Structured Latent Variable Models for Articulated Object Interaction

In this paper, we investigate a scenario in which a robot learns a low-dimensional representation of a door given a video of the door opening or closing. This representation can be used to infer door-related parameters and predict the outcomes of interacting with the door. Current machine learning based approaches in the doors domain are based primarily on labelled datasets. However, the large quantity of available door data suggests the feasibility of a semisupervised approach based on pretraining. To exploit the hierarchical structure of the dataset where each door has multiple associated images, we pretrain with a structured latent variable model known as a neural statistician. The neural satsitician enforces separation between shared context-level variables (common across all images associated with the same door) and instance-level variables (unique to each individual image). We first demonstrate that the neural statistician is able to learn an embedding that enables reconstruction and sampling of realistic door images. Then, we evaluate the correspondence of the learned embeddings to human-interpretable parameters in a series of supervised inference tasks. It was found that a pretrained neural statistician encoder outperformed analogous context-free baselines when predicting door handedness, size, angle location, and configuration from door images. Finally, in a visual bandit door-opening task with a variety of door configuration, we found that neural statistician embeddings achieve lower regret than context-free baselines.