Data-Efficient Robot Learning

Overview

Data-efficient robot learning studies how robots can learn useful skills without costly collections of demonstrations or extensive trial and error on physical hardware. Common approaches include imitation learning, sample-efficient reinforcement learning, world models that support planning or simulated practice, and methods that select, augment, or reuse demonstrations. Human videos, pretrained vision-language-action models, and transfer across robot embodiments can provide useful starting points, while benchmarks such as LIBERO and RoboCasa test manipulation performance in simulation and on real robots. A central challenge is that gains on offline prediction or simulated tasks do not always translate to reliable real-world behavior, and adaptation must improve new skills without losing old ones or requiring excessive supervision.

Latest papers

CardsList

189 papers51 papers in the last four weeks, up 113% on the four weeks before. 0.3% of all new papers.

  1. Robots Acquire Manipulation Skills in Seconds from a Single Human Video

    Jul 22, 2026Guangyan Chen, Meiling Wang, Te Cui +9Robot LearningRobot Skill Learning

  2. Learning to Navigate with Minimal Parameters: Decomposing Visual Navigation Through Closed-Form Geometric Interfaces

    Jul 13, 2026Edward Beng Wai Tan, Siew-Kei LamVisual NavigationRobot Policy Learning

  3. FlowDAgger: Human-in-the-Loop Adaptation of Generative Robot Policies in Latent Space

    Jul 9, 2026Michael Murray, Daphne Chen, Simran Bagaria +7Latent Action LearningRobot Policy Learning

  4. One Demonstration Is Enough for Real-World Robotic Reinforcement Learning

    Jul 2, 2026Yuwan Liu, Hongze Yu, Song Liu +5Reinforcement LearningRobot Skill Learning

  5. RECALL: Recovery Experience Collection for Active Lifelong Learning in Vision-Language-Action Models

    Jun 22, 2026Ulas Berk Karli, Tesca FitzgeraldContinual Robot LearningRobot Skill Learning

  6. DF-ExpEnse: Diffusion Filtered Exploration for Sample Efficient Finetuning

    Jun 17, 2026Calvin Luo, Chen Sun, Shuran SongRobot Policy AdaptationRobotic RL

  7. Task-Error Residual Learning for Real-Robot Five-Ball Juggling

    Jun 15, 2026Kai Ploeger, Jan PetersRobotic ControlRobot Skill Learning

  8. ATHENA: Accelerated Multi-Task Heterogeneous Influence Functions for Robot Data Curation

    Jun 15, 2026Tao Xu, Jiaxin Wang, Runhao Zhang +7Multi-Task LearningData-Efficient Robot Learning

  9. EgoGuide: Egocentric Guidance for Efficient Robot-Free Demonstration Collection and Learning

    Jun 12, 2026Yue Xu, Mingtao Nie, Tianle Li +4Robot LearningRobotic Data Collection

  10. ReGIL: Retrieval-Guided Imitation Learning from a Single Demonstration

    Jun 8, 2026Yuying Zhang, Francesco Verdoja, Wenyan Yang +1Robot Skill LearningRobotic RL

  11. SynthICL: Scalable In-context Imitation Learning with Synthetic Data

    Jun 6, 2026Cheng Qian, Ruomeng Fan, Yifei Ren +2ICL for RoboticsRobot Skill Learning

  12. SeeTraceAct: Visibility-Aware Latent Planning from Cross-Embodiment Demonstration Videos

    Jun 1, 2026Jaehyeon Son, Junhyun Kim, Kyle Kam +7Robot Skill LearningGeneralization in Robotic Manipulation

  13. RoboDream: Compositional World Models for Scalable Robot Data Synthesis

    Jun 1, 2026Junjie Ye, Rong Xue, Basile Van Hoorick +6Robot Skill LearningRobot Demonstration Generation

  14. Learning Multi-Modal Trajectory Policies for Data-Efficient Robotic Manipulation

    May 31, 2026Zijia Chen, Yuenan Hou, Xinhua Jiang +3Robot Policy LearningMixture of Experts

  15. PrimitiveVLA: Learning Reusable Motion Primitives for Efficient and Generalizable Robotic Manipulation

    May 27, 2026Yutai Li, Shaohui Peng, Jiaming Guo +8Long-Horizon Robotic ManipulationRobot Skill Learning

  16. Factored Diffusion Policies:Compositionally Generalized Robot Control with a Single Score Network

    May 21, 2026Sayan Mitra, Ege Yuceel, Noah Giles +1Robotic ControlAutonomous Drone Racing

  17. How to Instruct Your Robot: Dense Language Annotations Power Robot Policy Learning

    May 16, 2026Bosung Kim, Ruiyi Wang, David Acuna +5Robot Policy LearningRobot Skill Learning

  18. RoboEvolve: Co-Evolving Planner-Simulator for Robotic Manipulation with Limited Data

    May 13, 2026Harold Haodong Chen, Sirui Chen, Yingjie Xu +2Robot Skill LearningSynthetic Data Generation for Robotics

  19. TMRL: Diffusion Timestep-Modulated Pretraining Enables Exploration for Efficient Policy Finetuning

    May 12, 2026Matthew M. Hong, Jesse Zhang, Anusha Nagabandi +1Robot Policy AdaptationRobot Skill Learning

  20. Escaping the Diversity Trap in Robotic Manipulation via Anchor-Centric Adaptation

    May 8, 2026Yanzhe Chen, Kevin Yuchen Ma, Qi Lv +4Robot Policy AdaptationVLM Adaptation

  21. Learning to Race in Minutes: Infoprop Dyna on the Mini Wheelbot

    May 1, 2026Devdutt Subhasish, Henrik Hose, Sebastian TrimpeRobot Skill LearningAutonomous Racing

  22. Can Tabular Foundation Models Guide Exploration in Robot Policy Learning?

    Apr 30, 2026Buqing Ou, Frederike DümbgenTabular Foundation ModelsRobot Policy Learning

  23. RL Token: Bootstrapping Online RL with Vision-Language-Action Models

    Apr 24, 2026Charles Xu, Jost Tobias Springenberg, Michael Equi +4RL Fine-TuningVision-Language-Action Models

  24. Vision-Language-Action Jump-Starting for Reinforcement Learning Robotic Agents

    Apr 15, 2026Angelo Moroncelli, Roberto Zanetti, Marco Maccarini +1RL for RoboticsData-Efficient Robot Learning

  25. Minimal Embodiment Enables Efficient Learning of Number Concepts in Robot

    Apr 13, 2026Zhegong Shangguan, Alessandro Di Nuovo, Angelo CangelosiEmbodied CognitionMathematical Reasoning

  26. WM-DAgger: Enabling Efficient Data Aggregation for Imitation Learning with World Models

    Apr 13, 2026Anlan Yu, Zaishu Chen, Peili Song +6Robot Imitation LearningData-Efficient Robot Learning

  27. LIDEA: Human-to-Robot Imitation Learning via Implicit Feature Distillation and Explicit Geometry Alignment

    Apr 12, 2026Yifu Xu, Bokai Lin, Xinyu Zhan +4Human-to-Robot Motion ImitationCross-Embodiment Robot Learning