No Plan but Everything Under Control: Robustly Solving Sequential Tasks with Dynamically Composed Gradient Descent

Abstract: We introduce a novel gradient-based approach for solving sequential tasks by dynamically adjusting the underlying myopic potential field in response to feedback and the world's regularities. This adjustment implicitly considers subgoals encoded in these regularities, enabling the solution of long sequential tasks, as demonstrated by solving the traditional planning domain of Blocks World - without any planning. Unlike conventional planning methods, our feedback-driven approach adapts to uncertain and dynamic environments, as demonstrated by one hundred real-world trials involving drawer manipulation. These experiments highlight the robustness of our method compared to planning and show how interactive perception and error recovery naturally emerge from gradient descent without explicitly implementing them. This offers a computationally efficient alternative to planning for a variety of sequential tasks, while aligning with observations on biological problem-solving strategies.