arXiv AI

Missing Bridges: Composition-Aware Active Imitation Learning

The paper introduces Adaptive Agents via Latent Topologies (AALT), a method for active imitation learning that selects demonstrations based on their expected impact on start‑to‑goal connectivity rather than generic information gain. AALT builds a latent topology of hub states and learned behaviors, identifies high‑value bridge demonstrations that can solve many tasks simultaneously, and uses these to condition a diffusion policy for planning. In a simulated UR5e robot retrieval task with 72 start‑goal pairs, AALT achieved 100% success after only three demonstrations, outperforming baselines that required many more queries.

arXiv AI
Jun 2

ExpertGen: Scalable Sim-to-Real Expert Policy Learning from Imperfect Behavior Priors

arXiv:2603. 15956v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Learning generalizable and robust behavior cloning policies requires large volumes of high-quality robotics data.

By Zifan Xu, Ran Gong, Maria Vittoria Minniti, Kausik Sivakumar, Ahmet Salih Gundogdu, Eric Rosen, Riedana Yan, Tushar Kusnur, Zixing Wang, Di Deng, Peter Stone, Xiaohan Zhang, Karl Schmeckpeper
arXiv AI
Jul 24

Emergent Compositional Skills in Mixture-of-Experts VLAs

arXiv:2607. 20771v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We consider the problem of learning compositional robot policies end-to-end from expert demonstrations, without any pre-specified notion of task decomposition or hierarchy.

By Shlok Shah, Rhiaan Jhaveri, Tharun Kumar Tiruppali Kalidoss, Chirayu Nimonkar, Ishaan Javali
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 2

Coherent Off-Policy Improvement of Large Behavior Models with Learned Rewards

arXiv:2606. 02194v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Distilling expert demonstration data into large generative models using behavioral cloning is a scalable approach to learning capable policies for robotic control, particularly for dexterous manipulation.

By Christian Scherer, Joe Watson, Theo Gruner, Daniel Palenicek, Ingmar Posner, Jan Peters
arXiv AI
Aug 19

Teach and Grow: An Agent-Centered Architecture for General Robot Learning

Teach-and-Grow Learning (TGL) is an agent-centered architecture that transforms a few successful demonstrations into reusable Skill Blocks, enabling a robot to compose, execute, and revise behaviors in new scenes without task-specific policy retraining. The system maintains a Skill Library and structured Experience Memory to capture successes, failures, and repairs, allowing persistent reuse and agent-directed adaptation. Evaluation on the LIBERO benchmark shows state-of-the-art performance, and the authors propose a scaling-law hypothesis suggesting that accumulated reusable experience reduces future-task error and teaching demand following a power-law trend.

By Chang Nie, Zhe Liu, Hesheng Wang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 21

From Pretraining to Proficiency: Real-World Subtask RL for Long-Horizon Manipulation with Minimal Human Intervention

The paper introduces PARTS, a real‑world subtask reinforcement learning framework that fine‑tunes a pretrained robot policy by focusing on critical bottleneck subtasks while keeping the base policy frozen. It uses agent‑generated selectors and success verifiers to provide local rewards, enabling learning even when full‑task successes are rare. Experiments on bimanual YAM and single‑arm Franka robots show that PARTS raises complete‑task success from 32% to 61% and from 50% to 95%, respectively, with only tens of minutes of real‑world RL rollouts and minimal human intervention.

By Sichang Su, Benjamin Yang, Zhiyun Deng, Boyuan Liang, Yip Fun Yeung, Zelin Wang, Lingfeng Sun