Proud of Varshith Sreeramdass for leading this work in which we propose Guided Strategy Discovery (GSD). We introduce a novel diversity formulation based on a learned task-relevance measure that prioritizes behaviors exploring modeled latent factors to learn new, task-accomplishing behaviors from limited demonstrations. This will be presented at ICLR 2025 in Singapore.

Full reference: Sreeramdass, V., Paleja, R., Chen, L., van Waveren, S., Gombolay, M. “Generalized Behavior Learning from Diverse Demonstrations”, in International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), 2025.

Abstract: Diverse behavior policies are valuable in domains requiring quick test-time adaptation or personalized human-robot interaction. Human demonstrations provide rich information regarding task objectives and factors that govern individual behavior variations, which can be used to characterize useful diversity and learn diverse performant policies. However, we show that prior work that builds naive representations of demonstration heterogeneity fails in generating successful novel behaviors that generalize over behavior factors. We propose Guided Strategy Discovery (GSD), which introduces a novel diversity formulation based on a learned task-relevance measure that prioritizes behaviors exploring modeled latent factors. We empirically validate across three continuous control benchmarks for generalizing to in-distribution (interpolation) and out-of-distribution (extrapolation) factors that GSD outperforms baselines in novel behavior discovery by ~21%. Finally, we demonstrate that GSD can generalize striking behaviors for table tennis in a virtual testbed while leveraging human demonstrations collected in the real world.