Learning from Demonstration

Overview

Learning from Demonstration studies how an agent can acquire skills, goals, or task rules from examples rather than relying only on hand-coded instructions or rewards. Common approaches include behavior cloning of demonstrated actions, inverse reinforcement learning, reinforcement learning guided by demonstrations, and extracting reusable skills or symbolic plans from video and interaction traces. Work spans robot manipulation and navigation as well as GUI workflows, with evaluation in simulation, on real hardware, and on held-out tasks or objects. A central challenge is turning limited, imperfect demonstrations into safe, closed-loop behavior that generalizes across scenes and embodiments; data quality and offline prediction scores do not always reveal whether a policy will succeed at deployment.

Latest papers

CardsList

146 papers24 papers in the last four weeks, up 33% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. cotomi Act: Learning to Automate Work by Watching You

    May 4, 2026Masafumi Oyamada, Kunihiro Takeoka, Kosuke Akimoto +5Agent MemoryComputer-Use Agents

  2. Good in Bad (GiB): Sifting Through End-user Demonstrations for Learning a Better Policy

    May 2, 2026Noushad Sojib, Ola Ghattas, Momotaz BegumRobot Policy LearningRobot Skill Learning

  3. Learning from Demonstration with Failure Awareness for Safe Robot Navigation

    Apr 25, 2026Xianghui Wang, Siwei Cheng, Shanze Wang +3Safe Robot NavigationOffline RL

  4. SpanVLA: Learning from Negative-Recovery Samples with Fast Action Bridging for Vision-Language-Action Model

    Apr 21, 2026Zewei Zhou, Ruining Yang, Xuewei Qi +7VLMs for Autonomous DrivingAutonomous Driving

  5. Refinement of Accelerated Demonstrations via Incremental Iterative Reference Learning Control for Fast Contact-Rich Imitation Learning

    Apr 18, 2026Koki Yamane, Cristian C. Beltran-Hernandez, Steven Oh +2Robot Trajectory TrackingContact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

  6. A Unified Multi-Layer Framework for Skill Acquisition from Imperfect Human Demonstrations

    Apr 9, 2026Zi-Qi Yang, Mehrdad R. KermaniCompliant Robot ControlRobot Skill Learning

  7. EgoVerse: An Egocentric Human Dataset for Robot Learning from Around the World

    Apr 8, 2026Ryan Punamiya, Simar Kareer, Zeyi Liu +37Cross-Embodiment Robot LearningRobot Learning

  8. Optimizing Neurorobot Policy under Limited Demonstration Data through Preference Regret

    Apr 4, 2026Viet Dung Nguyen, Yuhang Song, Anh Nguyen +3Learning from DemonstrationRobot Imitation Learning

  9. GPA: Learning GUI Process Automation from Demonstrations

    Apr 2, 2026Zirui Zhao, Jun Hao Liew, Yan Yang +5GUI AutomationBusiness Process Automation

  10. Hierarchical Apprenticeship Learning from Imperfect Demonstrations with Evolving Rewards

    Mar 31, 2026Md Mirajul Islam, Rajesh Debnath, Adittya Soukarjya Saha +1Learning from Suboptimal DemonstrationsLearning from Demonstration

  11. Rainbow-DemoRL: Combining Improvements in Demonstration-Augmented Reinforcement Learning

    Mar 28, 2026Dwait Bhatt, Shih-Chieh Chou, Nikolay AtanasovOffline-To-Online RLSample-Efficient RL

  12. Influence of Gripper Design on Human Demonstration Quality for Robot Learning

    Mar 17, 2026Gina L. Georgadarellis, Natalija Beslic, Seonhun Lee +2Healthcare RoboticsRobotics

  13. 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

  14. See and Switch: Vision-Based Branching for Interactive Robot-Skill Programming

    Mar 9, 2026Petr Vanc, Jan Kristof Behrens, Václav Hlaváč +1Robot Skill LearningRobotic Manipulation

  15. Generative adversarial imitation learning for robot swarms: Learning from human demonstrations and trained policies

    Mar 3, 2026Mattes Kraus, Jonas KucklingRobot Imitation LearningLearning from Demonstration

  16. Interface-Aware Trajectory Reconstruction of Limited Demonstrations for Robot Learning

    Feb 26, 2026Demiana R. Barsoum, Mahdieh Nejati Javaremi, Larisa Y. C. Loke +1Learning from Suboptimal DemonstrationsTrajectory Inference

  17. Human-to-Robot Interaction: Learning from Video Demonstration for Robot Imitation

    Feb 22, 2026Thanh Nguyen Canh, Thanh-Tuan Tran, Haolan Zhang +3Learning from DemonstrationRobot Imitation Learning

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

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

  19. Policy Improvement with Style-Specific Demonstrations

    Jun 20, 2025Lingfeng Li, Yunlong Lu, Yongyi Wang +1Reinforcement LearningGame-Playing Agents

  20. HERB: Human-augmented Efficient Reinforcement learning for Bin-packing

    Apr 23, 2025Gojko Perovic, Nuno Ferreira Duarte, Atabak Dehban +3Robotic RLRobotics