EMPIRIC: Experiment-Driven Learning of Residual World Models for Robot Planning

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Chinese explanation / 中文解读

中文解读待补充：本站会优先为 VLA、具身智能、人形机器人控制、机器人操作等高价值论文补充中文说明。

Original abstract

A robot should be able to learn through experiments how unfamiliar objects behave and interact, then plan with that knowledge. It need not start from scratch: physics engines supply knowledge of motion and contact, but can omit entire mechanisms, such as glue curing, water heating, or wind. We present EMPIRIC, an agent that learns a residual world model: a physics engine extended with code for the missing mechanisms. The learned programs can introduce new forces, constraints, and hidden state, and Bayesian inference estimates their parameters and states from noisy observations. The resulting model lets the agent predict the outcomes of actions, choose informative experiments, and revise its hypotheses when predictions fail. Across five simulated domains, EMPIRIC learns interpretable, reusable models, and solves more tasks with fewer environment interactions than all three baselines. On a physical robot, it learns wind forces and domino masses to solve a manipulation task. Website and code: https://yichao-liang.github.io/empiric

Links and sources

• Official / arXiv page
• PDF from original source

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