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Improving Meta-imitation Learning with Focused Task Embedding

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Intelligent Systems and Applications (IntelliSys 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems ((LNNS,volume 544))

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Abstract

Meta-imitation learning has been applied to enable robots to quickly generalize the learned tasks to perform new tasks. The basic idea is to encode tasks into meaningful embeddings and perform the task specified by the given embedding. When the robot is tasked to perform a new, unseen task, it is given a single or just a few demonstrations, from which a new task embedding is obtained by generalizing from existing embeddings. Therefore, task encoding is key to the generalizability of meta-imitation learning. The problem is that most meta-imitation learning methods directly encode the whole task. This will take in too many irrelevant details into the task embeddings, resulting in poor generalization abilities. In this work, we propose to encode a task separately based on its different features, e.g., the required skills and the target objects. As a result, the robot can have a clearer understanding of the tasks and perform new tasks better. We compare the proposed method with typical meta-imitation learning methods on performing a set of robot tasks and test their performances of adapting to new, unseen tasks. The experimental results indicate that the proposed method can better encode tasks into meaningful embeddings and thus lead to better generalization.

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Correspondence to Chung-Ta King .

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Lin, YF., Ho, C., King, CT. (2023). Improving Meta-imitation Learning with Focused Task Embedding. In: Arai, K. (eds) Intelligent Systems and Applications. IntelliSys 2022. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 544. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16075-2_12

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