{"abstract":[{"lang":"eng","text":"World models learn behaviors in a latent imagination space to enhance the sample-efficiency of deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms. While learning world models for high-dimensional observations (e.g., pixel inputs) has become practicable on standard RL benchmarks and some games, their effectiveness in real-world robotics applications has not been explored. In this paper, we investigate how such agents generalize to real-world autonomous vehicle control tasks, where advanced model-free deep RL algorithms fail. In particular, we set up a series of time-lap tasks for an F1TENTH racing robot, equipped with a high-dimensional LiDAR sensor, on a set of test tracks with a gradual increase in their complexity. In this continuous-control setting, we show that model-based agents capable of learning in imagination substantially outperform model-free agents with respect to performance, sample efficiency, successful task completion, and generalization. Moreover, we show that the generalization ability of model-based agents strongly depends on the choice of their observation model. We provide extensive empirical evidence for the effectiveness of world models provided with long enough memory horizons in sim2real tasks."}],"publication":"2022 International Conference on Robotics and Automation","day":"12","quality_controlled":"1","scopus_import":"1","date_created":"2022-09-04T22:02:02Z","oa":1,"_id":"12010","title":"Latent imagination facilitates zero-shot transfer in autonomous racing","article_processing_charge":"No","language":[{"iso":"eng"}],"date_published":"2022-07-12T00:00:00Z","publication_identifier":{"issn":["1050-4729"],"isbn":["9781728196817"]},"author":[{"last_name":"Brunnbauer","first_name":"Axel","full_name":"Brunnbauer, Axel"},{"full_name":"Berducci, Luigi","first_name":"Luigi","last_name":"Berducci"},{"first_name":"Andreas","last_name":"Brandstatter","full_name":"Brandstatter, Andreas"},{"full_name":"Lechner, Mathias","id":"3DC22916-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87","last_name":"Lechner","first_name":"Mathias"},{"first_name":"Ramin","last_name":"Hasani","full_name":"Hasani, Ramin"},{"first_name":"Daniela","last_name":"Rus","full_name":"Rus, Daniela"},{"first_name":"Radu","last_name":"Grosu","full_name":"Grosu, Radu"}],"status":"public","ec_funded":1,"publisher":"IEEE","user_id":"2DF688A6-F248-11E8-B48F-1D18A9856A87","date_updated":"2022-09-05T08:46:12Z","external_id":{"arxiv":["2103.04909"]},"page":"7513-7520","project":[{"_id":"62781420-2b32-11ec-9570-8d9b63373d4d","call_identifier":"H2020","grant_number":"101020093","name":"Vigilant Algorithmic Monitoring of Software"},{"grant_number":"Z211","_id":"25F42A32-B435-11E9-9278-68D0E5697425","call_identifier":"FWF","name":"The Wittgenstein Prize"}],"main_file_link":[{"url":"https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2103.04909","open_access":"1"}],"oa_version":"Preprint","acknowledgement":"L.B. was supported by the Doctoral College Resilient Embedded Systems. M.L. was supported in part by the ERC2020-AdG 101020093 and the Austrian Science Fund (FWF) under grant Z211-N23 (Wittgenstein Award). R.H. and D.R. were supported by The Boeing Company and the Office of Naval Research (ONR) Grant N00014-18-1-2830. R.G. was partially supported by the Horizon-2020 ECSEL Project grant No. 783163 (iDev40) and A.B. by FFG Project ADEX.","type":"conference","month":"07","publication_status":"published","department":[{"_id":"ToHe"}],"citation":{"mla":"Brunnbauer, Axel, et al. “Latent Imagination Facilitates Zero-Shot Transfer in Autonomous Racing.” <i>2022 International Conference on Robotics and Automation</i>, IEEE, 2022, pp. 7513–20, doi:<a href=\"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICRA46639.2022.9811650\">10.1109/ICRA46639.2022.9811650</a>.","apa":"Brunnbauer, A., Berducci, L., Brandstatter, A., Lechner, M., Hasani, R., Rus, D., &#38; Grosu, R. (2022). Latent imagination facilitates zero-shot transfer in autonomous racing. In <i>2022 International Conference on Robotics and Automation</i> (pp. 7513–7520). Philadelphia, PA, United States: IEEE. <a href=\"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICRA46639.2022.9811650\">https://doi.org/10.1109/ICRA46639.2022.9811650</a>","chicago":"Brunnbauer, Axel, Luigi Berducci, Andreas Brandstatter, Mathias Lechner, Ramin Hasani, Daniela Rus, and Radu Grosu. “Latent Imagination Facilitates Zero-Shot Transfer in Autonomous Racing.” In <i>2022 International Conference on Robotics and Automation</i>, 7513–20. IEEE, 2022. <a href=\"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICRA46639.2022.9811650\">https://doi.org/10.1109/ICRA46639.2022.9811650</a>.","ama":"Brunnbauer A, Berducci L, Brandstatter A, et al. Latent imagination facilitates zero-shot transfer in autonomous racing. In: <i>2022 International Conference on Robotics and Automation</i>. IEEE; 2022:7513-7520. doi:<a href=\"https://doi.org/10.1109/ICRA46639.2022.9811650\">10.1109/ICRA46639.2022.9811650</a>","short":"A. Brunnbauer, L. Berducci, A. Brandstatter, M. Lechner, R. Hasani, D. Rus, R. Grosu, in:, 2022 International Conference on Robotics and Automation, IEEE, 2022, pp. 7513–7520.","ieee":"A. Brunnbauer <i>et al.</i>, “Latent imagination facilitates zero-shot transfer in autonomous racing,” in <i>2022 International Conference on Robotics and Automation</i>, Philadelphia, PA, United States, 2022, pp. 7513–7520.","ista":"Brunnbauer A, Berducci L, Brandstatter A, Lechner M, Hasani R, Rus D, Grosu R. 2022. Latent imagination facilitates zero-shot transfer in autonomous racing. 2022 International Conference on Robotics and Automation. ICRA: International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 7513–7520."},"year":"2022","doi":"10.1109/ICRA46639.2022.9811650","conference":{"name":"ICRA: International Conference on Robotics and Automation","start_date":"2022-05-23","location":"Philadelphia, PA, United States","end_date":"2022-05-27"}}