall, our work provides compelling evidence for investing in large-scale imitation learning. Project page: https://ram81.github.io/projects/habitat-web.
State-of-the-art approaches to ObjectGoal navigation rely on reinforcement learning and typically require significant computational resources and time for learning. We propose Potential functions for ObjectGoal Navigation with Interaction-free learning (PONI), a modular approach that disentangles the skills of `where to look?' for an object and `how to navigate to (x, y)?'. Our key insight is that `where to look?' can be treated purely as a perception problem, and learned without environment interactions. To address this, we propose a network that predicts two complementary potential functions conditioned on a semantic map and uses them to decide where to look for an unseen object. We train the potential function network using supervised learning on a passive dataset of top-down semantic maps, and integrate it into a modular framework to perform ObjectGoal navigation. Experiments on Gibson and Matterport3D demonstrate that our method achieves the state-of-the-art for ObjectGoal navigation while incurring up to 1,600x less computational cost for training. Code and pre-trained models are available: https://vision.cs.utexas.edu/projects/poni/
ObjectGoal Navigation (ObjectNav) is an embodied task wherein agents are to navigate to an object instance in an unseen environment. Prior works have shown that end-to-end ObjectNav agents that use vanilla visual and recurrent modules, e.g. a CNN+RNN, perform poorly due to overfitting and sample inefficiency. This has motivated current state-of-the-art methods to mix analytic and learned components and operate on explicit spatial maps of the environment. We instead re-enable a generic learned agent by adding auxiliary learning tasks and an exploration reward. Our agents achieve 24.5% success and 8.1% SPL, a 37% and 8% relative improvement over prior state-of-the-art, respectively, on the Habitat ObjectNav Challenge. From our analysis, we propose that agents will act to simplify their visual inputs so as to smooth their RNN dynamics, and that auxiliary tasks reduce overfitting by minimizing effective RNN dimensionality; i.e. a performant ObjectNav agent that must maintain coherent plans over long horizons does so by learning smooth, low-dimensional recurrent dynamics. Site: https://joel99.github.io/objectnav/
Navigation tasks in photorealistic 3D environments are challenging because they require perception and effective planning under partial observability. Recent work shows that map-like memory is useful for long-horizon navigation tasks. However, a focused investigation of the impact of maps on navigation tasks of varying complexity has not yet been performed. We propose the multiON task, which requires navigation to an episode-specific sequence of objects in a realistic environment. MultiON generalizes the ObjectGoal navigation task and explicitly tests the ability of navigation agents to locate previously observed goal objects. We perform a set of multiON experiments to examine how a variety of agent models perform across a spectrum of navigation task complexities. Our experiments show that: i) navigation performance degrades dramatically with escalating task complexity; ii) a simple semantic map agent performs surprisingly well relative to more complex neural image feature map agents; and iii) even oracle map agents achieve relatively low performance, indicating the potential for future work in training embodied navigation agents using maps. Video summary: https://youtu.be/yqTlHNIcgnY