A Generalist Dynamics Model for Control

Author:

Ingmar Schubert, Jingwei Zhang, Jake Bruce, Sarah Bechtle, Emilio Parisotto, Martin Riedmiller, Jost Tobias Springenberg, Arunkumar Byravan, Leonard Hasenclever, Nicolas Heess

Keyword:

Computer Science, Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI), Robotics (cs.RO)

journal:

date:

2023-05-17 16:00:00

Abstract

We investigate the use of transformer sequence models as dynamics models (TDMs) for control. We find that TDMs exhibit strong generalization capabilities to unseen environments, both in a few-shot setting, where a generalist TDM is fine-tuned with small amounts of data from the target environment, and in a zero-shot setting, where a generalist TDM is applied to an unseen environment without any further training. Here, we demonstrate that generalizing system dynamics can work much better than generalizing optimal behavior directly as a policy. Additional results show that TDMs also perform well in a single-environment learning setting when compared to a number of baseline models. These properties make TDMs a promising ingredient for a foundation model of control.

PDF: A Generalist Dynamics Model for Control.pdf