Generative pre-trained models have demonstrated remarkable effectiveness in language and vision domains by learning useful representations. In this paper, we extend the scope of this effectiveness by showing that visual robot manipulation can significantly benefit from large-scale video generative pre-training. We introduce GR-1, a straightforward GPT-style model designed for multi-task language-conditioned visual robot manipulation. GR-1 takes as inputs a language instruction, a sequence of observation images, and a sequence of robot states. It predicts robot actions as well as future images in an end-to-end manner. Thanks to a flexible design, GR-1 can be seamlessly finetuned on robot data after pre-trained on a large-scale video dataset. We perform extensive experiments on the challenging CALVIN benchmark and a real robot. On CALVIN benchmark, our method outperforms state-of-the-art baseline methods and improves the success rate from 88.9% to 94.9%. When trained on 10% data of the full dataset, GR-1 achieves a success rate of 77.8%, while the best baseline method achieves 66.8%. In the zero-shot generalization setting, GR-1 improves the success rate from 53.3% to 85.4%. In real robot experiments, GR-1 also outperforms the comparing baseline method. We provide inaugural evidence that a unified GPT-style transformer, augmented with large-scale video generative pre-training, exhibits remarkable generalization to multi-task visual robot manipulation. Code will be made available.
Unleashing Large-Scale Video Generative Pre-training for Visual Robot Manipulation
Hongtao Wu Ya Jing Chilam Cheang Guangzeng Chen Jiafeng Xu Xinghang Li Minghuan Liu Hang Li Tao Kong