Canalizing Babbling: Development-Inspired Goal Sampling for Visuo-Motor Learning

This paper introduces Canalizing Babbling, a development-inspired approach for data collection in sensorimotor learning. The method draws inspiration from reflexes in newborns, which are here hypothesized to scaffold the acquisition of coordinated sensorimotor actions by facilitating the early experience of contingent sensory and motor events. In the presented approach, a visual saliency system selects targets in 3D space, guiding an inverse dynamics controller to generate coordinated movements across multiple body parts of the MIMo simulated agent. Statistical analysis shows that the visual and motor observations collected using Canalizing Babbling exhibit a higher degree of coordination compared to those obtained through non-curated strategies. These findings suggest that biologically inspired exploration techniques like Canalizing Babbling can lower sample complexity, potentially accelerate downstream learning in embodied agents, and provide a framework to further investigate the role of reflexes in developmental learning.