A Generalist Dynamics Model for Control

Abstract

We investigate the use of transformer sequence models as dynamics models (TDMs) for control. We find that TDMs exhibit strong generalization capabilities to unseen environments, both in a few-shot setting, where a generalist TDM is fine-tuned with small amounts of data from the target environment, and in a zero-shot setting, where a generalist TDM is applied to an unseen environment without any further training. Here, we demonstrate that generalizing system dynamics can work much better than generalizing optimal behavior directly as a policy. Additional results show that TDMs also perform well in a single-environment learning setting when compared to a number of baseline models. These properties make TDMs a promising ingredient for a foundation model of control.