ElevateHead: Decide Once, Then Commit: When the Action Head Matters for Multimodal Imitation

Overview & Synopsis

Robots that learn from people often see several valid ways to do the same task: pass an obstacle on the left or on the right, open the microwave or move the kettle first. A policy that re-decides at every step can waver between these ways mid-task. We ask when the action head (the part of a policy that turns the state into actions) matters, and how it should make this choice. On a controlled task, heads that sample one way succeed far more often than a head that averages the ways when the demonstrations contain several ways and the state gives no hint which to take (+0.72 success with two ways); this trend was not reproduced on the other tasks we ran. We then present ElevateHead, a head that decides once at a learned decision point, commits to that choice for the episode, and exposes the choice as an input a user can set. We designed it by diagnosis: each version was frozen and tested on tasks it had not seen, and the next version changed only what a measured failure pointed to; predictions were registered before each run. The first four versions each fell below BeT on at least one held-out task. The fifth completed all four subtasks of the held-out Franka Kitchen task in 45.2% of episodes against 29.3% for BeT, the strongest baseline across our tasks (+0.160, 95% CI [+0.129, +0.188]); when a mode was forced, the first completed subtask matched it in 95% of successful episodes. Diagnosis also located where commitment breaks: varied start positions (repaired on the controlled task: commitment 0.22 to 0.81, success 0.74 to 0.91) and varied object placement (partly repaired: in an exploratory variant, commitment 0.03 to 0.59 on aligning with no detectable change in success). On held-out block stacking, version 4 was comparable to BeT and did not exceed it. A real-robot test with predictions fixed in advance is planned for a follow-up version of this paper.