Data to 7 Oct 2026

One-Shot Imitation from Observing Humans via Domain-Adaptive Meta-Learning

arXiv 1802.01557 ↗First posted 5 Feb 2018cs.LG cs.AI cs.CVcited by 146

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Cited by 60 in Offline RL and imitation learning from data, but placed by its own abstract, which didn’t fit.

Abstract (arXiv)

Humans and animals are capable of learning a new behavior by observing others perform the skill just once. We consider the problem of allowing a robot to do the same -- learning from a raw video pixels of a human, even when there is substantial domain shift in the perspective, environment, and embodiment between the robot and the observed human. Prior approaches to this problem have hand-specified how human and robot actions correspond and often relied on explicit human pose detection systems. In this work, we present an approach for one-shot learning from a video of a human by using human and robot demonstration data from a variety of previous tasks to build up prior knowledge through meta-learning. Then, combining this prior knowledge and only a single video demonstration from a human, the robot can perform the task that the human demonstrated. We show experiments on both a PR2 arm and a Sawyer arm, demonstrating that after meta-learning, the robot can learn to place, push, and pick-and-place new objects using just one video of a human performing the manipulation.

Key facts. Cited by 146 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 5 Feb 2018.

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Citing papers per year: 2018: 2; 2019: 12; 2020: 8; 2021: 27; 2022: 22; 2023: 32; 2024: 21; 2025: 17; 2026: 5.

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2023RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Controlcited by 2,993
2022R3M: A Universal Visual Representation for Robot Manipulationcited by 678
2023BridgeData V2: A Dataset for Robot Learning at Scalecited by 634
2022BC-Z: Zero-Shot Task Generalization with Robotic Imitation Learningcited by 517
2024Mobile ALOHA: Learning Bimanual Mobile Manipulation with Low-Cost Whole-Body Teleoperationcited by 377
2019Extrapolating Beyond Suboptimal Demonstrations via Inverse Reinforcement Learning from Observationscited by 256
2021Bridge Data: Boosting Generalization of Robotic Skills with Cross-Domain Datasetscited by 248
2021MT-Opt: Continuous Multi-Task Robotic Reinforcement Learning at Scalecited by 226
2023Affordances from Human Videos as a Versatile Representation for Roboticscited by 221
2023RH20T: A Comprehensive Robotic Dataset for Learning Diverse Skills in One-Shotcited by 173
2022Human-to-Robot Imitation in the Wildcited by 157
2021Learning Language-Conditioned Robot Behavior from Offline Data and Crowd-Sourced Annotationcited by 117

38 more

2021Learning Generalizable Robotic Reward Functions from "In-The-Wild" Human Videoscited by 116
2023Toward General-Purpose Robots via Foundation Models: A Survey and Meta-Analysiscited by 99
2022Instruction-driven history-aware policies for robotic manipulationscited by 93
2024EgoExoLearn: A Dataset for Bridging Asynchronous Ego- and Exo-centric View of Procedural Activities in Real Worldcited by 93
2021Coarse-to-Fine Imitation Learning: Robot Manipulation from a Single Demonstrationcited by 92
2021Learning by Watching: Physical Imitation of Manipulation Skills from Human Videoscited by 87
2023XSkill: Cross Embodiment Skill Discoverycited by 74
2019Third-Person Visual Imitation Learning via Decoupled Hierarchical Controllercited by 73
2018Task-Embedded Control Networks for Few-Shot Imitation Learningcited by 65
2023Advances and Challenges in Meta-Learning: A Technical Reviewcited by 65
2021Imitation Learning: Progress, Taxonomies and Challengescited by 56
2024Robot See Robot Do: Imitating Articulated Object Manipulation with Monocular 4D Reconstructioncited by 51
2019Meta-Inverse Reinforcement Learning with Probabilistic Context Variablescited by 50
2021Towards More Generalizable One-shot Visual Imitation Learningcited by 48
2023Pre-training Contextualized World Models with In-the-wild Videos for Reinforcement Learningcited by 45
2021AGENT: A Benchmark for Core Psychological Reasoningcited by 42
2024Hand-Object Interaction Pretraining from Videoscited by 38
2022Skill-based Meta-Reinforcement Learningcited by 36
2024VLM See, Robot Do: Human Demo Video to Robot Action Plan via Vision Language Modelcited by 36
2022On Transforming Reinforcement Learning by Transformer: The Development Trajectorycited by 35
2025Robotic Manipulation by Imitating Generated Videos Without Physical Demonstrationscited by 33
2018One-Shot Hierarchical Imitation Learning of Compound Visuomotor Taskscited by 32
2022Learning to Imitate Object Interactions from Internet Videoscited by 32
2022LISA: Learning Interpretable Skill Abstractions from Languagecited by 30
2023Inverse Dynamics Pretraining Learns Good Representations for Multitask Imitationcited by 30
2025UniSkill: Imitating Human Videos via Cross-Embodiment Skill Representationscited by 30
2024DITTO: Demonstration Imitation by Trajectory Transformationcited by 28
2019Watch, Try, Learn: Meta-Learning from Demonstrations and Rewardcited by 26
2021Noether Networks: Meta-Learning Useful Conserved Quantitiescited by 26
2021Bayesian Meta-Learning for Few-Shot Policy Adaptation Across Robotic Platformscited by 22
2021How to Train Your MAML to Excel in Few-Shot Classificationcited by 22
2020Scalable Multi-Task Imitation Learning with Autonomous Improvementcited by 21
2021Continuous Control with Action Quantization from Demonstrationscited by 21
2021Learning Multi-Stage Tasks with One Demonstration via Self-Replaycited by 21
2022Interactron: Embodied Adaptive Object Detectioncited by 21
2023One-Shot Imitation Learning: A Pose Estimation Perspectivecited by 21
2024Don't Start from Scratch: Behavioral Refinement via Interpolant-based Policy Diffusioncited by 21
2021DemoGrasp: Few-Shot Learning for Robotic Grasping with Human Demonstrationcited by 20

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