DecisionNCE: Embodied Multimodal Representations via Implicit Preference Learning
Published in arXiv., 2024
Recommended citation: Li, J., Zheng, J., Zheng, Y., Mao, L., Hu, X., Cheng, S., Niu, H., Liu, J., Liu, Y., Liu, J., Zhang, Y. Q., Zhan, X. DecisionNCE: Embodied Multimodal Representations via Implicit Preference Learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.18137.
Abstract
Multimodal pretraining has emerged as an effective strategy for the trinity of goals of representation learning in autonomous robots: 1) extracting both local and global task progression information; 2) enforcing temporal consistency of visual representation; 3) capturing trajectory-level language grounding. Most existing methods approach these via separate objectives, which often reach sub-optimal solutions. In this paper, we propose a universal unified objective that can simultaneously extract meaningful task progression information from image sequences and seamlessly align them with language instructions. We discover that via implicit preferences, where a visual trajectory inherently aligns better with its corresponding language instruction than mismatched pairs, the popular Bradley-Terry model can transform into representation learning through proper reward reparameterizations. The resulted framework, DecisionNCE, mirrors an InfoNCE-style objective but is distinctively tailored for decision-making tasks, providing an embodied representation learning framework that elegantly extracts both local and global task progression features, with temporal consistency enforced through implicit time contrastive learning, while ensuring trajectory-level instruction grounding via multimodal joint encoding. Evaluation on both simulated and real robots demonstrates that DecisionNCE effectively facilitates diverse downstream policy learning tasks, offering a versatile solution for unified representation and reward learning.