arXiv Machine Learning

BIFROST: Bridging Invariant Feature Representation for Observation-space Sim2Real Transfer

arXiv:2607. 01410v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Sim2real transfer for robot policy learning suffers due to mismatch between simulation and reality.

arXiv AI
Sep 18

Sim-and-Human Co-training for Data-Efficient and Scene-Generalizable Bimanual Manipulation

Sim-and-Human Co-training (SimHum) is a method that combines simulation and human demonstration data to train bimanual manipulation policies. It first extracts kinematic priors from simulation and visual priors from human observations, then fine‑tunes on a small real‑robot dataset. With only 80 real‑robot episodes per task, SimHum achieves 62.5% success on out‑of‑distribution scenes across four tabletop tasks, outperforming real‑only training by 53.7% and improving the best single‑source baseline by 35.0% in a matched‑time study.

By Kaipeng Fang, Weiqing Liang, Yuyang Li, Ji Zhang, Pengpeng Zeng, Heng Tao Shen, Jingkuan Song, Lianli Gao
arXiv AI
Sep 18

Accelerating Visual Policy Learning with Sampling-Based Model Predictive Control

The paper introduces Sampling-Guided Policy Search (SGPS), a method that combines sampling-based model‑predictive control with first‑order policy gradients to accelerate visual policy learning for locomotion and manipulation tasks. SGPS starts with behavior cloning from sampled actions and then alternates between sampling‑based refinement and short‑horizon policy updates under varied initial states and dynamics. The approach is demonstrated on simulated Unitree Go2 and G1 robots, learning tasks such as obstacle traversal and bimanual carrying, and the distilled policies transfer zero‑shot to a real Go2 robot using onboard depth perception.

By Yilang Liu, Haoxiang You, Qian Wang, Daniel Rakita, Ian Abraham