Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) provides a powerful framework for learning from demonstrations. However, real-world tasks often exhibit substantial natural variations (e.
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:2510. 17059v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Zero-shot imitation learning requires an agent to reproduce expert behavior from a single demonstration without additional environment interaction or gradient updates at test time.
By Kathryn Wantlin, Chongyi Zheng, Benjamin Eysenbach
KnowDemo is a framework that generates diverse robot demonstrations from human videos by leveraging structured manipulation knowledge. It uses a vision‑language model to extract task requirements and permissible execution variations, then resolves these against target‑scene entities to guide candidate generation and screening before motion planning. The resulting demonstrations feature multimodal behavior, alternative contact strategies, and valid subtask orders, and have been shown to improve planning success and enable sim‑to‑real policy transfer across three tasks.
By Zhiyuan Gao, Yanxiang Zhan, Mohammad Khoshnazar, Jeroen Sch\"afer, Michael Beetz
arXiv:2508. 08983v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Humans can learn a new manipulation task from one or two demonstrations and then perform it in a new room, with new objects, under new constraints.
By Ben Zandonati, Tom\'as Lozano-P\'erez, Leslie Pack Kaelbling
arXiv:2606. 15631v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Extending a vision-language-action (VLA) policy to a new task typically requires task-specific teleoperated demonstrations and per-task fine-tuning, making adaptation costly in both data collection and compute.
By Jeongeun Park, Juhan Park, Taekyung Kim, Sungjoon Choi, Dongyoon Han, Sangdoo Yun
arXiv:2608. 11363v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A central goal in robot learning is to move beyond task-specific human data collection toward robots that improve through autonomous interaction.
By Shreyas Kowshik, Sreyas Venkataraman, Leo Wang, Niharika Pant, Max Simchowitz, Aviral Kumar
The paper introduces QDTraj, a method that uses Quality‑Diversity algorithms to automatically generate a diverse set of low‑level trajectory primitives for manipulating articulated objects. By leveraging sparse reward exploration, QDTraj produces at least five times more diverse trajectories for hinge and slider tasks compared to baseline methods, and demonstrates strong generalization across 30 articulations from the PartNetMobility dataset, averaging 704 trajectories per task. The resulting primitives are validated both in simulation and on real robots, with the code released publicly.
By Mathilde Kappel, Mahdi Khoramshahi, Louis Annabi, Faiz Ben Amar, St\'ephane Doncieux
arXiv:2506. 04147v5 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Building capable household and industrial robots requires mastering the control of versatile, high-degree-of-freedom (DoF) systems such as mobile manipulators.
By Jiaheng Hu, Peter Stone, Roberto Mart\'in-Mart\'in
arXiv:2606. 15514v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Robotic systems perceive the world through multiple input modalities -- including visual camera streams and natural language instructions -- and must select appropriate actions based on these signals.
By Hassan Ismkhan, Hamid Bouchahcia
arXiv:2505. 03296v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We present Mixture of Discrete-time Gaussian Processes (MiDiGap), a novel approach for flexible policy representation and imitation learning in robot manipulation.
By Jan Ole von Hartz, Adrian R\"ofer, Joschka Boedecker, Abhinav Valada
The paper proposes a method to train efficient multi‑task manipulation policies by distilling knowledge from single‑task Conditional Flow Matching (CFM) experts. Instead of training separate models for each task, the authors transfer the experts’ learned velocity fields into a shared policy, combining this distillation signal with the original CFM objective. Experiments on RLBench demonstrate that this approach improves multi‑task performance while keeping the model size fixed, avoiding the need for larger capacity or performance drops seen with naive concatenated training.
By Shreya Deshmukh, Imen Mahdi, Nick Heppert, Abhinav Valada