Imitating Shortest Paths in Simulation Enables Effective Navigation and
  Manipulation in the Real World
Kiana Ehsani Tanmay Gupta Rose Hendrix Jordi Salvador Luca Weihs Kuo-Hao Zeng Kunal Pratap Singh Yejin Kim Winson Han Alvaro Herrasti Ranjay Krishna Dustin Schwenk Eli VanderBilt Aniruddha Kembhavi
Reinforcement learning (RL) with dense rewards and imitation learning (IL)
with human-generated trajectories are the most widely used approaches for
training modern embodied agents. RL requires extensive reward shaping and
auxiliary losses and is often too slow and ineffective for long-horizon tasks.
While IL with human supervision is effective, collecting human trajectories at
scale is extremely expensive. In this work, we show that imitating
shortest-path planners in simulation produces agents that, given a language
instruction, can proficiently navigate, explore, and manipulate objects in both
simulation and in the real world using only RGB sensors (no depth map or GPS
coordinates). This surprising result is enabled by our end-to-end,
transformer-based, SPOC architecture, powerful visual encoders paired with
extensive image augmentation, and the dramatic scale and diversity of our
training data: millions of frames of shortest-path-expert trajectories
collected inside approximately 200,000 procedurally generated houses containing
40,000 unique 3D assets. Our models, data, training code, and newly proposed
10-task benchmarking suite CHORES will be open-sourced.