PLEX: Making the Most of the Available Data for Robotic Manipulation Pretraining

Abstract: A rich representation is key to general robotic manipulation, but existing approaches to representation learning require large amounts of multimodal demonstrations. In this work we propose PLEX, a transformer-based architecture that learns from a small amount of task-agnostic visuomotor trajectories and a much larger amount of task-conditioned object manipulation videos -- a type of data available in quantity. PLEX uses visuomotor trajectories to induce a latent feature space and to learn task-agnostic manipulation routines, while diverse video-only demonstrations teach PLEX how to plan in the induced latent feature space for a wide variety of tasks. Experiments showcase PLEX's generalization on Meta-World and SOTA performance in challenging Robosuite environments. In particular, using relative positional encoding in PLEX's transformers greatly helps in low-data regimes of learning from human-collected demonstrations. The paper's accompanying code and data are available at https://microsoft.github.io/PLEX.