Prepare Before You Act: Learning From Humans to Rearrange Initial States

Abstract

Imitation learning (IL) has proven effective across a wide range of manipulation tasks. However, IL policies often struggle when faced with out-of-distribution observations; for instance, when the target object is in a previously unseen position or occluded by other objects. In these cases, extensive demonstrations are needed for current IL methods to reach robust and generalizable behaviors. But when humans are faced with these sorts of atypical initial states, we often rearrange the environment for more favorable task execution. For example, a person might rotate a coffee cup so that it is easier to grasp the handle, or push a box out of the way so they can directly grasp their target object. In this work we seek to equip robot learners with the same capability: enabling robots to prepare the environment before executing their given policy. We propose ReSET, an algorithm that takes initial states -- which are outside the policy's distribution -- and autonomously modifies object poses so that the restructured scene is similar to training data. Theoretically, we show that this two step process (rearranging the environment before rolling out the given policy) reduces the generalization gap. Practically, our ReSET algorithm combines action-agnostic human videos with task-agnostic teleoperation data to i) decide when to modify the scene, ii) predict what simplifying actions a human would take, and iii) map those predictions into robot action primitives. Comparisons with diffusion policies, VLAs, and other baselines show that using ReSET to prepare the environment enables more robust task execution with equal amounts of total training data. See videos at our project website: https://reset2025paper.github.io/