Universal Actions for Enhanced Embodied Foundation Models

TL;DR

UniAct introduces a universal action space for embodied foundation models, enabling better cross-robot generalization and adaptation by capturing shared behaviors across diverse robots, outperforming larger models in real-world tasks.

Contribution

The paper proposes UniAct, a novel framework that learns universal actions to unify heterogeneous robot control spaces, facilitating cross-domain data use and quick adaptation to new robots.

Findings

Outperforms 14X larger SOTA models in various tasks

Enables effective cross-embodiment control and adaptation

Demonstrates strong generalization across diverse robots

Abstract

Training on diverse, internet-scale data is a key factor in the success of recent large foundation models. Yet, using the same recipe for building embodied agents has faced noticeable difficulties. Despite the availability of many crowd-sourced embodied datasets, their action spaces often exhibit significant heterogeneity due to distinct physical embodiment and control interfaces for different robots, causing substantial challenges in developing embodied foundation models using cross-domain data. In this paper, we introduce UniAct, a new embodied foundation modeling framework operating in a Universal Action Space. Our learned universal actions capture the generic atomic behaviors across diverse robots by exploiting their shared structural features, and enable enhanced cross-domain data utilization and cross-embodiment generalizations by eliminating the notorious heterogeneity. The universal actions can be efficiently translated back to heterogeneous actionable commands by simply adding embodiment-specific details, from which fast adaptation to new robots becomes simple and straightforward. Our 0.5B instantiation of UniAct outperforms 14X larger SOTA embodied foundation models in extensive evaluations on various real-world and simulation robots, showcasing exceptional cross-embodiment control and adaptation capability, highlighting the crucial benefit of adopting universal actions. Project page: https://github.com/2toinf/UniAct