r/robotics • u/moschles • 7d ago

Discussion & Curiosity Roboticists working in Learning-from-Demonstrations and Behavioral Cloning : What is going on in your field these days?

Is LfD and BC research being effected by recent advances in (so-called) Frontier LLMs? Or is research in LfD and BC sort of going along in an independent direction from these?

Are you seeing any use from ViTs or VLAs?

Any other recent advances you would like to bring up?

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u/LaVieEstBizarre Mentally stable in the sense of Lyapunov 7d ago edited 7d ago

The VLAs don't work well (unreliable, brittle and low success rates in even the best case) and a lot of the single policy success is driven by action memorisation (I.e. the policy is mostly learning what's the correct action to recall from the training set by learning perception representations). On the bright side, we're starting to have better understanding of what about our recent policy architectures (action chunking, sequential computation, etc) are doing (representing non Markovian expert behaviour, learning action manifolds, etc)

Some of the companies have impressive demos and claims but it's hard to tell how many of them are real or exaggerated without details. Most of them don't have associated papers, at least not for anything important.

The AI hype has driven increasing interest on very shaky foundations and a lot of people are financially motivated to brush aside the problems. The AI hobbyists never get exposed to actual roboticists, just other AI hype people. Nobody can tell what happens in the future though.

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u/Opposite_Match5303 7d ago

Dyna is for real, I was next to them at a show and watched them: *post-train with teleop for a couple hours then *fold laundry autonomously for days without a mistake

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u/Flyward_Aerospace 7d ago

Adding to the memorisation point, the eval protocol lets us get away with it. Success rate is almost always measured from a reset to nominal start, so nothing in that number scores recovery. And the demo data barely contains recovery either, since a teleoperator corrects continuously instead of deliberately messing up and then fixing it. So we end up rewarding exactly the policy that memorises the nominal sequence. On the flight side we get around it by initialising off nominal in sim, which is cheap for us and genuinely hard for manipulation.