Toyota announces large behavior models
Toyota Research Institute reported that it had taught robots more than 60 difficult, dexterous skills with a method based on Diffusion Policy, and named the direction large behavior models, by analogy with large language models.
Why it matters
Here an industrial laboratory, rather than a university group, put its name to the claim that a robot’s skills would come from one trained model rather than from per-task engineering, and gave a skill count for it. The term itself stuck from this point.
The skills include pouring liquids, using tools and manipulating deformable objects. A behaviour is learned from a teacher’s haptic demonstrations together with a language description of the goal, after which a diffusion policy absorbs what was shown; a new behaviour can be put into service from dozens of demonstrations. Because the skills work directly from camera images and tactile sensing, using only learned representations, they cope with tasks that were traditionally very hard: deformable objects, cloth and liquids. The figure of 60 is TRI’s own count in a press release: no per-skill success rates are given there and there is no independent check, so the confidence on this record is medium.