Dynamics as Prompts: In-Context Learning for Sim-to-Real System Identifications

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel in-context learning method that dynamically adjusts simulation parameters based on past interactions, significantly improving sim-to-real transfer accuracy in robotics tasks without gradient updates.

Contribution

The work presents a new online, in-context learning approach for sim-to-real system identification that outperforms traditional methods in accuracy and efficiency.

Findings

80% improvement in environment parameter estimation for object scooping

70% success rate in sim-to-real transfer across multiple objects

Significant outperformance over baselines in simulation evaluations

Abstract

Sim-to-real transfer remains a significant challenge in robotics due to the discrepancies between simulated and real-world dynamics. Traditional methods like Domain Randomization often fail to capture fine-grained dynamics, limiting their effectiveness for precise control tasks. In this work, we propose a novel approach that dynamically adjusts simulation environment parameters online using in-context learning. By leveraging past interaction histories as context, our method adapts the simulation environment dynamics to real-world dynamics without requiring gradient updates, resulting in faster and more accurate alignment between simulated and real-world performance. We validate our approach across two tasks: object scooping and table air hockey. In the sim-to-sim evaluations, our method significantly outperforms the baselines on environment parameter estimation by 80% and 42% in the object scooping and table air hockey setups, respectively. Furthermore, our method achieves at least 70% success rate in sim-to-real transfer on object scooping across three different objects. By incorporating historical interaction data, our approach delivers efficient and smooth system identification, advancing the deployment of robots in dynamic real-world scenarios. Demos are available on our project page: https://sim2real-capture.github.io/