Learning from Mixed-Quality Deployment Experience for Robot Manipulation

Abstract

Robot policies deployed in real environments naturally accumulate mixed-quality experience, including successful executions, partial progress, and failures. Although these rollouts provide valuable information for further learning, directly incorporating them into imitation learning may reinforce undesirable behaviors, while offline reinforcement learning often suffers from unreliable value estimation under sparse rewards and limited data coverage. We consider a practical post-deployment setting where learning relies only on naturally accumulated autonomous rollouts, without additional human corrections or exploratory interaction. To effectively exploit such experience, we propose Predictive Action Chunk Learning (PACL). PACL first learns a predictive chunk-level critic that evaluates temporally extended action sequences and augments temporal difference learning with future latent prediction, providing richer supervision for long-horizon value estimation. The learned critic then converts chunk-level Q-values into discrete quality conditions, which guide a diffusion actor to learn jointly from these mixed-quality experiences without treating all behaviors as equivalent supervision. At inference, the actor generates multiple action chunks and the critic selects the highest valued candidate. Experiments across simulated and real-world robot manipulation tasks show that PACL consistently improves the pretrained policy and outperforms strong imitation learning and offline reinforcement learning baselines.