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Robotic assembly presents a long-standing challenge due to its requirement for precise, contact-rich manipulation. While simulation-based learning has enabled the development of robust assembly policies, their performance often degrades…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-02-27 Yijie Guo , Iretiayo Akinola , Lars Johannsmeier , Hugo Hadfield , Abhishek Gupta , Yashraj Narang

Behavior Cloning (BC) is an effective imitation learning technique and has even been adopted in some safety-critical domains such as autonomous vehicles. BC trains a policy to mimic the behavior of an expert by using a dataset composed of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Shili Wu , Yizhao Jin , Puhua Niu , Aniruddha Datta , Sean B. Andersson

Contact-rich robotic skills remain challenging for industrial robots due to tight geometric tolerances, frictional variability, and uncertain contact dynamics, particularly when using position-controlled manipulators. This paper presents a…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-09 Khalil Abuibaid , Aleksandr Sidorenko , Achim Wagner , Martin Ruskowski

There is an increased demand for task automation in robots. Contact-rich tasks, wherein multiple contact transitions occur in a series of operations, are extensively being studied to realize high accuracy. In this study, we propose a…

Robotics · Computer Science 2020-02-28 Masahide Oikawa , Kyo Kutsuzawa , Sho Sakaino , Toshiaki Tsuji

In this study, we show that a movement policy can be improved efficiently using the previous experiences of a real robot. Reinforcement Learning (RL) is becoming a popular approach to acquire a nonlinear optimal policy through trial and…

The ability to discover optimal behaviour from fixed data sets has the potential to transfer the successes of reinforcement learning (RL) to domains where data collection is acutely problematic. In this offline setting, a key challenge is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-11-23 Alex Beeson , Giovanni Montana

While classic control theory offers state of the art solutions in many problem scenarios, it is often desired to improve beyond the structure of such solutions and surpass their limitations. To this end, residual policy learning (RPL)…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-08-09 Alireza Ranjbar , Ngo Anh Vien , Hanna Ziesche , Joschka Boedecker , Gerhard Neumann

The safe application of reinforcement learning (RL) requires generalization from limited training data to unseen scenarios. Yet, fulfilling tasks under changing circumstances is a key challenge in RL. Current state-of-the-art approaches for…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-06 Philipp Altmann , Fabian Ritz , Leonard Feuchtinger , Jonas Nüßlein , Claudia Linnhoff-Popien , Thomy Phan

Behavior Cloning (BC) has emerged as a highly effective paradigm for robot learning. However, BC lacks a self-guided mechanism for online improvement after demonstrations have been collected. Existing offline-to-online learning methods…

Residual Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a popular approach for adapting pretrained policies by learning a lightweight residual policy that provides corrective actions. While Residual RL is more sample-efficient than finetuning the entire…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Lakshita Dodeja , Karl Schmeckpeper , Shivam Vats , Thomas Weng , Mingxi Jia , George Konidaris , Stefanie Tellex

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn the optimal policy from a fixed dataset generated by behavior policies without additional environment interactions. One common challenge that arises in this setting is the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-06 Songyuan Zhang , Oswin So , H. M. Sabbir Ahmad , Eric Yang Yu , Matthew Cleaveland , Mitchell Black , Chuchu Fan

High-quality and representative data is essential for both Imitation Learning (IL)- and Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based motion planning tasks. For real robots, it is challenging to collect enough qualified data either as demonstrations…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-06-13 Sha Luo , Lambert Schomaker

Behavior cloning (BC) is a popular supervised imitation learning method in the societies of robotics, autonomous driving, etc., wherein complex skills can be learned by direct imitation from expert demonstrations. Despite its rapid…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-08-21 Wensheng Liang , Jun Xie , Zhicheng Wang , Jianwei Tan , Xiaoguang Ma

Advanced building control methods such as model predictive control (MPC) offer significant potential benefits to both consumers and grid operators, but the high computational requirements have acted as barriers to more widespread adoption.…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-04-02 Zachary E. Lee , K. Max Zhang

Behavior cloning (BC) has become a staple imitation learning paradigm in robotics due to its ease of teaching robots complex skills directly from expert demonstrations. However, BC suffers from an inherent generalization issue. To solve…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-08-12 Tianyu Li , Sunan Sun , Shubhodeep Shiv Aditya , Nadia Figueroa

We present Residual Policy Learning (RPL): a simple method for improving nondifferentiable policies using model-free deep reinforcement learning. RPL thrives in complex robotic manipulation tasks where good but imperfect controllers are…

Robotics · Computer Science 2019-01-04 Tom Silver , Kelsey Allen , Josh Tenenbaum , Leslie Kaelbling

Reinforcement learning (RL) is widely used for humanoid control, with on-policy methods such as Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) enabling robust training via large-scale parallel simulation and, in some cases, zero-shot deployment to real…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-02-24 Weidong Huang , Zhehan Li , Hangxin Liu , Biao Hou , Yao Su , Jingwen Zhang

Prediction is an appealing objective for self-supervised learning of behavioral skills, particularly for autonomous robots. However, effectively utilizing predictive models for control, especially with raw image inputs, poses a number of…

Robotics · Computer Science 2018-10-09 Frederik Ebert , Sudeep Dasari , Alex X. Lee , Sergey Levine , Chelsea Finn

Reinforcement learning (RL) holds great promise for enabling autonomous acquisition of complex robotic manipulation skills, but realizing this potential in real-world settings has been challenging. We present a human-in-the-loop…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-21 Jianlan Luo , Charles Xu , Jeffrey Wu , Sergey Levine

Learning robust driving policies from large-scale, real-world datasets is a central challenge in autonomous driving, as online data collection is often unsafe and impractical. While Behavioral Cloning (BC) offers a straightforward approach…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-28 Antonio Guillen-Perez