Robot Imitation Learning

Latest papers 647

172 papers in the last four weeks, up 310% on the four weeks before. 1.0% of all new papers.

A4A: Cross-Embodiment Transfer of Action-Oriented 4D Affordances from Human Demonstrations
Sep 5, 2026Yifan Han, Litao Liu, Yuqi Gu +7Robotic Manipulation Cross-Embodiment Robot Learning
Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Rutgers University–New Brunswick · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (GZ) +2
What Matters, When? Diagnosing and Improving Conditional Visual Grounding in Visuomotor Imitation Policies
Sep 4, 2026Vivek Chavan, Pengtao Xie, Yahuan Shi +3Visuomotor Policy Learning Robotic Manipulation
Fraunhofer Institute for Production Systems and Design Technology IPK · Technische Universität Berlin
Dressing in Motion: A Human Motion-Aware Diffusion Policy for Robot-Assisted Dressing
Sep 4, 2026Haoxiang Sun, Fangyuan Wang, Songhao Huang +4Assistive Robotics Dynamic Robotic Manipulation
Department of Mechanical Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, China. · School of Nursing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Hong Kong SAR, China. · School of Physics, Engineering and Technology, University of York, UK. +1
Scaling Bimanual Household Manipulation from 1,500 hours of Demonstrations to On-Policy Corrections
Sep 3, 2026Jiafeng Xu, Qi Li, Yan Shen +7Bimanual Robotic Manipulation Robot Imitation Learning
School of Computer Science, Peking University. · 1PrimeBot Research Institute, Swancor Advanced Materials Co., Ltd. · 3Crobotia.
Does Imitation Learning Preserve Temporal Robustness in Dexterous Manipulation? An Expert-Learner Comparison Across Task Execution Speeds
Sep 1, 2026Clinton Enwerem, John S. Baras, Calin BeltaContact-Rich Robotic Manipulation Robotic Policy Evaluation
Institute for Systems Research University of Maryland College Park, MD, U.S.A.
CanonNav: Disentangling Navigation Behavior from Camera Geometry in Cross-Platform Visual Navigation
Aug 31, 2026Dong-Wook Kim, Ji-Hoon Hwang, E-In Son +2Visual Navigation Safe Robot Navigation
Seoul National University, Republic of Korea
PredVLA: Predictive Sensorimotor Modeling for Sub-Million-Parameter Robot Manipulation
Aug 27, 2026Hiroki Sawada, Shunichi KasaharaLanguage-Conditioned Robot Control Efficient VLA Models
Sony Computer Science Laboratory Tokyo, Japan
FLARE: A Failure-Aware Framework for Autonomous Correction and Recovery in Visual-Language Robotic Manipulation
Aug 27, 2026Ganlong Zhao, Zijia Tang, Xingping Chen +3Robot Failure Recovery Robustness of VLA Models
The Chinese University of Hong Kong · Centre for Perceptual and Interactive Intelligence · Duke University +5
One Policy, Many Embodiments: Unified Camera-Centric Action Geometry Pre-training for Heterogeneous Embodied Manipulation
Aug 26, 2026Xiaomi Embodied Intelligence Team, University of Macau, : +21Robot Learning Cross-Embodiment Robot Learning
Xiaomi Embodied Intelligence Team · University of Macau
VISTA: Visually Inferred Spatial ConTact Attention for Contact-Rich Manipulation
Aug 26, 2026Jiayi Chen, Wenlong Dong, Yan Huang +5Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation Visuomotor Policy Learning
Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School, Tsinghua University, Shenzhen, China. · Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, Southern University of Science and Technology, Shenzhen, China. · School of Future Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China.
Triplet2Track: A Hierarchical System with Object-Centric Representations for Reliable Long-Horizon Manipulation
Aug 24, 2026Jianxiang Liu, Gaojing Zhang, Chuan Wen +4Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation Robot Imitation Learning
School of Artificial Intelligence, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China. · School of Engineering and Informatics, University of Sussex, Brighton, U.K.
WorldToken: Time-First Sequence Modeling for Robotic Imitation Learning
Aug 23, 2026Chunkai Yang, Andong Yang, Di Huang +2Robot Policy Learning Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation
School of Remote Sensing and Information Engineering, Wuhan University, Wuhan, China. · Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. · Institute for AI Industry Research, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.
Predicting Consequences and Reinforcing Navigation Policies with Latent World Models
Aug 23, 2026Zengmao Wang, Wei Gao, Shuhan ShenWorld Models for Robotics Action-Conditioned World Models
School of Advanced Interdisciplinary Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences · Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences · School of Artificial Intelligence, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences
The Imitator Game: Benchmarking Robot Imitative Ability Beyond Action Prediction
Aug 23, 2026Xunzhe Zhou, Yiyang Cai, Fengyi Wang +9Imitation Learning Robot Imitation Learning
The University of Hong Kong · TranscEngram · Fudan University +1
TONAV: Task-Oriented Navigation and Action-Velocity Chunk Learning for Articulated Object Quadrupedal Mobile Manipulation
Aug 23, 2026Haoran Lin, Mingyu Yang, Pengfei Qi +6Articulated Object Manipulation Robot Navigation
School of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics, Hunan University, China · National Engineering Research Center of Robot Visual Perception and Control Technology, Hunan University, China · College of Semiconductors (College of Integrated Circuits), Hunan University, Changsha, China
Beyond Imitation: Self-Improving Robot Policies via Off-Policy Q-Planning
Aug 21, 2026Varun Giridhar, Anant Khandelwal, Jeremy A. Collins +2Robot Policy Adaptation Robotic RL
Georgia Institute of Technology
Demonstration-Guided Humanoid Stand-Up on an Emulated Deformable Surface
Aug 21, 2026Aniruddh Kushwah, Vyankatesh Ashtekar, Ashish DuttaHumanoid Robotics RL for Robotics
Department of Mechanical Engineering Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, India
Rethinking Demonstration Unlearning in Imitation Learning for Robotics
Aug 21, 2026Jiazhuo Li, Yu Zhang, Yiming Fei +4Machine Unlearning Evaluation Robot Imitation Learning
Zhejiang University · Tsinghua Shenzhen International Graduate School · Wuhan University of Technology
Towards Professional Tennis Styles for Humanoid Robots with Adaptive Motion Planning and Tracking
Aug 20, 2026Tao Huang, Ruofei Liu, Xuchen Tang +15Robotics Robot Motion Planning
Noitom Robotics · Shanghai AI Laboratory · Shanghai Jiao Tong University +1
RoboEdit: Turning Human Manipulation Videos into Scalable Robot Experience
Aug 19, 2026Yaowei Guo, Zeng Tao, Yuxin Jiang +7Cross-Embodiment Robot Learning Synthetic Data Generation for Robotics
University of California, Los Angeles · Massachusetts Institute of Technology · University of Utah
HarvestPoint-ACT: Explicit Target Selection and Harvest-Point Conditioning for Robotic Fruit Harvesting under Occlusion
Aug 19, 2026Hanying Hu, Weipeng Li, Yikun Huang +4Robotic Manipulation Agricultural Robotics
College of Computer and Information Sciences, Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University, Fuzhou, China. · School of Mechatronic Engineering and Automation, Shanghai University, Shanghai, China. · Graduate School of Engineering Science, The University of Osaka, Osaka, Japan.
VERAGMIL: Virtual Environment for Scooping Granular Foods with Imitation Learning Models
Aug 18, 2026Amanuel Ergogo, Diego Dall'Alba, Przemyslaw KorzeniowskiAssistive Robotics Robot Learning
SANO Centre for Computational Personalized Medicine, Krakow, Poland. · Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Florida, Tampa, United States. · Department of Engineering for Innovation Medicine, University of Verona, Verona, Italy.
FetchMan: Learning Visual Humanoid Loco-Manipulation Policies from Simulated Experiences
Aug 17, 2026Omar Rayyan, Zhi Li, Max Argus +4Humanoid Loco-Manipulation Sim-to-Real Transfer
University of California, Los Angeles · Allen Institute for AI · University of Washington
MatchingPolicy: Correspondence-Aware Policy Enables Cross-Object In-Context Learning
Aug 17, 2026Qijin She, Hanyang Yu, Zeming Li +1Robot Imitation Learning ICL for Robotics
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Hong Kong SAR, China
ViHaTeleop: A Low-Cost, Lightweight Visual-Haptic Teleoperation System for Dexterous Manipulation Learning
Aug 17, 2026Fucai Zhu, Yanhou Lai, Paul Maestre +1Robot Teleoperation Haptic Feedback
Graduate School of Information Sciences, Tohoku University, Sendai, Japan
SurgVIL: Scaling Surgical Robot Imitation Learning with Open-source Surgical Videos
Aug 17, 2026Xinhao Chen, JuoTung Chen, Nigel Nelson +4Robot Imitation Learning Surgical Robotics
Laboratory for Computational Sensing and Robotics (LCSR) Johns Hopkins University, USA · Nvidia, USA
Learning Varying Physical Therapist-Patient Interactions for Robot-mediated Upper Limb Task-Specific Training
Aug 17, 2026Jia Quan Loh, Vincent Crocher, Marlena Klaic +2Assistive Robotics Human-Robot Interaction
Human Robotics Laboratory, Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Melbourne · Melbourne School of Health Sciences, The University of Melbourne
Revisiting Open-Loop Execution in Robotics: Toward Reactive, Higher-Performing Policies
Aug 16, 2026Michael Zeng, Abhinav Agarwal, Ajay Bati +3Robot Policy Learning Robot Imitation Learning
Massachusetts Institute of Technology · Mundane Systems Inc. · University of California, Berkeley
PILOT: Privileged Imitation Learning for End-to-End Motion Planning of Autonomous UAVs under Partial Observability
Aug 14, 2026Qingrui Zhang, Feng Xue, Xiang Zhou +1UAV Navigation Constrained Motion Planning
School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Sun Yat-sen University (Shenzhen Campus), Shenzhen, China
NestDex: Nested Policy Learning with Copilot Assisted Teleoperation for Dexterous Manipulation
Aug 13, 2026James Zhao, Jinhe Tang, Mingyuan Ba +1Robot Teleoperation Visuomotor Policy Learning
School of Computer Science and 2Australian Centre for Robotics, The University of Sydney, Australia · College of Connected Computing, Vanderbilt University, TN, USA

Sep 5, 2026J/K move · Enter open · S save

A4A: Cross-Embodiment Transfer of Action-Oriented 4D Affordances from Human Demonstrations

Yifan Han, Litao Liu, Yuqi Gu, Ye Lu+6

Shanghai Jiao Tong University · Rutgers University–New Brunswick · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (GZ)+2

Robotic Manipulation Cross-Embodiment Robot Learning Language-Conditioned Robot Manipulation Robot Imitation Learning

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Human demonstrations contain rich manipulation knowledge, but it remains unclear what information can be transferred effectively to robot control. Existing affordance representations are typically formulated as 2D masks, 3D regions, contact points, or actionability scores, and therefore primarily identify where interaction may occur. However, effective manipulation also requires modeling how interaction-relevant geometry evolves during task execution. To bridge this gap, we introduce action-oriented 4D affordances, which represent the language-conditioned future trajectories of interaction-relevant 3D points. These trajectories capture task-conditioned geometric evolution rather than embodiment-specific actions, enabling transferable interaction priors across humans and robots. Based on this representation, we construct a large-scale action-oriented 4D affordance dataset from existing human--object interaction video data and complementary RGB-D demonstrations, and introduce A4A, an affordance-to-action framework that uses 4D affordance trajectory prediction to pretrain robot policies before manipulation fine-tuning. Experiments in both simulation and the real world validate the effectiveness of A4A, showing that pretraining with action-oriented 4D affordance data consistently improves the manipulation performance of diverse VLA policies. These results establish action-oriented 4D affordances as an effective cross-embodiment representation for transferring manipulation knowledge from human demonstrations to robot control.