cs.ROMar 16, 2026

Zero-Shot Generalization from Motion Demonstrations to New Tasks

Authors: Kilian Freitag, Alvin Combrink, Nadia Figueroa

Organizations: Department of Electrical Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology, Gothenburg, Sweden · GRASP Lab, University of Pennsylvania, PA 19104, USA

Abstract

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

Explore similar work

CardsList
  1. Dynamics-Aware Meta-Imitation for Generalization to Unseen Robotic Manipulation

    Jul 17, 2026Zhenduo Shang, Xiyao Liu, Bohan Li +4Robot Skill LearningGeneralization in Robotic Manipulation

  2. Dex-One2Many: Learning Dexterous Manipulation from a Single Human Demonstration

    Oct 8, 2026Jusuk Lee, Sungha Kim, Yeonsoo Park +8Robotic ManipulationLearning from Demonstration

  3. AffordGen: Generating Diverse Demonstrations for Generalizable Object Manipulation with Afford Correspondence

    Apr 12, 2026Jiawei Zhang, Kaizhe Hu, Yingqian Huang +3Robotic ManipulationGeneralization in Robotic Manipulation