English

Hierarchical Policy Learning via Spectral Decomposition

Robotics 2026-06-28 v1

Abstract

In this paper, we identify a semantic decomposition in robot action sequences, separating task-level motion intent from execution-level refinements. By analyzing actions in the spectral domain using the discrete cosine transform (DCT), we observe that low-frequency components capture global motion trajectories, while high-frequency components encode precise timing, alignment, and contact behaviors. Motivated by this structure, we propose Causal Spectral Policy (CSP), which models action generation as a causal coarse-to-fine process: coarse motion is predicted from observation and language, and fine corrections are generated conditionally on the realized trajectory. Across simulation and real-world evaluations, CSP consistently outperforms strong baselines on precision-sensitive manipulation tasks. Additionally, we propose human-inspired teleoperation noise injection as a data augmentation method, under which our approach demonstrates strong robustness to noisy demonstrations.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2606.29570,
  title  = {Hierarchical Policy Learning via Spectral Decomposition},
  author = {Shuxin Cao and Liquan Wang and Walker Byrnes and Yiye Chen and Yilun Du and Animesh Garg},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2606.29570},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-22T20:13:00.547Z