mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Combining Self-Supervised Learning and Imitation for Vision-Based Rope Manipulation

arXiv 1703.02018 ↗First posted 6 Mar 2017cs.CV cs.LG cs.ROcited by 90

Not on the map. Why?

Cited by 31 in Offline RL and imitation learning from data, but placed by its own abstract, which didn’t fit.

Abstract (arXiv)

Manipulation of deformable objects, such as ropes and cloth, is an important but challenging problem in robotics. We present a learning-based system where a robot takes as input a sequence of images of a human manipulating a rope from an initial to goal configuration, and outputs a sequence of actions that can reproduce the human demonstration, using only monocular images as input. To perform this task, the robot learns a pixel-level inverse dynamics model of rope manipulation directly from images in a self-supervised manner, using about 60K interactions with the rope collected autonomously by the robot. The human demonstration provides a high-level plan of what to do and the low-level inverse model is used to execute the plan. We show that by combining the high and low-level plans, the robot can successfully manipulate a rope into a variety of target shapes using only a sequence of human-provided images for direction.

Key facts. Cited by 90 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 6 Mar 2017.

Builds on

No reference list yet.

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2018: 2; 2019: 3; 2020: 3; 2021: 18; 2022: 19; 2023: 22; 2024: 9; 2025: 9; 2026: 5.

90 papers.

Sort:

By area:

  1. 2023BridgeData V2: A Dataset for Robot Learning at Scalecited by 634
  2. 2018An Algorithmic Perspective on Imitation Learningcited by 455
  3. 2022Video PreTraining (VPT): Learning to Act by Watching Unlabeled Online Videoscited by 338
  4. 2023Affordances from Human Videos as a Versatile Representation for Roboticscited by 221
  5. 2020Toward the Fundamental Limits of Imitation Learningcited by 96
  6. 2019Recent Advances in Imitation Learning from Observationcited by 92
  7. 2021Coarse-to-Fine Imitation Learning: Robot Manipulation from a Single Demonstrationcited by 92
  8. 2020State-Only Imitation Learning for Dexterous Manipulationcited by 90
  9. 2022You Only Demonstrate Once: Category-Level Manipulation from Single Visual Demonstrationcited by 79
  10. 2019Provably Efficient Imitation Learning from Observation Alonecited by 78
  11. 2022Dexterous Imitation Made Easy: A Learning-Based Framework for Efficient Dexterous Manipulationcited by 75
  12. 2022RoboCraft: Learning to See, Simulate, and Shape Elasto-Plastic Objects with Graph Networkscited by 69
38 more
  1. 2023Multi-Stage Cable Routing through Hierarchical Imitation Learningcited by 59
  2. 2021Imitation Learning: Progress, Taxonomies and Challengescited by 56
  3. 2021FabricFlowNet: Bimanual Cloth Manipulation with a Flow-based Policycited by 54
  4. 2024Efficient Diffusion Transformer Policies with Mixture of Expert Denoisers for Multitask Learningcited by 46
  5. 2022DiffSkill: Skill Abstraction from Differentiable Physics for Deformable Object Manipulations with Toolscited by 44
  6. 2022Mesh-based Dynamics with Occlusion Reasoning for Cloth Manipulationcited by 32
  7. 2023LS-IQ: Implicit Reward Regularization for Inverse Reinforcement Learningcited by 28
  8. 2021Self-Supervised Euphemism Detection and Identification for Content Moderationcited by 24
  9. 2021Learning by Watchingcited by 22
  10. 2022Using Both Demonstrations and Language Instructions to Efficiently Learn Robotic Taskscited by 17
  11. 2024A Survey of Imitation Learning Methods, Environments and Metricscited by 16
  12. 2023A Perspective of Q-value Estimation on Offline-to-Online Reinforcement Learningcited by 15
  13. 2022Contact Points Discovery for Soft-Body Manipulations with Differentiable Physicscited by 14
  14. 2024Stabilizing Reinforcement Learning in Differentiable Multiphysics Simulationcited by 14
  15. 2021Recent Advances in Leveraging Human Guidance for Sequential Decision-Making Taskscited by 13
  16. 2023Breadcrumbs to the Goal: Goal-Conditioned Exploration from Human-in-the-Loop Feedbackcited by 13
  17. 2021Provably Breaking the Quadratic Error Compounding Barrier in Imitation Learning, Optimallycited by 12
  18. 2022Plan Your Target and Learn Your Skills: Transferable State-Only Imitation Learning via Decoupled Policy Optimizationcited by 12
  19. 2025A Survey on Imitation Learning for Contact-Rich Tasks in Roboticscited by 12
  20. 2021Untangling Dense Non-Planar Knots by Learning Manipulation Features and Recovery Policiescited by 11
  21. 2024One-Shot Imitation under Mismatched Executioncited by 11
  22. 2019To Follow or not to Follow: Selective Imitation Learning from Observationscited by 10
  23. 2020Interactive Imitation Learning in State-Spacecited by 10
  24. 2021Physics perception in sloshing scenes with guaranteed thermodynamic consistencycited by 10
  25. 2023Foldsformer: Learning Sequential Multi-Step Cloth Manipulation With Space-Time Attentioncited by 10
  26. 2023Imitation Learning from Observation with Automatic Discount Schedulingcited by 10
  27. 2022Bilinear value networkscited by 9
  28. 2022Autonomously Untangling Long Cablescited by 9
  29. 2023PLEX: Making the Most of the Available Data for Robotic Manipulation Pretrainingcited by 9
  30. 2024PianoMime: Learning a Generalist, Dexterous Piano Player from Internet Demonstrationscited by 8
  31. 2021Deformable Linear Object Prediction Using Locally Linear Latent Dynamicscited by 7
  32. 2021Disentangling Dense Multi-Cable Knotscited by 7
  33. 2022Learning to Fold Real Garments with One Arm: A Case Study in Cloud-Based Robotics Researchcited by 6
  34. 2023Deep Reinforcement Learning Based on Local GNN for Goal-conditioned Deformable Object Rearrangingcited by 6
  35. 2023Giving Robots a Hand: Learning Generalizable Manipulation with Eye-in-Hand Human Video Demonstrationscited by 6
  36. 2018Shared Multi-Task Imitation Learning for Indoor Self-Navigationcited by 5
  37. 2022SGTM 2.0: Autonomously Untangling Long Cables using Interactive Perceptioncited by 5
  38. 2023Mimicking Better by Matching the Approximate Action Distributioncited by 5

50 most cited of 90 All 90 (JSON)