Generalizable Imitation Learning Through Pre-Trained Representations

In this paper we leverage self-supervised vision transformer models and their emergent semantic abilities to improve the generalization abilities of imitation learning policies. We introduce BC-ViT, an imitation learning algorithm that leverages rich DINO pre-trained Visual Transformer (ViT) patch-level embeddings to obtain better generalization when learning through demonstrations. Our learner sees the world by clustering appearance features into semantic concepts, forming stable keypoints that generalize across a wide range of appearance variations and object types. We show that this representation enables generalized behaviour by evaluating imitation learning across a diverse dataset of object manipulation tasks. Our method, data and evaluation approach are made available to facilitate further study of generalization in Imitation Learners.