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arXiv2022

Correct Me if I am Wrong: Interactive Learning for Robotic Manipulation

Learning to solve complex manipulation tasks from visual observations is a dominant challenge for real-world robot learning. Although deep reinforcement learning algorithms have recently demonstrated impressive results in this context, they still require an impractical amount of time-consuming trial-and-error iterations. In this work, we consider the promising alternative paradigm of interactive learning in which a human teacher provides feedback to the policy during execution, as opposed to imitation learning where a pre-collected dataset of perfect demonstrations is used. Our proposed CEILing (Corrective and Evaluative Interactive Learning) framework combines both corrective and evaluative feedback from the teacher to train a stochastic policy in an asynchronous manner, and employs a dedicated mechanism to trade off human corrections with the robot's own experience. We present results obtained with our framework in extensive simulation and real-world experiments to demonstrate that CEILing can effectively solve complex robot manipulation tasks directly from raw images in less than one hour of real-world training.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2020

Grasp Proposal Networks: An End-to-End Solution for Visual Learning of Robotic Grasps

Learning robotic grasps from visual observations is a promising yet challenging task. Recent research shows its great potential by preparing and learning from large-scale synthetic datasets. For the popular, 6 degree-of-freedom (6-DOF) grasp setting of parallel-jaw gripper, most of existing methods take the strategy of heuristically sampling grasp candidates and then evaluating them using learned scoring functions. This strategy is limited in terms of the conflict between sampling efficiency and coverage of optimal grasps. To this end, we propose in this work a novel, end-to-end \emph{Grasp Proposal Network (GPNet)}, to predict a diverse set of 6-DOF grasps for an unseen object observed from a single and unknown camera view. GPNet builds on a key design of grasp proposal module that defines \emph{anchors of grasp centers} at discrete but regular 3D grid corners, which is flexible to support either more precise or more diverse grasp predictions. To test GPNet, we contribute a synthetic dataset of 6-DOF object grasps; evaluation is conducted using rule-based criteria, simulation test, and real test. Comparative results show the advantage of our methods over existing ones. Notably, GPNet gains better simulation results via the specified coverage, which helps achieve a ready translation in real test. We will make our dataset publicly available.

cs.CV↗
arXiv2024

ARCADE: Scalable Demonstration Collection and Generation via Augmented Reality for Imitation Learning

Robot Imitation Learning (IL) is a crucial technique in robot learning, where agents learn by mimicking human demonstrations. However, IL encounters scalability challenges stemming from both non-user-friendly demonstration collection methods and the extensive time required to amass a sufficient number of demonstrations for effective training. In response, we introduce the Augmented Reality for Collection and generAtion of DEmonstrations (ARCADE) framework, designed to scale up demonstration collection for robot manipulation tasks. Our framework combines two key capabilities: 1) it leverages AR to make demonstration collection as simple as users performing daily tasks using their hands, and 2) it enables the automatic generation of additional synthetic demonstrations from a single human-derived demonstration, significantly reducing user effort and time. We assess ARCADE's performance on a real Fetch robot across three robotics tasks: 3-Waypoints-Reach, Push, and Pick-And-Place. Using our framework, we were able to rapidly train a policy using vanilla Behavioral Cloning (BC), a classic IL algorithm, which excelled across these three tasks. We also deploy ARCADE on a real household task, Pouring-Water, achieving an 80% success rate.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

EgoGuide: Egocentric Guidance for Efficient Robot-Free Demonstration Collection and Learning

Robot learning from real-world demonstrations is currently constrained by data scaling. Universal Manipulation Interface (UMI) provides an efficient robot-free data collection interface, yet current UMI-style pipelines often collect redundant demonstrations and lack global scene context. To improve data efficiency, we present EgoGuide, a collection interface that records synchronized wrist and head/egocentric observations and couples them with online visual-geometric data quality guidance. We also introduce a Gated Egocentric Residual Policy for robust learning from a viewpoint-varying egocentric camera, allowing head/egocentric context to correct ambiguous local observations while preserving stable wrist-view control. Real-world experiments show that EgoGuide reduces the required number of data episodes and improves data efficiency. The residual policy further improves robustness under visual occlusion. Project Page: https://silicx.github.io/EgoGuide

cs.RO↗
arXiv2024

Subconscious Robotic Imitation Learning

Although robotic imitation learning (RIL) is promising for embodied intelligent robots, existing RIL approaches rely on computationally intensive multi-model trajectory predictions, resulting in slow execution and limited real-time responsiveness. Instead, human beings subconscious can constantly process and store vast amounts of information from their experiences, perceptions, and learning, allowing them to fulfill complex actions such as riding a bike, without consciously thinking about each. Inspired by this phenomenon in action neurology, we introduced subconscious robotic imitation learning (SRIL), wherein cognitive offloading was combined with historical action chunkings to reduce delays caused by model inferences, thereby accelerating task execution. This process was further enhanced by subconscious downsampling and pattern augmented learning policy wherein intent-rich information was addressed with quantized sampling techniques to improve manipulation efficiency. Experimental results demonstrated that execution speeds of the SRIL were 100\% to 200\% faster over SOTA policies for comprehensive dual-arm tasks, with consistently higher success rates.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Behavior-Aligned Action Tokenization for Robot Policy Learning

Autoregressive robot policies learn continuous control by predicting discrete action tokens from observations. Different tasks often share local motions, yet behavioral correspondence across demonstrations receives limited explicit supervision in existing tokenizers. Motions with different timing can therefore lack a shared representation despite following similar patterns. We propose Behavior-Aligned Action Tokenization (BAAT), which uses soft dynamic time warping (Soft-DTW) to select corresponding action chunks and aligns their quantized coordinates jointly with reconstruction. This objective encourages similar motions across tasks to occupy nearby quantized representations while retaining executable action detail. A history-conditioned diffusion decoder reconstructs continuous action chunks from these tokens, and a downstream autoregressive policy learns to predict them. We evaluate BAAT on selected tasks from three simulation benchmarks and two real robot tasks. BAAT achieves a mean simulation success rate of approximately 45.2%, exceeding OAT by approximately 7.2 percentage points. In the controlled LIBERO-All alignment ablation, policy success rises from 70.2% to 79.0% while trajectory replay success decreases. These results support behavioral correspondence as supervision for organizing shared motion structure in action tokenizers and improving downstream robot policy learning.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2025

Impact of Static Friction on Sim2Real in Robotic Reinforcement Learning

In robotic reinforcement learning, the Sim2Real gap remains a critical challenge. However, the impact of Static friction on Sim2Real has been underexplored. Conventional domain randomization methods typically exclude Static friction from their parameter space. In our robotic reinforcement learning task, such conventional domain randomization approaches resulted in significantly underperforming real-world models. To address this Sim2Real challenge, we employed Actuator Net as an alternative to conventional domain randomization. While this method enabled successful transfer to flat-ground locomotion, it failed on complex terrains like stairs. To further investigate physical parameters affecting Sim2Real in robotic joints, we developed a control-theoretic joint model and performed systematic parameter identification. Our analysis revealed unexpectedly high friction-torque ratios in our robotic joints. To mitigate its impact, we implemented Static friction-aware domain randomization for Sim2Real. Recognizing the increased training difficulty introduced by friction modeling, we proposed a simple and novel solution to reduce learning complexity. To validate this approach, we conducted comprehensive Sim2Sim and Sim2Real experiments comparing three methods: conventional domain randomization (without Static friction), Actuator Net, and our Static friction-aware domain randomization. All experiments utilized the Rapid Motor Adaptation (RMA) algorithm. Results demonstrated that our method achieved superior adaptive capabilities and overall performance.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

How to Instruct Your Robot: Dense Language Annotations Power Robot Policy Learning

Scaling robot policy learning is bottlenecked by the cost of collecting demonstrations, while language annotations for existing demonstrations are comparatively cheap. We study language density as a lever for extracting more signal from a fixed robot or egocentric-video corpus. We introduce DeMiAn (Dense Multi-aspect Annotation), a two-stage approach that first re-labels demonstration segments with VLM-generated annotations along four complementary aspects: physical motion, scene composition, arm pose, and reasoning. A learned instructor then maps a task description and initial scene snapshot to a task-appropriate annotation at deployment, running asynchronously so generation latency is hidden behind policy execution. Across over 1M robot manipulation clips and 50K EgoVerse human-egocentric videos, DeMiAn improves both a vision-language-action policy and a video-based world-action model without collecting new demonstrations. On RoboCasa, the instructor raises success by 5 points over a task-only baseline and comes within 3 points of a per-task oracle. No fixed annotation aspect dominates across tasks, showing that selecting the right dense language matters. DeMiAn also improves composite-task and out-of-distribution performance, and shifts the compute-performance frontier in both mid-training and post-training after accounting for annotation-generation FLOPs. These results position dense re-annotation as a practical scaling lever for robot policy learning.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2024

DiffClone: Enhanced Behaviour Cloning in Robotics with Diffusion-Driven Policy Learning

Robot learning tasks are extremely compute-intensive and hardware-specific. Thus the avenues of tackling these challenges, using a diverse dataset of offline demonstrations that can be used to train robot manipulation agents, is very appealing. The Train-Offline-Test-Online (TOTO) Benchmark provides a well-curated open-source dataset for offline training comprised mostly of expert data and also benchmark scores of the common offline-RL and behaviour cloning agents. In this paper, we introduce DiffClone, an offline algorithm of enhanced behaviour cloning agent with diffusion-based policy learning, and measured the efficacy of our method on real online physical robots at test time. This is also our official submission to the Train-Offline-Test-Online (TOTO) Benchmark Challenge organized at NeurIPS 2023. We experimented with both pre-trained visual representation and agent policies. In our experiments, we find that MOCO finetuned ResNet50 performs the best in comparison to other finetuned representations. Goal state conditioning and mapping to transitions resulted in a minute increase in the success rate and mean-reward. As for the agent policy, we developed DiffClone, a behaviour cloning agent improved using conditional diffusion.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2025

STRAP: Robot Sub-Trajectory Retrieval for Augmented Policy Learning

Robot learning is witnessing a significant increase in the size, diversity, and complexity of pre-collected datasets, mirroring trends in domains such as natural language processing and computer vision. Many robot learning methods treat such datasets as multi-task expert data and learn a multi-task, generalist policy by training broadly across them. Notably, while these generalist policies can improve the average performance across many tasks, the performance of generalist policies on any one task is often suboptimal due to negative transfer between partitions of the data, compared to task-specific specialist policies. In this work, we argue for the paradigm of training policies during deployment given the scenarios they encounter: rather than deploying pre-trained policies to unseen problems in a zero-shot manner, we non-parametrically retrieve and train models directly on relevant data at test time. Furthermore, we show that many robotics tasks share considerable amounts of low-level behaviors and that retrieval at the "sub"-trajectory granularity enables significantly improved data utilization, generalization, and robustness in adapting policies to novel problems. In contrast, existing full-trajectory retrieval methods tend to underutilize the data and miss out on shared cross-task content. This work proposes STRAP, a technique for leveraging pre-trained vision foundation models and dynamic time warping to retrieve sub-sequences of trajectories from large training corpora in a robust fashion. STRAP outperforms both prior retrieval algorithms and multi-task learning methods in simulated and real experiments, showing the ability to scale to much larger offline datasets in the real world as well as the ability to learn robust control policies with just a handful of real-world demonstrations.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2023

Torque-based Deep Reinforcement Learning for Task-and-Robot Agnostic Learning on Bipedal Robots Using Sim-to-Real Transfer

In this paper, we review the question of which action space is best suited for controlling a real biped robot in combination with Sim2Real training. Position control has been popular as it has been shown to be more sample efficient and intuitive to combine with other planning algorithms. However, for position control gain tuning is required to achieve the best possible policy performance. We show that instead, using a torque-based action space enables task-and-robot agnostic learning with less parameter tuning and mitigates the sim-to-reality gap by taking advantage of torque control's inherent compliance. Also, we accelerate the torque-based-policy training process by pre-training the policy to remain upright by compensating for gravity. The paper showcases the first successful sim-to-real transfer of a torque-based deep reinforcement learning policy on a real human-sized biped robot. The video is available at https://youtu.be/CR6pTS39VRE.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2024

Self Supervised Deep Learning for Robot Grasping

Learning Based Robot Grasping currently involves the use of labeled data. This approach has two major disadvantages. Firstly, labeling data for grasp points and angles is a strenuous process, so the dataset remains limited. Secondly, human labeling is prone to bias due to semantics. In order to solve these problems we propose a simpler self-supervised robotic setup, that will train a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). The robot will label and collect the data during the training process. The idea is to make a robot that is less costly, small and easily maintainable in a lab setup. The robot will be trained on a large data set for several hundred hours and then the trained Neural Network can be mapped onto a larger grasping robot.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Rethinking Demonstration Unlearning in Imitation Learning for Robotics

Imitation learning for robotics depends on human demonstrations, some of which people may later ask to remove. Retraining without them is the natural reference, but its cost grows with policy and dataset scale, motivating cheaper operators that edit a trained policy. Metrics inherited from machine unlearning, such as forgetting loss or a single membership attack, do not establish what an edit removed from a policy acting in closed loop. We therefore introduce a retrain-calibrated audit that reads demonstration unlearning along two axes: behavior, whether the edited policy acts like one retrained without the removed demonstrations, and evidence, whether an auditor can still detect it was trained on them. The behavior axis measures action divergence to that retrain at matched states, calibrated by a floor built from independent retrains, so a policy at the floor is as close to a retrain as retrains are to each other. The evidence axis applies a per-demonstration membership attack against a retrain null, reporting both its rank and its absolute member-loss level, since rank alone accepts operators that inflate member losses past the null. A conformal test then combines both axes into one hypothesis of joint retrain consistency, against a fleet of independent retrains large enough to reject at conventional significance. Across five preregistered conditions on three real-robot policy classes and two simulation suites, the axes dissociate in both directions on one checkpoint, as an edit may repair task behavior while leaving evidence unchanged, or reduce evidence while moving behavior away from retraining. On the ACT arm, a redirect edit restores blind-scored robot success to 18 of 20 trials.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2020

Never Stop Learning: The Effectiveness of Fine-Tuning in Robotic Reinforcement Learning

One of the great promises of robot learning systems is that they will be able to learn from their mistakes and continuously adapt to ever-changing environments. Despite this potential, most of the robot learning systems today are deployed as a fixed policy and they are not being adapted after their deployment. Can we efficiently adapt previously learned behaviors to new environments, objects and percepts in the real world? In this paper, we present a method and empirical evidence towards a robot learning framework that facilitates continuous adaption. In particular, we demonstrate how to adapt vision-based robotic manipulation policies to new variations by fine-tuning via off-policy reinforcement learning, including changes in background, object shape and appearance, lighting conditions, and robot morphology. Further, this adaptation uses less than 0.2% of the data necessary to learn the task from scratch. We find that our approach of adapting pre-trained policies leads to substantial performance gains over the course of fine-tuning, and that pre-training via RL is essential: training from scratch or adapting from supervised ImageNet features are both unsuccessful with such small amounts of data. We also find that these positive results hold in a limited continual learning setting, in which we repeatedly fine-tune a single lineage of policies using data from a succession of new tasks. Our empirical conclusions are consistently supported by experiments on simulated manipulation tasks, and by 52 unique fine-tuning experiments on a real robotic grasping system pre-trained on 580,000 grasps.

cs.LG↗
arXiv2026

DeVA: Decoupled Video-Action Model with physical guidance for robot policy learning

Generalizable robot manipulation requires policies that can anticipate how visual scenes evolve while executing language instructions. While recent Vision-Language-Action models benefit from large-scale pretraining, their predominantly static pretraining objectives provide limited supervision for physical dynamics and temporal causality, leaving control-relevant knowledge to be learned from downstream robot demonstrations. Video generative models offer a promising foundation by encoding rich spatiotemporal priors through future predictions. However, existing Video-Action Models either couple video and action prediction in a shared backbone, making policy adaptation harder to optimize, or under-utilize video information when guiding the action branch. In this work, we introduce DeVA, a Decoupled Video-Action model with specialized video and action experts, multi-level feature transfer, and physically salient guidance. DeVA transfers representations from multiple video layers to the action expert, enabling rich information exchange while making policy learning more tractable. It further supervises intermediate video features and the action stream with physically salient guidance (affordance/depth). Experiments on both simulation benchmarks and real-world deployment demonstrate strong performance with limited data, faster convergence than a unified architecture, and clear performance gains from physical guidance.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2015

Robotics for Learning

Teaching Robotics is about empowering students to create and configure robotics devices and program computers to nurture in students the skill sets necessary to play an active role in society. The robot in Figure 1 focuses on the design of scaffolds and physical assembly methods, coupled with a computer logic program to make that makes it move or behave in a very precise (remote controlled or autonomous) manner. This enables students to investigate, explore and refine the program to affect the robots. The Robotics approach takes into account the increasing popularity of Computer Science and the learning by doing (Schank, Berman, & Macpherson, 1999) approach to solve complex problems and use computers meaningfully in learning (Barron & Darling-Hammond, 2008; Jonassen, Howland, Marra, & Crismond, 2008). In Singapore, teachers and students in Woodlands Ring Secondary and Rulang Primary have incorporated robotics to varying extents into formal and informal curricula. In addition, other less expensive robotics tools can be used, depending on the curriculum or different requirements at international competitions. The two main pedagogical learning approaches that have taken root in Robotics are learning- by-doing and constructionism (Papert & Harel, 1991).

physics.ed-ph↗
arXiv2024

Unsupervised Learning of Effective Actions in Robotics

Learning actions that are relevant to decision-making and can be executed effectively is a key problem in autonomous robotics. Current state-of-the-art action representations in robotics lack proper effect-driven learning of the robot's actions. Although successful in solving manipulation tasks, deep learning methods also lack this ability, in addition to their high cost in terms of memory or training data. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised algorithm to discretize a continuous motion space and generate "action prototypes", each producing different effects in the environment. After an exploration phase, the algorithm automatically builds a representation of the effects and groups motions into action prototypes, where motions more likely to produce an effect are represented more than those that lead to negligible changes. We evaluate our method on a simulated stair-climbing reinforcement learning task, and the preliminary results show that our effect driven discretization outperforms uniformly and randomly sampled discretizations in convergence speed and maximum reward.

cs.RO↗
arXiv2026

Tune to Learn: How Controller Gains Shape Robot Policy Learning

Position controllers have become the dominant interface for executing learned manipulation policies. Yet a critical design decision remains understudied: how should we choose controller gains for policy learning? The conventional wisdom is to select gains based on desired task compliance or stiffness. However, this logic breaks down when controllers are paired with state-conditioned policies: effective stiffness emerges from the interplay between learned reactions and control dynamics, not from gains alone. We argue that gain selection should instead be guided by learnability: how amenable different gain settings are to the learning algorithm in use. In this work, we systematically investigate how position controller gains affect three core components of modern robot learning pipelines: behavior cloning, reinforcement learning from scratch, and sim-to-real transfer. Through extensive experiments across multiple tasks and robot embodiments, we find that: (1) behavior cloning benefits from compliant and overdamped gain regimes, (2) reinforcement learning can succeed across all gain regimes given compatible hyperparameter tuning, and (3) sim-to-real transfer is harmed by stiff and overdamped gain regimes. These findings reveal that optimal gain selection depends not on the desired task behavior, but on the learning paradigm employed. Project website: https://younghyopark.me/tune-to-learn

cs.RO↗