Beyond Domain Randomization: Event-Inspired Perception for Visually Robust Adversarial Imitation from Videos
Imitation from videos often fails when expert demonstrations and learner environments exhibit domain shifts, such as discrepancies in lighting, color, or texture. While visual randomization partially addresses this problem by augmenting training data, it remains computationally intensive and inherently reactive, struggling with unseen scenarios. We propose a different approach: instead of randomizing appearances, we eliminate their influence entirely by rethinking the sensory representation itself. Inspired by biological vision systems that prioritize temporal transients (e.g., retinal ganglion cells) and by recent sensor advancements, we introduce event-inspired perception for visually robust imitation. Our method converts standard RGB videos into a sparse, event-based representation that encodes temporal intensity gradients, discarding static appearance features. This biologically grounded approach disentangles motion dynamics from visual style, enabling robust visual imitation from observations even in the presence of visual mismatches between expert and agent environments. By training policies on event streams, we achieve invariance to appearance-based distractors without requiring computationally expensive and environment-specific data augmentation techniques. Experiments across the DeepMind Control Suite and the Adroit platform for dynamic dexterous manipulation show the efficacy of our method. Our code is publicly available at Eb-LAIfO.
Code (1)
Tasks
Data AugmentationSimilar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Pre-training of Deep RL Agents for Improved Learning under Domain Randomization
Visual domain randomization in simulated environments is a widely used method to transfer policies trained in simulation to real robots. However, domain randomization and augmentation hamper the training of a policy. As …
reinforcement-learningReinforcement Learning (RL)FSDR: Frequency Space Domain Randomization for Domain Generalization
Domain generalization aims to learn a generalizable model from a known source domain for various unknown target domains. It has been studied widely by domain randomization that transfers source images to different styles…
Domain AdaptationDomain GeneralizationBest of Sim and Real: Decoupled Visuomotor Manipulation via Learning Control in Simulation and Perception in Real
Sim-to-real transfer remains a fundamental challenge in robot manipulation due to the entanglement of perception and control in end-to-end learning. We present a decoupled framework that learns each component where it is…
Robot ManipulationDomain Randomization for Active Pose Estimation
Accurate state estimation is a fundamental component of robotic control. In robotic manipulation tasks, as is our focus in this work, state estimation is essential for identifying the positions of objects in the scene, f…
Pose EstimationState EstimationBiologically Inspired Event-Based Perception and Sample-Efficient Learning for High-Speed Table Tennis Robots
Perception and decision-making in high-speed dynamic scenarios remain challenging for current robots. In contrast, humans and animals can rapidly perceive and make decisions in such environments. Taking table tennis as a…