Active Inference for Robotic Manipulation
Robotic manipulation stands as a largely unsolved problem despite significant advances in robotics and machine learning in the last decades. One of the central challenges of manipulation is partial observability, as the agent usually does not know all physical properties of the environment and the objects it is manipulating in advance. A recently emerging theory that deals with partial observability in an explicit manner is Active Inference. It does so by driving the agent to act in a way that is not only goal-directed but also informative about the environment. In this work, we apply Active Inference to a hard-to-explore simulated robotic manipulation tasks, in which the agent has to balance a ball into a target zone. Since the reward of this task is sparse, in order to explore this environment, the agent has to learn to balance the ball without any extrinsic feedback, purely driven by its own curiosity. We show that the information-seeking behavior induced by Active Inference allows the agent to explore these challenging, sparse environments systematically. Finally, we conclude that using an information-seeking objective is beneficial in sparse environments and allows the agent to solve tasks in which methods that do not exhibit directed exploration fail.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Mobile Manipulation with Active Inference for Long-Horizon Rearrangement Tasks
Despite growing interest in active inference for robotic control, its application to complex, long-horizon tasks remains untested. We address this gap by introducing a fully hierarchical active inference architecture for…
Tactile Active Inference Reinforcement Learning for Efficient Robotic Manipulation Skill Acquisition
Robotic manipulation holds the potential to replace humans in the execution of tedious or dangerous tasks. However, control-based approaches are not suitable due to the difficulty of formally describing open-world manipu…
reinforcement-learningReinforcement LearningReinforcement Learning (RL)ReactVLA: Fast and Lightweight Reactive Robot Manipulation via Improved Mean Flow Action Generation
Diffusion-based Vision-Language-Action (VLA) policies have demonstrated strong capability in modeling expressive and multimodal action distributions. However, their reliance on iterative sampling introduces substantial i…
Robot ManipulationInteractive Imitation Learning for Dexterous Robotic Manipulation: Challenges and Perspectives -- A Survey
Dexterous manipulation is a crucial yet highly complex challenge in humanoid robotics, demanding precise, adaptable, and sample-efficient learning methods. As humanoid robots are usually designed to operate in human-cent…
Imitation LearningA General One-Shot Multimodal Active Perception Framework for Robotic Manipulation: Learning to Predict Optimal Viewpoint
Active perception in vision-based robotic manipulation aims to move the camera toward more informative observation viewpoints, thereby providing high-quality perceptual inputs for downstream tasks. Most existing active p…
Robotic Grasping