Learning from an Imitable Teacher: Competition Solution for the MetaFine Challenge

The MetaFine Open Competition (RoboFineMani workshop, CoRL 2026) evaluates fine-grained manipulation beyond binary success. Its five simulated tasks, from grasping a bottle by an instructed part to inserting letter-shaped pegs with 4 mm clearance, are scored on perception under lighting and camera changes, instruction understanding, and behavior. This report presents Team Friday's solution, which got second place with an overall score of 0.947, more than twice the $π_0$ baseline. Instead of fine-tuning a large vision-language-action (VLA) model, we train one 19M-parameter policy per task with a separate instruction classifier and focus on the data, all generated in the simulator by a privileged scripted teacher, including its corrections of the student's mistakes. By analyzing failed episodes, we find that a teacher that almost always succeeds can still teach a memoryless student badly: its pauses become stalls, its fixed habits become shortcuts, and it never shows the errors the student makes. Making the teacher imitable raised the official score on letter insertion, the hardest task, from 0.44 to 0.82 with 32% more data and the same architecture, and finally to 0.88. We summarize practical lessons on demonstration data and evaluation, which we hope will help in imitation learning for precise manipulation.