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. HandelBot: Real-World Piano Playing via Fast Adaptation of Dexterous Robot Policies

    Mar 12, 2026Amber Xie, Haozhi Qi, Dorsa SadighRobotic ManipulationBimanual Robotic Manipulation

  2. SaPaVe: Towards Active Perception and Manipulation in Vision-Language-Action Models for Robotics

    Mar 12, 2026Mengzhen Liu, Enshen Zhou, Cheng Chi +6Active Vision for Robot ManipulationRobotic Manipulation

  3. Concurrent Prehensile and Nonprehensile Manipulation: A Practical Approach to Multi-Stage Dexterous Tasks

    Mar 12, 2026Hao Jiang, Yue Wu, Yue Wang +2Dexterous ManipulationLong-Horizon Robotic Manipulation

  4. ScanDP: Generalizable 3D Scanning with Diffusion Policy

    Mar 11, 2026Itsuki Hirako, Ryo Hakoda, Yubin Liu +3Occupancy Grid Mapping3D Reconstruction

  5. SEA-Nav: Efficient Policy Learning for Safe and Agile Quadruped Navigation in Cluttered Environments

    Mar 10, 2026Shiyi Chen, Mingye Yang, Haiyi Liu +6Quadruped Robot NavigationRobot Navigation

  6. Quality over Quantity: Demonstration Curation via Influence Functions for Data-Centric Robot Learning

    Mar 10, 2026Haeone Lee, Taywon Min, Junsu Kim +4Training Data CurationData-Efficient Robot Learning

  7. DeReCo: Decoupling Representation and Coordination Learning for Object-Adaptive Decentralized Multi-Robot Cooperative Grasping and Lifting

    Mar 9, 2026Kazuki Shibata, Ryosuke Sota, Shandil Dhiresh Bosch +3Multi-Robot Cargo TransportationMulti-Robot Coordination

  8. DAISS: Phase-Aware Imitation Learning for Dual-Arm Robotic Ultrasound-Guided Interventions

    Mar 8, 2026Feng Li, Pei Liu, Shiting Wang +4Bimanual Robotic ManipulationRobot Imitation Learning

  9. Approximate Imitation Learning for Event-based Quadrotor Flight in Cluttered Environments

    Mar 8, 2026Nico Messikommer, Jiaxu Xing, Leonard Bauersfeld +3Robot Imitation LearningRobotic Control

  10. Learning Quadruped Walking from Seconds of Demonstration

    Mar 7, 2026Ruipeng Zhang, Hongzhan Yu, Ya-Chien Chang +3Robot Imitation LearningData-Efficient Robot Learning

  11. Few-Shot Neural Differentiable Simulator: Real-to-Sim Rigid-Contact Modeling

    Mar 6, 2026Zhenhao Huang, Siyuan Luo, Bingyang Zhou +3Differentiable PhysicsRobot Dynamics Learning

  12. RoboPocket: Improve Robot Policies Instantly with Your Phone

    Mar 5, 2026Junjie Fang, Wendi Chen, Han Xue +7Data-Efficient Robot LearningRobot Learning

  13. Tether: Autonomous Functional Play with Correspondence-Driven Trajectory Warping

    Mar 3, 2026William Liang, Sam Wang, Hung-Ju Wang +3Robot LearningData-Efficient Robot Learning

  14. ACDC: Adaptive Curriculum Planning with Dynamic Contrastive Control for Goal-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning in Robotic Manipulation

    Mar 2, 2026Xuerui Wang, Guangyu Ren, Tianhong Dai +4Goal-Conditioned RLGoal-Conditioned Robotic Manipulation

  15. ROSER: Few-Shot Robotic Sequence Retrieval for Scalable Robot Learning

    Mar 2, 2026Zillur Rahman, Eddison Pham, Alejandro Daniel Noel +1Data-Efficient Robot LearningFew-Shot Learning

  16. Scaling Tasks, Not Samples: Mastering Humanoid Control through Multi-Task Model-Based Reinforcement Learning

    Mar 2, 2026Shaohuai Liu, Weirui Ye, Yilun Du +1Multi-Task RLModel-Based RL

  17. TGM-VLA: Task-Guided Mixup for Sampling-Efficient and Robust Robotic Manipulation

    Feb 28, 2026Fanqi Pu, Lei Jiang, Wenming YangRobot Imitation LearningData-Efficient Robot Learning

  18. GeCo-SRT: Geometry-aware Continual Adaptation for Robotic Cross-Task Sim-to-Real Transfer

    Feb 24, 2026Wenbo Yu, Wenke Xia, Weitao Zhang +1Sim-to-Real TransferRobot Policy Adaptation

  19. Sample-Efficient Learning with Online Expert Correction for Autonomous Catheter Steering in Endovascular Bifurcation Navigation

    Feb 23, 2026Hao Wang, Tianliang Yao, Bo Lu +4Robotic Endovascular InterventionRL for Robotics

  20. CLASH: Collision Learning via Augmented Sim-to-real Hybridization to Bridge the Reality Gap

    Feb 21, 2026Haotian He, Ning Guo, Siqi Shi +2Sim-to-Real TransferRobotics Simulation

  21. Cross-Embodiment Offline Reinforcement Learning for Heterogeneous Robot Datasets

    Feb 20, 2026Haruki Abe, Takayuki Osa, Yusuke Mukuta +1RL for RoboticsCross-Embodiment Robot Learning

  22. FRAPPE: Infusing World Modeling into Generalist Policies via Multiple Future Representation Alignment

    Feb 19, 2026Han Zhao, Jingbo Wang, Wenxuan Song +5World Models for RoboticsLatent World Models

  23. SparTa: Sparse Graphical Task Models from a Handful of Demonstrations

    Feb 18, 2026Adrian Röfer, Nick Heppert, Abhinav ValadaRobot LearningLearning from Demonstration