Behavior Cloning

Also known as BC

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Overview

Behavior cloning learns a policy by matching expert actions to observed states or images, offering a direct way to turn demonstrations into control without designing a reward function. Common approaches include supervised regression, sequence and diffusion policies, visual or language-conditioned models, and methods that retrieve, reweight, or augment demonstrations. Researchers evaluate these methods in settings such as simulated driving, robotic manipulation, navigation, and long-horizon tasks, with growing attention to recovery from errors and shifts in the environment. A central challenge is that good action-prediction scores do not guarantee successful closed-loop behavior: errors can compound, demonstrations may be noisy or incomplete, and policies must handle multimodal actions and unfamiliar states safely.

Latest papers

CardsList

46 papers12 papers in the last four weeks, up 140% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. AWLS: Advantage-Weighted Latent Steering for One-Step Generative Robotic Manipulation Policies

    Oct 20, 2026Jiahong Tang, Jiaju He, Zhiyuan Yang +2Robot Policy LearningRobotic Manipulation

    Nanyang Technological University, Singapore · Singapore Institute of Manufacturing Technology (SIMTech), Agency for Science, Technology and Research (A*STAR), Singapore

  2. ALIGN: Aligning Condition Estimation and Expression in Advantage-Conditioned Behavior Cloning

    Oct 19, 2026Zechen Wang, Zhenqi Qiu, Houlong Xiong +8Robot Imitation LearningBehavior Cloning

    PrimeBot · ShanghaiTech University · Shanghai Jiao Tong University +2

  3. DemoStream: Batched Task-and-Motion-Plan Optimization for Automated Learning from Demonstration

    Oct 15, 2026Caelan Garrett, Neel Jawale, Fabio RamosLearning from DemonstrationMotion Planning

    NVIDIA · University of Sydney

  4. Graph-Reweighted Behavior Cloning with Human Interventions for Precise Robotic Manipulation

    Oct 14, 2026Xiaoman Li, Zhiqiang Yang, Jiayu Hu +6Robot Imitation LearningBehavior Cloning

    Zhejiang University, State Key Lab of CAD & CG · The Institute of Artificial Intelligence, China Telecom (TeleAI) · South China University of Technology +4

  5. Investigating Behavior Cloning from Few Demonstrations for Autonomous Driving based on Bird's-Eye View in Simulated Cities

    Oct 14, 2026Eric Aislan Antonelo, Gustavo Claudio Karl Couto, Christian Möller +1Instance ReweightingAutonomous Driving

    Automation and Systems Engineering Department, Federal University of Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, Brazil · Faculty of Science and Engineering, Information Technology Åbo Akademi University, Finland

  6. Where Small Mistakes Matter: Quantifying State Criticality for Imitation Learning

    Oct 13, 2026Yusuf Umut Ciftci, Joonwon Kang, Ajay Suresha Sathya +1Imitation LearningRobot Imitation Learning

    University of Southern California · Stanford University · Georgia Institute of Technology +1

  7. Self-Supervised Keyframe Discovery for Horizon-Invariant Behavior Cloning

    Oct 7, 2026Prabin Kumar Rath, Omkar Patil, Nakul GopalanBehavior CloningRobot Imitation Learning

    Arizona State University

  8. An Informational Curse of Horizon in Goal-Conditioned Policy Learning

    Oct 7, 2026John L. Zhou, Yuxuan Dong, Jonathan C. KaoGoal-Conditioned RLGeneralization in RL

    University of California, Los Angeles

  9. Structured Representation Learning for Behavior Cloning: How can we learn to safely control a nuclear power plant?

    Oct 5, 2026Perceval Beja-Battais, Alain Grosset{ê}te, Nicolas VayatisRepresentation LearningSafety-Critical Control

    CB

  10. Behavioral Cloning Mystery

    Oct 5, 2026Seohong Park, Sergey LevineBehavior CloningImitation Learning

    University of California, Berkeley

  11. Diffusion-2BC: Hybrid Diffusion and Regression Training for Offline Behavior Cloning in Autonomous Driving

    Sep 29, 2026Bruno Maciel Machado, Eric Aislan AntoneloEnd-to-End Autonomous DrivingDiffusion Policy

    Department of Automation and Systems Engineering, Graduate Program in Automation and Systems Engineering, Federal University of Santa Catarina, Florianópolis, Santa Catarina, Brazil

  12. Disagreement-Regularized Imitation Learning for Image-Based Continuous Control with Gaussian and Beta Policies

    Sep 29, 2026Irving Giovani Bronzatti Petrazzini, Eric Aislan AntoneloImitation LearningBehavior Cloning

    Department of Automation and Systems Engineering, Federal University of Santa Catarina, Florian´opolis, Santa Catarina, Brazil.

  13. Is Online Interaction Necessary for Recovery? A Minimalist Approach to Robust Planning via Perturbation

    Sep 27, 2026Bumgeun Park, Donghwan LeeRobot Imitation LearningBehavior Cloning

    Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)

  14. Training-free Behavior Cloning

    Sep 24, 2026Maximilian Adang, Timothy Chen, Lars Osterberg +2Robot Policy LearningBehavior Cloning

    Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94404, USA.

  15. HIL-UMI: Bringing Human-in-the-Loop Post-Training of Vision-Language-Action Models to Universal Manipulation Interface

    Sep 17, 2026Zimu Han, Yiming Zeng, Jiyao Zhang +9Interactive Imitation LearningVision-Language-Action Models

    Center on Frontier Computing Studies, School of Computer Science, Peking University, China · Xi’an Jiaotong University, China · National Key Laboratory for Multimedia Information Processing, School of Computer Science, Peking University, China +2

  16. Imitation Learning for Autonomous Driving in CARLA

    Sep 15, 2026Jordy KietoAutonomous DrivingImitation Learning

  17. Behavioral Cloning Outperforms Entropy-Regularized RL: Critic-Driven Failure of Actor-Critic Methods on Adaptive Tumor Treatment

    Sep 6, 2026Aleksandar Dimitrov, Giacomo SpiglerActor-Critic MethodsSoft Actor-Critic

    Department of Cognitive Science & Artificial Intelligence, Tilburg University, Tilburg, The Netherlands

  18. Closed-Loop Evaluation of Bird's-Eye-View Maps from Cross-View Transformers as Inputs to Behavior-Cloning Policies

    Sep 5, 2026Felipe Carlos dos Santos, Eric Antonelo, Gustavo Claudio Karl CoutoBird's-Eye-View SegmentationBird's-Eye-View Representation

    Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), Florianópolis, Brazil Department of Automation and Systems Engineering

  19. A Low-Cost, Open Platform for End-to-End Autonomous Driving on a Miniature Ackermann Vehicle

    Sep 3, 2026Gustavo Claudio Karl Couto, Eric Aislan Antonelo, Gabriel George ZippererEnd-to-End Autonomous DrivingSim-to-Real Transfer

    Department of Automation and Systems Engineering Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC) – Florianópolis – SC – Brazil

  20. RedLight-VLA: Models for traffic-rule grounding and behavioral emphasis in driving policies

    Aug 21, 2026Bala Murali Manoghar Sai Sudhakar, Sourab Bapu Sridhar, Sandipan Das +5Autonomous DrivingVLMs for Autonomous Driving

    Qualcomm Technologies, Inc., USA · Qualcomm Auto Ltd Sweden Filial, Sweden · Qualcomm India Private Limited, India +1

  21. Enhancing Visual Domain Robustness in Behaviour Cloning via Saliency-Guided Augmentation

    Aug 12, 2026Zheyu Zhuang, Ruiyu Wang, Nils Ingelhag +2Data AugmentationDomain Generalization

    KTH Royal Institute of Technology · Aalto University

  22. Otter: A Time-Aware, History-Conditioned Human Chess AI

    Aug 5, 2026Tarun Kumar SBehavior CloningHuman Behavior Prediction

    Peargent Labs Bangalore, India

  23. Cortex: Compact Behavior Cloning for Quake with Frozen Visual Features

    Jul 22, 2026Dzmitry MalyshauGame-Playing AgentsVisuomotor Policy Learning

  24. Language-Critique Imitation Learning from Suboptimal Demonstrations

    Jul 1, 2026Chih-Han Yang, Dai-Jie Wu, Yun-Ping Huang +3Imitation LearningBehavior Cloning

    Graduate Institute of Communication Engineering, National Taiwan University (NTU) · University of Utah · National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University +1

  25. Scalable Behaviour Cloning on Browser Using via Skill Distillation

    Jun 30, 2026Kaisen Yang, Zheng Jiang, Yuzhao Peng +11Skill DistillationBehavior Cloning

    Einsia

  26. WARP-RM: A Warp-Augmented Relative Progress Reward Model for Data Curation

    Jun 26, 2026Justin Yu, Andrew Goldberg, Kavish Kondap +7Long-Horizon Robotic ManipulationRobot Skill Learning

    University of California, Berkeley · Stanford University · XDOF

  27. Scalable Behavior Cloning with Open Data, Training, and Evaluation

    Jun 25, 2026Arthur Allshire, Himanshu Gaurav Singh, Ritvik Singh +15Robot Policy LearningDiffusion Transformer

    UC Berkeley · MIT · XDOF +2

  28. Decoupling the Declarative from the Procedural in Vision-Language-Action Models

    Jun 19, 2026Nikolaos Tsagkas, Andreas Sochopoulos, Chris Xiaoxuan Lu +2Robotic ManipulationTransfer Learning

    University of Edinburgh · UCL · Samsung AI Center - Cambridge

  29. MirrorDuo: Reflection-Consistent Visuomotor Learning from Mirrored Demonstration Pairs

    Jun 18, 2026Zheyu Zhuang, Ruiyu Wang, Giovanni Luca Marchetti +2Robot Skill LearningGeneralization in Robotic Manipulation

    Division of Robotics, Perception and Learning, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden · Department of Mathematics, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden

  30. What Demonstration Curation Metrics Do to Your Policy

    Jun 8, 2026Aarav BediTraining Data CurationLearning from Demonstration

    Department of Mechanical Engineering University of California, Berkeley