Exploitation-Guided Exploration for Semantic Embodied Navigation

Justin Wasserman, Girish Chowdhary, Abhinav Gupta, Unnat Jain

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

In the recent progress in embodied navigation and sim-to-robot transfer, modular policies have emerged as a de facto framework. However, there is more to compositionality beyond the decomposition of the learning load into modular components. In this work, we investigate a principled way to syntactically combine these components. Particularly, we propose Exploitation-Guided Exploration (XgX) where separate modules for exploration and exploitation come together in a novel and intuitive manner. We configure the exploitation module to take over in the deterministic final steps of navigation i.e. when the goal becomes visible. Crucially, an exploitation module teacher-forces the exploration module and continues driving an overridden policy optimization. XgX, with effective decomposition and novel guidance, improves the state-of-the-art performance on the challenging object navigation task from 70% to 73%. Along with better accuracy, through targeted analysis, we show that XgX is also more efficient at goal-conditioned exploration. Finally, we show sim-to-real transfer to robot hardware and XgX performs over two-fold better than the best baseline from simulation benchmarking. Project page: xgxvisnav.github.io

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publication2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, ICRA 2024
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages2901-2908
Number of pages8
ISBN (Electronic)9798350384574
DOIs
StatePublished - 2024
Event2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, ICRA 2024 - Yokohama, Japan
Duration: May 13 2024May 17 2024

Publication series

NameProceedings - IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation
ISSN (Print)1050-4729

Conference

Conference2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, ICRA 2024
Country/TerritoryJapan
CityYokohama
Period5/13/245/17/24

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Control and Systems Engineering
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering
  • Artificial Intelligence

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