Path signatures have been proposed as a powerful representation of paths that efficiently captures the path’s analytic and geometric characteristics, having useful algebraic properties including fast concatenation of paths through tensor products. Signatures have recently been widely adopted in machine learning problems for time series analysis. In this work we establish connections between value functions typically used in optimal control and intriguing properties of path signatures.

Encouraged by the remarkable achievements of language and vision foundation models, developing generalist robotic agents through imitation learning, using large demonstration datasets, has become a prominent area of interest in robot learning. The efficacy of imitation learning is heavily reliant on the quantity and quality of the demonstration datasets. In this study, we aim to scale up demonstrations in a data-efficient way to facilitate the learning of generalist robotic agents.

Robotic assembly for high-mixture settings requires adaptivity to diverse parts and poses, which is an open challenge. Meanwhile, in other areas of robotics, large models and sim-to-real have led to tremendous progress.

Model-Free Reinforcement Learning (MFRL), leveraging the policy gradient theorem, has demonstrated considerable success in continuous control tasks. However, these approaches are plagued by high gradient variance due to zeroth-order gradient estimation, resulting in suboptimal policies. Conversely, First-Order Model-Based Reinforcement Learning~(FO-MBRL) methods employing differentiable simulation provide gradients with reduced variance but are susceptible to bias in scenarios involving stiff dynamics, such as physical contact.

For both humans and robots, the sense of touch, known as tactile sensing, is critical for performing contact-rich manipulation tasks. Three key challenges in robotic tactile sensing are 1) interpreting sensor signals, 2) predicting sensor signals in novel scenarios, and 3) learning sensor-based policies. For visuotactile sensors, interpretation has been facilitated by their close relationship with vision sensors (e.g., RGB cameras).