Glen Berseth

I am an assistant professor at the University de Montreal and Mila. My research explores how to use deep learning and reinforcement learning to develop generalist robots.

Dinesh Jayaraman Articles


Morphology-Agnostic Visual Robotic Control

Brian Yang, Dinesh Jayaraman, Glen Berseth, Alexei Efros, Sergey Levine

Existing approaches for visuomotor robotic control typically require characterizing the robot in advance by calibrating the camera or performing system identification. We propose MAVRIC, an approach that works with minimal prior knowledge of the robot's morphology, and requires only a camera view containing the robot and its environment and an unknown control interface. MAVRIC revolves around a mutual information-based method for self-recognition, which discovers visual "control points" on the robot body within a few seconds of exploratory interaction, and these control points in turn are then used for visual servoing. MAVRIC can control robots with imprecise actuation, no proprioceptive feedback, unknown morphologies including novel tools, unknown camera poses, and even unsteady handheld cameras. We demonstrate our method on visually-guided 3D point reaching, trajectory following, and robot-to-robot imitation.


SMiRL: Surprise Minimizing RL in Unstable Environments

Glen Berseth, Daniel Geng, Coline Devin, Nicholas Rhinehart, Chelsea Finn, Dinesh Jayaraman, Sergey Levine

All living organisms carve out environmental niches within which they can maintain relative predictability amidst the ever-increasing entropy around them [schneider1994, friston2009]. Humans, for example, go to great lengths to shield themselves from surprise --- we band together in millions to build cities with homes, supplying water, food, gas, and electricity to control the deterioration of our bodies and living spaces amidst heat and cold, wind and storm. The need to discover and maintain such surprise-free equilibria has driven great resourcefulness and skill in organisms across very diverse natural habitats. Motivated by this, we ask: could the motive of preserving order amidst chaos guide the automatic acquisition of useful behaviors in artificial agents?