Graph-Reweighted Behavior Cloning with Human Interventions for Precise Robotic Manipulation
Authors: Xiaoman Li, Zhiqiang Yang, Jiayu Hu, Jipeng Kong, Yang Zhang, Jingwei Zhang, Fangzheng Yan, Chunhua Shen, Chenjia Bai
Organizations: Zhejiang University, State Key Lab of CAD & CG · The Institute of Artificial Intelligence, China Telecom (TeleAI) · South China University of Technology · University of Science and Technology of China · ShanghaiTech University · Tsinghua University · Gamma Robotics (γ)
Long-horizon precise manipulation produces mixed-quality data for post-training vision-language-action (VLA) models: even successful demonstrations and intervention-assisted rollouts may contain detours, hesitations, failed attempts, and imperfect recoveries. The key challenge is to identify which action chunks actually advance the task, rather than uniformly cloning or discarding imperfect trajectories. We propose Graph-Reweighted Behavior Cloning (GR-BC), an offline iterative post-training framework that builds a task-conditioned goal-reachability graph over demonstrations and iteratively collected rollouts, including both successful and failed episodes with human interventions. Reverse graph search computes minimal remaining steps to task success within the dataset support, and each action chunk is weighted by how much its execution reduces this potential. This consequence-based weighting reuses recoverable segments from failed trajectories, leverages interventions as recovery paths, and down-weights locally regressive chunks even inside successful trajectories. New rollouts are incorporated by appending them to the graph and rerunning search, without training a reward model, action-conditioned critic, or progress predictor. Across four precise manipulation tasks and three VLA backbones, GR-BC improves single-round supervised fine-tuning and reaches 91% success after a few offline iterations, without trajectory comparisons or progress labels. More details and videos are available at: https://gr-bc.github.io
Figures & tables
Figure 1: Overview of the GR-BC framework. (A) We construct a task-conditioned goal-reachability graph from mixed-quality offline data. (B) Reverse graph search estimates minimal remaining steps to task success, providing dense potential signals. (C) Action chunks are weighted by these consequence-based potentials for VLA SFT. (D) New real-world rollouts, including failed episodes and human interventions, are iteratively incorporated to refine the graph and policy.
Figure 2: Real-world evaluation tasks. We evaluate GR-BC on four long-horizon precise manipulation tasks requiring precise visual alignment, contact-rich interactions, and recovery from execution errors.
Figure 3: Multi-view node encoding for graph construction.
Figure 4: Cross-trajectory similarity computation. We compute the pair-wise feature distance between states vi and vj , normalized by their local adaptive scales σc(v) , to establish connectivity that reflects consistent physical state compatibility.
Figure 5: Comparison of progress estimation and transition weights. GRP (ours) provides more consistent progress signals than reward modeling baselines (SARM, Robometer, Robo-Dopamine, ReWiND). Our consequence-based weights effectively isolate task-advancing segments from local regressions or failed behaviors.
Method
ΔSF↑
ρdev↑
Class. SE ↑
Class. FE ↑
Multi-cam.
Failure data
Progress labels
ReWiND [ 34 ]
0.003
0
30/30
1/30
–
–
–
SARM [ 17 ]
0.24
0.48
26/30
14/30
–
–
✓
Robo-Dopamine [ 21 ]
0.29
0.59
29/30
8/30
✓
–
✓
RoboMeter [ 19 ]
0.159
0.69
30/30
6/30
–
✓
✓
GRP (ours)
0.97
0.92
30/30
30/30
✓
✓
–
Table 1: Progress-model interfaces and evaluation results.
Figure 6: Policy improvement across offline post-training rounds. GR-BC achieves more consistent gains than DAgger, AWR, and RA-BC on precise assembly tasks.
Variant
Failure reach. ↑
Zero-wt. ratio ↓
Pre/ normal ↓
Mismatch edges ↓
Temporal only
0.0%
62.3%
1.02
–
w/o gripper
97.8%
26.3%
0.46
15.8%
Ours
98.3%
25.0%
0.42
0.0%
Table 2: Graph ablation on the Assembly Model task.
Appendix figures & tables20 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Figure 7: Real-world robot workspace used for GR-BC data collection and evaluation.
Table 10Table 11
Statistic
Assembly Model
Graphics Card
Screw Tightening
Memory Stick
Demo trajectories
215
125
100
150
Successful rollouts
85
270
160
240
Failed rollouts
100
120
80
80
Mean rollouts per round
90
120
80
100
Appendix
Table 7: Aggregate dataset statistics.
Parameter
Meaning
Default
k
temporal subsampling interval
15 frames
K
mutual KNN size per camera view
20
αedge
adaptive similarity-edge threshold
1.0
ϵc
stability constant for adaptive length
10−4
N
action chunk horizon
30 frames
δmin
minimum net progress threshold
0.002
Appendix
Table 8: Hyperparameters mentioned in the paper.
Figure 8: Two-trajectory graph construction example on the Assembly Model task. Blue and orange nodes denote two different trajectories, solid edges denote temporal transitions, and dashed red edges denote zero-cost edges from successful terminal nodes to g⋆ . Node colors indicate retrieved remaining steps Rrec(v) , where lower values correspond to states closer to task completion. The right image pairs show representative matched states; R is the graph-retrieved remaining-step estimate and d is the MCR feature-space distance between the matched states.
Figure 9: Graph overview constructed from the demonstration data and one rollout round for all four tasks. Darker node colors indicate larger remaining-step estimates.
Table 9: Demo-only zero-shot progress evaluation. The graph is built from successful demonstrations only. Held-out rollouts are inserted one at a time, scored by graph-retrieved progress, and removed before the next rollout is evaluated. The diagnostic split yields a large terminal-progress gap between held-out successful and failed rollouts.
Parameter
X-VLA
SmolVLA
π0.5
Input image resolution
Raw videos: 480×640 ; model inputs: 256×256 , 256×256 , 224×224
480×640 raw RGB videos; padded to 512×512
480×640 raw RGB videos; resized to 224×224
Number of camera views
3
3
3
Action representation
8-D joint/gripper command
8-D joint/gripper command
8-D joint/gripper command
Action chunk horizon N
30 frames
50 frames
30 frames
Hardware
4 NVIDIA H100 GPUs
4 NVIDIA H100 GPUs
4 NVIDIA H100 GPUs
Batch size
32 per GPU; 128 effective
32 per GPU; 128 effective
16 per GPU; 64 effective
Appendix
Table 10: VLA post-training hyperparameters.
Figure 11: Single-task backbone compatibility on Graphics Card. GR-BC improves over the DAgger-style baseline across X-VLA, SmolVLA, and π0.5 in this controlled study.
Backbone
Method
BC
r=1
r=2
r=3
X-VLA
DAgger-style
0
8
17
63
GR-BC
0
14
67
92
SmolVLA
DAgger-style
0
8
8
14
GR-BC
0
10
12
35
π0.5
DAgger-style
3
12
18
55
GR-BC
3
14
69
93
Appendix
Table 11: Single-task backbone compatibility study on the Graphics Card task. We report success rate (%) across behavior cloning initialization and three iterative post-training rounds.
Parameter
Meaning
Recommended range
Effect
k
Temporal subsampling interval
10–20 frames
Controls graph density. Smaller values preserve fine contact dynamics but increase graph size; larger values reduce cost but may miss short regressions.
K
Mutual KNN size per camera view
10–30
Controls similarity-edge recall. Larger values improve connectivity but may introduce false visual neighbors.
αedge
Adaptive similarity-edge threshold
0.8–1.2
Controls cross-trajectory stitching. Larger values improve failure reachability; smaller values give more conservative edges.
ϵc
Stability constant for adaptive length
10−5 – 10−3
Prevents unstable normalization when local visual scale is very small.
Rmax
Normalization scale for remaining steps
95th percentile; 95–99th percentile recommended range
Maps remaining steps to normalized progress. A small value saturates progress early; a large value compresses progress differences.
N
Action chunk horizon
20–40 frames
Defines the lookahead for chunk consequence. Smaller values give local credit; larger values capture longer effects but may mix behaviors.
Appendix
Table 12: Hyperparameters and recommended ranges for GR-BC.
k
Sim. edges
Fail reach.
Rmax
Zero wt.
High wt.
5
62,349
95.8%
125.0
26.8%
1.9%
10
30,221
97.5%
194.0
26.4%
21.7%
15
20,229
98.3%
255.0
24.6%
38.3%
Appendix
Table 13: Hyperparameter sensitivity diagnostics.
Figure 12: Encoder comparison overview on the Assembly Model rollout dataset. The visualization compares graph structure and progress behavior across R3M, MCR, and V-JEPA2.1 encoders under the same graph-construction rule.
Encoder
Sim. edges ↓
Rmax
Reachable ↑
Mean regression ↓
Total variation ↓
End progress ↑
Encode time ↓
R3M
12913
145.1
96.3%
0.388
1.420
0.745
60.2s
MCR
9973
223.5
94.4%
0.437
1.289
0.713
64.3s
V-JEPA2.1-B/384
19310
129.4
96.9%
0.656
1.688
0.567
123.7s
V-JEPA2.1-L/384
18980
131.8
95.1%
0.642
1.655
0.562
176.9s
Appendix
Table 14: Encoder comparison on the Assembly Model rollout dataset. All methods use stride 15 , history length 0 , and the same multi-view consensus and gripper-consistency check. Arrows indicate the preferred direction.
Figure 13: Multiple Success Modes on Assembly Model.
Figure 14: Shortest-path visualization from a failed state to a successful terminal state. The path alternates between temporal transitions and similarity bridges, showing how failed data can be routed through reusable recovery segments.
Figure 15: Examples of Progress prediction on demonstration data.
Figure 16: Examples of Progress prediction on policy rollouts.
Pretrained vision-language-action (VLA) policies provide strong priors for robot manipulation, yet adapting them online to fine-grained biomedical tasks remains challenging. Task success often hinges on subtle, view-dependent visual cues, while task-level rewards provide little guidance about which regions matter, making it difficult to learn task-relevant visual grounding from limited real-robot interaction. Online adaptation is further constrained by the computational cost of VLA inference and replay-based updates. We introduce GRAFT (Grounded Reinforcement Adaptation for Fast Task Learning), a framework for efficient online VLA adaptation through grounded perception. GRAFT uses region-level supervision to learn view-specific visual anchors that focus perception on task-relevant local cues without requiring region proposals at deployment. It further combines single-step action generation with cached visual-language prefix reuse to accelerate online learning. Across four biomedical manipulation tasks, GRAFT improves success rates by 32.5 percentage points under matched adaptation budgets, while reducing the computational overhead of online policy updates.
Yibo Qiu, Haoliang Ye, Shu'ang Sun +3
Suzhou Institute for Advanced Research, University of Science and Technology of China, Suzhou, Jiangsu, China, and also with the School of Biomedical Engineering, Division of Life Sciences and Medicine, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui, China
Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models remain brittle in long-horizon, contact-rich manipulation because success-only imitation provides little supervision for execution drift, while failed rollouts are often discarded. We introduce RePO-VLA, a recovery-driven policy optimization framework that assigns distinct roles to success, recovery, and failure trajectories. RePO-VLA first applies Recovery-Aware Initialization (RAI), slicing recovery segments and resetting history so corrective actions depend on the current adverse state rather than the preceding failure. It then learns a Progress-Aware Semantic Value Function (PAS-VF), aligning spatiotemporal trajectory features with instructions and successful references. The resulting labels salvage useful failure prefixes via reliability decay, while low-value labels mark drift and terminal breakdowns, teaching differences among nominal, failed, and corrective actions. The data engine turns adverse states into planner-generated or human-collected corrective rollouts, teaching recovery to the success manifold. Value-Conditioned Refinement (VCR) trains the policy to prefer high-progress actions. At deployment, a fixed high value (v=1.0) biases actions toward the learned success manifold without online failure detectors or heuristic retries. We introduce FRBench, with standardized error injection and recovery-focused evaluation. Across simulated and real-world bimanual tasks, RePO-VLA improves robustness, raising adversarial success from 20% to 75% on average and up to 80% in scaled real-world trials.
Weijia Liufu, Xiaoyu Guo, Ruiyi Chen +16
1Sun Yat-sen University · 2South China University of Technology · 3Peng Cheng Laboratory +3
Human interventions provide crucial corrective signals for post-training Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. However, enabling seamless humanoid interventions is a formidable systems challenge due to complex whole-body kinematics and dexterous-hand control. Consequently, the collected intervention trajectories are often suboptimal, and methods that rely on human interventions as expert supervision can absorb hesitant, inefficient, or even erroneous behaviors. To address both the system and algorithmic challenges, we propose ROVE, a reinforcement learning framework for humanoid VLA post-training with imperfect human interventions. First, ROVE introduces a human-in-the-loop pipeline capable of collecting deployment and intervention data for humanoid manipulation. Second, it utilizes Optimistic Value Estimation (OVE) to prioritize high-value behaviors from mixed-quality trajectories. To further robustify value estimation, we incorporate cross-embodiment human experience videos to provide rich supervision for long-tailed failure and recovery modes. The resulting critic yields informative advantage signals, steering the VLA actor to focus on high-value behaviors rather than indiscriminately imitating all actions. On challenging real-world contact-rich and fine-grained humanoid manipulation tasks, ROVE outperforms experience-learning baselines and consistently improves across multiple rollout-intervention iterations.
Wei Xiao, Weiliang Tang, Yuying Ge +4
1XPENG Robotics · 2Fudan University · 3The Chinese University of Hong Kong +1