NeurIPS 2020

An Imitation from Observation Approach to Transfer Learning with Dynamics Mismatch


Review 1

Summary and Contributions: This paper considers the important problem of transferring a policy learned in simulation to the real world. Specifically, the authors consider the approach of Grounded Action Transformation (GAT) for grounding a simulator in observations of the agent in the real world. Specifically, this approach learns to map state and action of the agent in the real environment to an action that will be executed in simulation but produces the same state transition as observed in the real world. The authors observe and prove that GAT is basically form of Imitation from Observations (IfO). Then the authors go ahead and use recent successes in IfO to propose a new adversarial initiation learning algorithms for action transformations. The authors show on different simulated tasks, simulators and variations of one environment that the new algorithm GARAT better reduces the domain shift the GAT. After reading the authors response, I think they addressed some of the concerns. My opinion is unchanged. A remaining concern is the 'real' naming. While I recognize the intend of the method, the authors have not shown the transfer to a real robot. Therefore, this would need to be re-worded.

Strengths: - the paper is clear and formal in deriving the algorithm and provide the proofs to backup their arguments. - they also provide the empirical evaluation to show that the new algorithm produces policies that performs better or equally well as policies learned by significantly more roll-outs. - the paper is clear and self-contained. I enjoyed reading it.

Weaknesses: Experiments on a real robot are missing. This would be the ultimate test and typically presents more challenges than any simulation environment. However, due to the current circumstance, real robot experiments may not have been possible. The authors did a good job at evaluating their approach with a broad set of experiments. A better analysis/discussion of why GAT performed so much worse from GARAT would have been desirable.

Correctness: The method and derivation seem correct.

Clarity: Very well written.

Relation to Prior Work: Seems to be well laid out. I am however not an expert in this area and may not be aware of relevant related work.

Reproducibility: Yes

Additional Feedback:


Review 2

Summary and Contributions: A new sim-to-real transfer algorithm, namely GARAT, is presented. GARAT is based on adversarial imitation from observation. The main idea of the paper is based on interacting with the target domain to make the simulator more realistic, namely grounded sim-to-real. The paper argues that previous method of ‘grounded action transformation (GAT)’[14] can be seen as an IfO method and thus IfO methods such as [43] can be effective for improving sim-to-real transfer. Based on that, it is proposed that IfO approaches can be repurposed for sim-to-real. Experimental evaluation is done on several simulation domains with different dynamics and it is reported that GARAT performs better than black-box sim-to-real methods.

Strengths: + mathematical proof is provided to show that it is possible to learn action transformation policy directly from data. + Sim-to-Real topic which is an important topic in policy learning is considered in this paper. + Posing Sim-to-Real as an IfO is interesting.

Weaknesses: -The cost function formulation is similar to previous work of [17] and [43]. The adversarial objective minimized is based on prior work of [17] and [43]. Given this, the proposed approach does not offer significant technical novelty. - Throughout the paper, it is said that the proposed method a sim-to-real approach and the transferred domain is called ‘real’. However, the experiments are based on sim-to-sim evaluation where there are two simulator for a task and one of them is called ‘real’. I do not see such characterization as acceptable. If the proposed approach is a transfer learning approach for transferring between two domains it should not be called sim-to-real. Sim-to-real research seeks to present techniques that are trained in simulation but will eventually be tested and evaluated on *real physical* robots/domains (please see references [r.1, r.2, r.3, r.4, r.5, r.6] provided below) It is more correct to call this work as a sim-to-sim or transfer learning approach. - The experimental results are conducted on limited domains only including several MuJoCo environments and Mintaur. What would be the performance of the propose approach if high dimensional observation (such as images) is considered? -In the experiment of Fig. 1(b), why is the curve of GAT cut at around 25 in Time? What would be the result of GAT otherwise? -In the experiment of Fig. 3, why is the performance of GARAT is sometimes more that upper bound scaled reward of 1 (the rewards are scaled such that \pi_{real} achieves 1) ? ~~~~Post Rebuttal Comments~~~~~ My main concern about this paper is that the technical novelty is not significant and the experimental evaluations and comparisons, whether sim-to-real or sim-to-sim, are not sufficient to demonstrate the effectiveness and the weaknesses of the proposed approach or backup the claim the the proposed approach can “be successfully adapted to sim-to-real problem.” . I also share the concerns of the other reviewers that more exhaustive experiments are required and even for sim2sim experiments different simulation environments should be considered. Unfortunately, these concern is not well addressed in the rebuttal. Also, my other question about high dimensional observation is not addressed. Conditioned on commitment from the authors that they modify the paper from “sim-to-real” to “sim-to-sim” within the current manuscript and the commitment and to add the missed references, I update my rating.

Correctness: I did not notice any explicit error. For comments and questions about method and experiments please see other sections.

Clarity: -The presentation of the paper can be improved. I found the paper rather hard to follow although most of the sections were re-explanation of past works (such as sec. 2.1, sec. 2.2, sec 2.3, and parts of sec. 4). I’d suggest, re-organizing the paper such that the main contributions be better highlighted and re-explanation of past work be moved to appendix to help the reader better distinguish what is the paper contribution and novelty and what is the recap of the past known methods. - Fig. 2 is not much informative, I’d suggest that space be used to add some of the other experimental results from the appendix.

Relation to Prior Work: - While the main topic of the paper is explained to be sim-to-real, some successful past work on sim-to-real are not mentioned. Experimental evaluations also misses comparison with some of successful past works, such as domain randomization[32,39]. To name a few of miss citations, please check the references [r.1, r.2, r.3, r.4, r.5, r.6] listed below. Adding citation to [r.1, r.2, r.3, r.4, r.5, r.6] is strongly recommended in any version of the manuscript. [r.1]. Stephen James, Andrew J Davison, and Edward Johns. Transferring end-to-end visuomotor control from simulation to real world for a multi-stage task. Conference on Robot Learning, 2017. [r.2]. Fereshteh Sadeghi, Alexander Toshev, Eric Jang, and Sergey Levine. Sim2real viewpoint invariant visual servoing by recurrent control. In IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2018. [r.3]. Jan Matas, Stephen James, and Andrew J Davison. Sim-to-Real reinforcement learning for deformable object manipulation. Conference on Robot Learning, 2018. [r.4]. Konstantinos Bousmalis, Alex Irpan, Paul Wohlhart, Yunfei Bai, Matthew Kelcey, Mrinal Kalakrishnan, Laura Downs, Julian Ibarz, Peter Pastor, Kurt Konolige, Sergey Levine, and Vincent Vanhoucke. Using Simulation and Domain Adaptation to Improve Efficiency of Deep Robotic Grasping. IEEE Intl. Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2018. [r.5]. Stephen James , Paul Wohlhart , Mrinal Kalakrishnan , Dmitry Kalashnikov , Alex Irpan , Julian Ibarz , Sergey Levine , Raia Hadsell , Konstantinos Bousmalis, Sim-to-Real via Sim-to-Sim: Data-efficient Robotic Grasping via Randomized-to-Canonical Adaptation Networks, CVPR, 2019. [r.6]. Stephen James, Michael Bloesch, and Andrew J Davison. Task-embedded control networks for few-shot imitation learning. Conference on Robot Learning, 2018.

Reproducibility: Yes

Additional Feedback:


Review 3

Summary and Contributions: Post rebuttal I would like to thank the authors for their comprehensive response. I agree that the proposed (sim2sim) method is valuable and can be eventually used for sim2real. However, I think the current paper should be about "sim2sim transfer" or "adaptation to changes in dynamics" without demonstrating sim2real results; therefore, the title of "Towards Sim-to-Real Transfer: ..." is still an overclaim. Moreover, extensive experiments on environments with dynamics changes in many properties are needed to strengthen the claims. I will stick to a weak accept here. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- The paper proposes to formulate the problem of grounded action transformation, which learns to transform a policy to match the dynamics of the target environment for sim-to-real transfer, as imitation learning from observation (IfO). This grounded action transformation can be done by constructing a new MDP with a new state space with the joint state and action space of the original MDP. Then, an expert trajectory in the original MDP corresponds to a sequence of states in the target MDP, which can be used for IfO. With IfO formulation, the proposed method learns the action transformation using IfO techniques. The empirical results demonstrate that the grounded action transformation using IfO adapts a policy to the changes in dynamics only with a few thousands of real-world interactions.

Strengths: - The paper poses the grounded action transform as imitation from observation, which is novel and opens up the possibility of using IfO algorithms for transfer learning. - The experimental results verify efficient adaptation of a policy from one environment to another environment with different dynamics. - The theoretical derivation of IfO formulation is clear and correct. - The implementation of the proposed method is simple and straightforward.

Weaknesses: - The empirical evaluation is not enough to claim the applicability of the proposed method to general sim-to-real transfer. Since the proposed method is built upon grounded action transformation, it does not consider discrepancy in the state space and noise, which is a critical issue in sim-to-real transfer. The real-world experiments or more exhaustive experiments in simulation are required. - Experiments have conducted mostly on locomotion benchmarks. To support the claim of sim-to-real transfer under a general setup, it would be necessary to demonstrate results on robotic manipulation tasks, such as openai gym robotics environments and robosuite environment. - As can be seen in the Figure 1(b), the error between GARAT and "real" exists in a simple environment. How can RL reduce the gap present in the action transformation?

Correctness: The proposed method and experiments are correct.

Clarity: The paper is generally clear and well written.

Relation to Prior Work: The paper clearly discusses difference between the proposed method and prior work.

Reproducibility: Yes

Additional Feedback: - The paper includes most details to reproduce the results. - Figure 1(b): How many "real" trajectories and policy updates are used to get the plot? - Which variant of IfO algorithms is used for the main results? - What is the rationale behind the choice of TRPO and PPO for training agent policy and action transformation policy, respectively? - Some curves in Figure 3 show decreasing performance as trained with more samples which is counter-intuitive. - As an ablation, fine-tuning the agent policy (without action transformation) can demonstrate the efficacy of grounded action transformation. Minor comments: - L104: can also been seen as -> can also be seen as - Figure 1(b): The GAT curve stops in the middle.


Review 4

Summary and Contributions: The paper proposes a sim2"real" transfer framework. The paper extends Grounded Action Transformation into Generative Adversarial into Generative Adversarial Reinforced Action Transformation by using adversarial imitation techniques. They then demonstrate the GARAT is better then GAT at transforming.

Strengths: They do show that they can transfer policies between two simulators (OpenAI Gym and Mujoco) and show that they can transfer between varying transition dynamics within the same task. This paper shows that it can adapt to different parameters in the simulation environment effectively. For instance, parameters such as gravity, mass, and friction can be varied and GARAT can adapt to these new parameters much quicker than GAT. This paper would benefit the community for those that currently use GAT. This paper demonstrates contributions to the problem of sim-to-sim performance transfer and ways to make agents generalize to various parameters in simulation. The method in the paper is novel and relevant for the community for sim-to-sim transfer.

Weaknesses: The biggest weakness of this paper is that it claims to do sim-to-real tasks, but in reality the tasks are sim-to-sim. The paper does not demonstrate that transferring between two physics simulators which approximate physics in a similar albeit different way, is not a kin to transferring to a real world policy. GARAT's performance remains untested on the actual problem of sim-to-real transfer. This paper demonstrates that GARAT may perform better than GAT in sim-to-sim. Even the word "real" is quoted in experiments listed in the end of the paper, but not in the title or abstract or introduction. The paper has demonstrated sim-sim Even for sim2sim experiments, I would like to see more than one between entirely different simulators. This is a different type of generalization that simply adjusting to different parameters within the same simulation. These parameters that need to be adjusted to may even vary over time due to declining battery levels in the real world. Due to these differences between sim-to-sim transfer and deploying these simulation learned policies on actual robots, this paper does not actually demonstrate sim-to-reality transfer. Rather, it only demonstrates sim-to-sim transfer.

Correctness: They are reasonable correct for sim2sim experiments, however, they are missing any "real" experiments for reality. The methods therefore do not back the claims of sim-to-real transfer, but rather only sim-to-"real" transfer.

Clarity: Reasonably so.

Relation to Prior Work: Yes

Reproducibility: Yes

Additional Feedback: This paper should either be reframed as a sim-to-sim paper or have at least one experiment in reality to demonstrate that it can actually transfer from sim-to-reality. The current global pandemic may make real world robotics experiments difficult, but that should affect both the claims and the methods of the paper, not just the methods. Update: Given the author's rebuttal and promised changes in the final version, I have decided to increase my score accordingly.