Paper ID: 2405.14005

Neural Scaling Laws for Embodied AI

Sebastian Sartor, Neil Thompson

Scaling laws have driven remarkable progress across machine learning domains like language modeling and computer vision. However, the exploration of scaling laws in embodied AI and robotics has been limited, despite the rapidly increasing usage of machine learning in this field. This paper presents the first study to quantify scaling laws for Robot Foundation Models (RFMs) and the use of LLMs in robotics tasks. Through a meta-analysis spanning 198 research papers, we analyze how key factors like compute, model size, and training data quantity impact model performance across various robotic tasks. Our findings confirm that scaling laws apply to both RFMs and LLMs in robotics, with performance consistently improving as resources increase. The power law coefficients for RFMs closely match those of LLMs in robotics, resembling those found in computer vision and outperforming those for LLMs in the language domain. We also note that these coefficients vary with task complexity, with familiar tasks scaling more efficiently than unfamiliar ones, emphasizing the need for large and diverse datasets. Furthermore, we highlight the absence of standardized benchmarks in embodied AI. Most studies indicate diminishing returns, suggesting that significant resources are necessary to achieve high performance, posing challenges due to data and computational limitations. Finally, as models scale, we observe the emergence of new capabilities, particularly related to data and model size.

Submitted: May 22, 2024