H-GAP: Humanoid Control with a Generalist Planner
Zhengyao Jiang Yingchen Xu Nolan Wagener Yicheng Luo Michael Janner Edward Grefenstette Tim Rocktäschel Yuandong Tian
Humanoid control is an important research challenge offering avenues for
integration into human-centric infrastructures and enabling physics-driven
humanoid animations. The daunting challenges in this field stem from the
difficulty of optimizing in high-dimensional action spaces and the instability
introduced by the bipedal morphology of humanoids. However, the extensive
collection of human motion-captured data and the derived datasets of humanoid
trajectories, such as MoCapAct, paves the way to tackle these challenges. In
this context, we present Humanoid Generalist Autoencoding Planner (H-GAP), a
state-action trajectory generative model trained on humanoid trajectories
derived from human motion-captured data, capable of adeptly handling downstream
control tasks with Model Predictive Control (MPC). For 56 degrees of freedom
humanoid, we empirically demonstrate that H-GAP learns to represent and
generate a wide range of motor behaviours. Further, without any learning from
online interactions, it can also flexibly transfer these behaviors to solve
novel downstream control tasks via planning. Notably, H-GAP excels established
MPC baselines that have access to the ground truth dynamics model, and is
superior or comparable to offline RL methods trained for individual tasks.
Finally, we do a series of empirical studies on the scaling properties of
H-GAP, showing the potential for performance gains via additional data but not
computing. Code and videos are available at
https://ycxuyingchen.github.io/hgap/.