Data-Efficient Robot Learning

Human behavior is among the most scalable sources of data for learning physical intelligence, yet how to effectively leverage it for dexterous manipulation remains unclear. While prior work demonstrates human to robot transfer in constrained settings, it is unclear whether large scale human data can support fine grained, high degree of freedom dexterous manipulation. We present EgoScale, a human to dexterous manipulation transfer framework built on large scale egocentric human data. We train a Vision Language Action (VLA) model on over 20,854 hours of action labeled egocentric human video, more than 20 times larger than prior efforts, and uncover a log linear scaling law between human data scale and validation loss. This validation loss strongly correlates with downstream real robot performance, establishing large scale human data as a predictable supervision source. Beyond scale, we introduce a simple two stage transfer recipe: large scale human pretraining followed by lightweight aligned human robot mid training. This enables strong long horizon dexterous manipulation and one shot task adaptation with minimal robot supervision. Our final policy improves average success rate by 54% over a no pretraining baseline using a 22 DoF dexterous robotic hand, and transfers effectively to robots with lower DoF hands, indicating that large scale human motion provides a reusable, embodiment agnostic motor prior.

Efficiently training control policies for robots is a major challenge that can greatly benefit from utilizing knowledge gained from training similar systems through cross-embodiment knowledge transfer. In this work, we focus on accelerating policy training using a library-based initialization scheme that enables effective knowledge transfer across multirotor configurations. By leveraging a physics-aware neural control architecture that combines a reinforcement learning-based controller and a supervised control allocation network, we enable the reuse of previously trained policies. To this end, we utilize a policy evaluation-based similarity measure that identifies suitable policies for initialization from a library. We demonstrate that this measure correlates with the reduction in environment interactions needed to reach target performance and is therefore suited for initialization. Extensive simulation and real-world experiments confirm that our control architecture achieves state-of-the-art control performance, and that our initialization scheme saves on average up to $73.5\%$ of environment interactions (compared to training a policy from scratch) across diverse quadrotor and hexarotor designs, paving the way for efficient cross-embodiment transfer in reinforcement learning.

Enhancing the generalization of robotic learning in diverse unseen environments remains a fundamental challenge. Existing approaches often rely on large-scale pretraining, which is labor-intensive and time-consuming, or semantic data augmentation methods that assume flawless upstream object detection in real-world scenarios. In this work, we propose RoboAug, a novel generative data augmentation framework that reduces reliance on large-scale pretraining and perfect visual recognition by requiring only a single image with bounding box annotations for dataset construction. Leveraging this minimal supervision, RoboAug employs pretrained generative models for precise semantic augmentation and introduces a plug-and-play region-contrastive loss to guide attention toward task-relevant regions, thereby enhancing generalization and task success rates. Extensive real-world experiments on UR-5e, AgileX, and Tian Gong 2.0 demonstrate that RoboAug consistently outperforms state-of-the-art augmentation baselines under background, distractor, and lighting shifts. Our project is available at https://x-roboaug.github.io/.

World models offer a promising avenue for more faithfully capturing complex dynamics, including contacts and non-rigidity, as well as complex sensory information, such as visual perception, in situations where standard simulators struggle. However, these models are computationally complex to evaluate, posing a challenge for popular RL approaches that have been successfully used with simulators to solve complex locomotion tasks but yet struggle with manipulation. This paper introduces a method that bypasses simulators entirely, training RL policies inside world models learned from robots' interactions with real environments. At its core, our approach enables policy training with large-scale diffusion models via a novel decoupled first-order gradient (FoG) method: a full-scale world model generates accurate forward trajectories, while a lightweight latent-space surrogate approximates its local dynamics for efficient gradient computation. This coupling of a local and global world model ensures high-fidelity unrolling alongside computationally tractable differentiation. We demonstrate the efficacy of our method on the Push-T manipulation task, where it significantly outperforms PPO in sample efficiency. We further evaluate our approach through an ego-centric object manipulation task with a quadruped. Together, these results demonstrate that learning inside data-driven world models is a promising pathway for solving hard-to-model RL tasks in image space without reliance on hand-crafted physics simulators.

Real-robot demonstrations are prohibitively expensive, while simulation data and real-world human demonstrations are both scalable but each leaves a distinct gap: simulation suffers from a sim-to-real visual gap, and human data suffers from a human-to-robot embodiment gap. In this work, we identify a natural yet underexplored complementarity between these sources: simulation contributes robot-valid actions absent in human data, while human data provides real-world observations that simulation struggles to render. Building on this insight, we present SimHum, a co-training recipe that extracts kinematic priors from simulation and visual priors from human observations, then fine-tunes on a small real-robot dataset. SimHum exhibits strong scene-generalizable and data-efficient capabilities. With only 80 real-robot episodes per task, it achieves 62.5% success on held-out OOD scenes across four bimanual tabletop tasks, 53.7% higher than Real only in absolute success rate. Moreover, in a controlled data-collection study with matched collection time, SimHum improves over the best single-source pre-training baseline by 35.0% in absolute success rate. Project page: https://kaipengfang.github.io/sim-and-human/

Imitation learning has shown promise in learning from large-scale real-world datasets. However, pretrained policies usually perform poorly without sufficient in-domain data. Besides, human-collected demonstrations entail substantial labour and tend to encompass mixed-quality data and redundant information. As a workaround, human-in-the-loop systems gather domain-specific data for policy post-training, and exploit closed-loop policy feedback to offer informative guidance, but usually require full-time human surveillance during policy rollout. In this work, we devise ARMADA, a multi-robot deployment and adaptation system with human-in-the-loop shared control, featuring an autonomous online failure detection method named FLOAT. Thanks to FLOAT, ARMADA enables paralleled policy rollout and requests human intervention only when necessary, significantly reducing reliance on human supervision. Hence, ARMADA enables efficient acquisition of in-domain data, and leads to more scalable deployment and faster adaptation to new scenarios. We evaluate the performance of ARMADA on four real-world tasks. FLOAT achieves nearly 95% accuracy on average, surpassing prior state-of-the-art failure detection approaches by over 20%. Besides, ARMADA manifests more than 4$\times$ increase in success rate and greater than 2$\times$ reduction in human intervention rate over multiple rounds of policy rollout and post-training, compared to previous human-in-the-loop learning methods.

Vision-based manipulation policies are commonly learned from rich visual observations, typically using dense visual features extracted from full resolution images. It remains unclear how much of this visual information is really needed for effective policy learning. In this paper, we investigate the opposite end of the spectrum: how effective can manipulation policies be if they use as input only a compact visual representation. Sparse 2D keypoints provide a deliberately compact representation, giving the policy spatial information while removing direct access to appearance, texture, and background. We design AFFORD2ACT (Affordance-Guided Keypoints to Act) to study how much manipulation capability can be retained under this representation constraint. An off-the-shelf language-conditioned affordance model identifies the task-relevant region, from which up to 15 object keypoints are selected, together with 4 end-effector keypoints. The policy input is therefore reduced to only 19 2D keypoints (38 coordinates). A lightweight gating further decides which keypoints to pay attention to during execution. Across six real-robot manipulation tasks, this compact state outperforms the evaluated RGB, RGB-D, and dense-affordance behavior cloning baselines, degrades less as the number of demonstrations is reduced, and achieves 82% average success in held-out settings. Replacing learned gating with uniform weights reduces success from 92% to 52%. At the same time, the representation depends on reliable affordance localization and keypoint tracking, and remains vulnerable to incorrect masks, occlusion, tracking drift, and distractors.

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) enables robots to learn complex behaviors through interaction with the environment. However, due to the unrestricted nature of the learning algorithms, the resulting solutions are often brittle and appear unnatural. This is especially true for learning direct joint-level torque control, as inductive biases are difficult to integrate into the learning process. We propose an inductive bias for learning locomotion that is especially useful for torque control: latent actions learned from a small dataset of expert demonstrations. This prior allows the policy to directly leverage knowledge contained in the expert's actions and facilitates more efficient exploration. We observe that the agent is not restricted to the reward levels of the demonstration, and performance in transfer tasks is improved significantly. Latent action priors combined with style rewards for imitation lead to a closer replication of the expert's behavior. Videos are available at https://sites.google.com/view/latent-action-priors.

Efficiently tackling multiple tasks within complex environments, such as those found in robot manipulation, remains an ongoing challenge in robotics and an opportunity for data-driven solutions such as reinforcement learning (RL). The high cost of data gathering in robotics encourages data-efficient approaches such as model-based RL, which builds a dynamic model of the robot to conduct most policy learning on cheaper simulations, while enabling data reuse and transfer between tasks. In this work, we employ Bayesian deep learning (BDL) with a double purpose. First, we increase the model quality by improving its calibration. Second, we improve data efficiency by performing active learning of the dynamic model during a preliminary exploration phase, actively estimating the information gain of each transition and using it as the exploration reward. We compare several BDL methods in a realistic robot manipulation setup. Our experiments show that our approach matches the quality of relevant alternatives with much lower robot execution requirements and, unlike previous studies validated only on standard RL environments, we tackle robotic arm end-tasks on a complete manipulator simulator such as CoppeliaSim. Code is available at https://github.com/ropertunizar/BayesianActiveExploration.