Organizations: Department of Electrical Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden · GRASP Lab, University of Pennsylvania, PA 19104, USA
Learning motion policies from expert demonstrations is an essential paradigm in modern robotics. While end-to-end models aim for broad generalization, they require large datasets and computationally heavy inference. Conversely, learning dynamical systems (DS) provides fast, reactive, and provably stable control from very few demonstrations. However, existing DS learning methods typically model isolated tasks and struggle to reuse demonstrations for novel behaviors. In this work, we formalize the problem of combining isolated demonstrations within a shared workspace to enable generalization to unseen tasks. The Gaussian Graph is introduced, which reinterprets spatial components of learned motion primitives as discrete vertices with connections to one another. This formulation allows us to bridge continuous control with discrete graph search. We propose two frameworks leveraging this graph: Stitching, for constructing time-invariant DSs, and Chaining, giving a sequence-based DS for complex motions while retaining convergence guarantees. Simulations and real-robot experiments show that these methods successfully generalize to new tasks where baseline methods fail.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1 : The Demonstration Stitching (Section IV ) pipeline using Shortest Path and Reuse Gaussians . On a set of separate demonstrations (a) (initial positions in red, target positions in green), LPV-DS is applied to each demonstration separately (b) , from which a Gaussian Graph is constructed and a shortest path from an initial position to a target position is found (c) . A DS is constructed to follow the shortest path (d) . Thus, a zero-shot generalization from separate motion demonstrations to a new, undemonstrated task is achieved.
Fig. 2 : Examples of two DS-Chains, with the resulting motions when starting at an initial position in red. Colored regions show the active DS at the corresponding part of the trajectory, with the underlying Gaussians shown in orange.
Fig. 3 : Qualitative results for datasets 2D Small (first row) and 2D Large (second and third row). Simulations are shown in red, demonstrations in blue-green, and Gaussians extracted from the GG in orange. Baseline methods are excluded as they failed in all the presented cases, as well as Chaining (DS) since results are similar to Chaining (All).
2D Small
2D Large
3D PC-GMM
Method
Success %
RMSE
Data Support
Comp. Time
Success %
RMSE
Data Support
Comp. Time
Success %
RMSE
Data Support
Comp. Time
Baseline (All)
20.8%
1.77 ± 0.72
0.73 ± 0.17
8.29 ± 0.63
19.1%
2.15 ± 0.74
0.72 ± 0.23
17.51 ± 1.86
28.3%
0.28 ± 0.33
0.88 ± 0.17
17.78 ± 16.59
Baseline (DS)
20.0%
2.97 ± 1.57
0.68 ± 0.25
10.16 ± 0.42
13.7%
3.30 ± 0.76
0.58 ± 0.24
33.65 ± 2.67
35.8%
2.53 ± 1.19
0.93 ± 0.10
251 ± 23
Stitch-SP (All)
98.3%
0.08 ± 0.02
0.86 ± 0.24
0.76 ± 0.42
90.2%
0.14 ± 0.30
0.90 ± 0.17
1.09 ± 1.28
90.0%
0.04 ± 0.03
0.87 ± 0.19
1.33 ± 1.27
Stitch-SP (DS)
94.2%
0.08 ± 0.02
0.86 ± 0.24
0.14 ± 0.71
91.3%
0.19 ± 0.41
0.87 ± 0.21
0.59 ± 1.90
85.8%
0.04 ± 0.02
0.85 ± 0.20
0.06 ± 0.04
Stitch-SPT (All)
97.5%
0.09 ± 0.03
0.86 ± 0.19
1.44 ± 0.72
89.7%
0.27 ± 0.44
0.77 ± 0.22
5.06 ± 5.95
81.7%
0.08 ± 0.11
0.92 ± 0.13
7.10 ± 12.37
TABLE I : The results on each dataset for the methods LPV-DS (Baseline), Stitching using the Shortest Path (Stitch SP) and Shortest Path Tree (Stitch SPT), and Chaining, showing the success rate in percent, RMSE, Data Support, and computation time in seconds from four random seeds. The two levels of reuse from Section IV-B — recomputing both the GMM and DS parameters (all) or only recomputing the DS parameters (DS) — are tested. ∗ Calculating the RMSE of Chaining methods is approximated by mixing DSs equally during transitions.
Fig. 4 : Real-robot experiments where we collect 3 demonstrations with 2 trajectories each and test Stitch-SPT (DS) and Chaining (DS) on two different tasks that require reversing and stitching. The environment consists of a transparent cube (object 1), a red cube (object 2), a brown box (box A), a white box (box B), and a plant acting as an obstacle.
Imitation Learning aims to learn skills from extensive observations and demonstrations for robots, so it suffers from data scarcity and environment generalization. The existing methods predominantly focus on imitation from in-domain tasks and consequently struggle with generalization to unseen tasks. To bridge this generalization gap, we propose the Dynamics-Aware Meta-Imitation (DAMI) framework. By integrating meta-learning to construct a shared skill space, DAMI equips agents for rapid adaptation to novel tasks. We introduce the Visual-Motor Trajectory (VMT) module to capture complex spatio-temporal dynamics within the task latent space. Furthermore, we propose the Unpaired Unified Task (U2T) block to fuse unstructured multimodal observations. To coordinate these representations, we integrate a Task-Conditioned Feature Modulation (TCFM) mechanism customized for modulating low-level 3D features. By capturing intrinsic dynamics from a random complete reference demonstration, our framework learns the underlying task logic rather than memorizing static cues, ensuring effective generalization. Extensive experiments in both simulation and real-world settings demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art baselines regarding direct inference on seen tasks and adaptation to unseen tasks via few-shot fine-tuning.
Zhenduo Shang, Xiyao Liu, Bohan Li +4
State Key Laboratory of Robotics and Intelligent Systems, Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang 110016, China · University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China · Shenyang University of Technology
While learning dexterous manipulation from a single human video offers a promising alternative to costly robot demonstrations, many recent methods predominantly imitate demonstrated motions. Such strict motion matching often limits generalization to initial object poses, goal poses, and grasps not shown in the video. Alternatively, discovering a policy via reinforcement learning (RL) allows for broad generalization, but without prior guidance, it struggles with high-dimensional exploration in complex, multi-stage tasks. To address these coupled generalization and exploration challenges, we present Dex-One2Many, a real-to-sim-to-real framework that learns a generalizable dexterous manipulation policy from a single human video. Our key insight is to abstract the video into sequential scene graphs that guide RL, enabling efficient exploration while preserving broad generalizability. The graphs serve as generative constraints for sampling diverse reset states and provide dense rewards for each stage. Because the graphs constrain relations rather than exact poses, these reset states cover object poses and grasps beyond the video, while initializing each stage from them with dense rewards keeps exploration short and guided. Trained entirely in simulation, Dex-One2Many transfers zero-shot to a real multi-fingered hand. Across five tool-use and manipulation tasks, Dex-One2Many exceeds baselines by 6.5% in seen configurations, while its robust generalization widens this gap to 71% in unseen scenarios.
Jusuk Lee, Sungha Kim, Yeonsoo Park +8
Seoul National University · University of Maryland, College Park · All Purpose AI +1
Despite the recent success of modern imitation learning methods in robot manipulation, their performance is often constrained by geometric variations due to limited data diversity. Leveraging powerful 3D generative models and vision foundation models (VFMs), the proposed AffordGen framework overcomes this limitation by utilizing the semantic correspondence of meaningful keypoints across large-scale 3D meshes to generate new robot manipulation trajectories. This large-scale, affordance-aware dataset is then used to train a robust, closed-loop visuomotor policy, combining the semantic generalizability of affordances with the reactive robustness of end-to-end learning. Experiments in simulation and the real world show that policies trained with AffordGen achieve high success rates and enable zero-shot generalization to truly unseen objects, significantly improving data efficiency in robot learning. Project Page: https://jiaweiz9.github.io/AffordGen-release/
Jiawei Zhang, Kaizhe Hu, Yingqian Huang +3
Shanghai Qi Zhi Institute · Tsinghua University · Fudan University +1