mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Waypoint-Based Imitation Learning for Robotic Manipulation

arXiv 2307.14326 ↗First posted 26 Jul 2023cs.RO cs.AI cs.LGcited by 59

On the map: Offline RL and imitation learning from data → Robot manipulation imitation learning

Abstract (arXiv)

While imitation learning methods have seen a resurgent interest for robotic manipulation, the well-known problem of compounding errors continues to afflict behavioral cloning (BC). Waypoints can help address this problem by reducing the horizon of the learning problem for BC, and thus, the errors compounded over time. However, waypoint labeling is underspecified, and requires additional human supervision. Can we generate waypoints automatically without any additional human supervision? Our key insight is that if a trajectory segment can be approximated by linear motion, the endpoints can be used as waypoints. We propose Automatic Waypoint Extraction (AWE) for imitation learning, a preprocessing module to decompose a demonstration into a minimal set of waypoints which when interpolated linearly can approximate the trajectory up to a specified error threshold. AWE can be combined with any BC algorithm, and we find that AWE can increase the success rate of state-of-the-art algorithms by up to 25% in simulation and by 4-28% on real-world bimanual manipulation tasks, reducing the decision making horizon by up to a factor of 10. Videos and code are available at https://lucys0.github.io/awe/

Key facts. Cited by 59 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Robot manipulation imitation learning, one of 13 directions in Offline RL and imitation learning from data. Builds on 29 of its 44 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 26 Jul 2023.

Builds on

29 of 44 references.

Closest ancestors · 11

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2023HYDRA: Hybrid Robot Actions for Imitation Learning29 Jun
  2. 2023Learning Fine-Grained Bimanual Manipulation with Low-Cost Hardware23 Apr
  3. 2023NeRF in the Palm of Your Hand: Corrective Augmentation for Robotics via Novel-View Synthesis18 Jan
  4. 2022SEIL: Simulation-augmented Equivariant Imitation Learning31 Oct
  5. 2022VIOLA: Imitation Learning for Vision-Based Manipulation with Object Proposal Priors20 Oct
  6. 2022Behavior Transformers: Cloning k modes with one stone22 Jun
  7. 2022BC-Z: Zero-Shot Task Generalization with Robotic Imitation Learning4 Feb
  8. 2021The Surprising Effectiveness of Representation Learning for Visual Imitation2 Dec
  9. 2021Coarse-to-Fine Imitation Learning: Robot Manipulation from a Single Demonstration13 May
  10. 2021Generalization Through Hand-Eye Coordination: An Action Space for Learning Spatially-Invariant Visuomotor Control28 Feb
  11. 2019Self-Supervised Correspondence in Visuomotor Policy Learning16 Sep

Other references · 18

  1. 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 20,851
  2. 2023Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusioncited by 2,730
  3. 2022RT-1: Robotics Transformer for Real-World Control at Scalecited by 2,007
  4. 2021What Matters in Learning from Offline Human Demonstrations for Robot Manipulationcited by 699
  5. 2021CLIPort: What and Where Pathways for Robotic Manipulationcited by 617
  6. 2022Perceiver-Actor: A Multi-Task Transformer for Robotic Manipulationcited by 545
  7. 2021Implicit Behavioral Cloningcited by 442
  8. 2020Transporter Networks: Rearranging the Visual World for Robotic Manipulationcited by 342
  9. 2017Deep Imitation Learning for Complex Manipulation Tasks from Virtual Reality Teleoperationcited by 286
  10. 2019TossingBot: Learning to Throw Arbitrary Objects with Residual Physicscited by 131
  11. 2017Robotic Pick-and-Place of Novel Objects in Clutter with Multi-Affordance Grasping and Cross-Domain Image Matchingcited by 124
  12. 2018Learning Synergies between Pushing and Grasping with Self-supervised Deep Reinforcement Learningcited by 121
6 more
  1. 2018Closing the Loop for Robotic Grasping: A Real-time, Generative Grasp Synthesis Approachcited by 117
  2. 2021Q-attention: Enabling Efficient Learning for Vision-based Robotic Manipulationcited by 85
  3. 2019Form2Fit: Learning Shape Priors for Generalizable Assembly from Disassemblycited by 51
  4. 2020Spatial Action Maps for Mobile Manipulationcited by 31
  5. 2019Learned Critical Probabilistic Roadmaps for Robotic Motion Planningcited by 18
  6. 2021Rapidly-exploring Random Forest: Adaptively Exploits Local Structure with Generalised Multi-Trees Motion Planningcited by 3

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2023: 3; 2024: 25; 2025: 22; 2026: 9.

59 papers.

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By area:

  1. 2024Mobile ALOHA: Learning Bimanual Mobile Manipulation with Low-Cost Whole-Body Teleoperationcited by 377
  2. 2023A Survey of Imitation Learning: Algorithms, Recent Developments, and Challengescited by 145
  3. 2024RVT-2: Learning Precise Manipulation from Few Demonstrationscited by 135
  4. 2024EquiBot: SIM(3)-Equivariant Diffusion Policy for Generalizable and Data Efficient Learningcited by 72
  5. 2024SkillMimicGen: Automated Demonstration Generation for Efficient Skill Learning and Deploymentcited by 48
  6. 2024Bidirectional Decoding: Improving Action Chunking via Guided Test-Time Samplingcited by 46
  7. 2025Diffusion Models for Robotic Manipulation: A Surveycited by 39
  8. 2024Twisting Lids Off with Two Handscited by 36
  9. 2025Multi-agent Embodied AI: Advances and Future Directionscited by 36
  10. 2024BiGym: A Demo-Driven Mobile Bi-Manual Manipulation Benchmarkcited by 30
  11. 2023Universal Visual Decomposer: Long-Horizon Manipulation Made Easycited by 23
  12. 2024VoxAct-B: Voxel-Based Acting and Stabilizing Policy for Bimanual Manipulationcited by 21
38 more
  1. 2024InterACT: Inter-dependency Aware Action Chunking with Hierarchical Attention Transformers for Bimanual Manipulationcited by 21
  2. 2024Deep Generative Models for Offline Policy Learning: Tutorial, Survey, and Perspectives on Future Directionscited by 20
  3. 2026Fast-ThinkAct: Efficient Vision-Language-Action Reasoning via Verbalizable Latent Planningcited by 20
  4. 2023Kinematic-aware Prompting for Generalizable Articulated Object Manipulation with LLMscited by 19
  5. 2025Dense Policy: Bidirectional Autoregressive Learning of Actionscited by 19
  6. 2025Dexterous Manipulation through Imitation Learning: A Surveycited by 18
  7. 2025Chain-of-Action: Trajectory Autoregressive Modeling for Robotic Manipulationcited by 16
  8. 2025SAIL: Faster-than-Demonstration Execution of Imitation Learning Policiescited by 16
  9. 2024Mimicking-Bench: A Benchmark for Generalizable Humanoid-Scene Interaction Learning via Human Mimickingcited by 14
  10. 2024Leveraging Locality to Boost Sample Efficiency in Robotic Manipulationcited by 13
  11. 2025Think Small, Act Big: Primitive Prompt Learning for Lifelong Robot Manipulationcited by 13
  12. 2024VIEW: Visual Imitation Learning with Waypointscited by 10
  13. 2025MTIL: Encoding Full History with Mamba for Temporal Imitation Learningcited by 10
  14. 2024DrS: Learning Reusable Dense Rewards for Multi-Stage Taskscited by 9
  15. 2024What's the Move? Hybrid Imitation Learning via Salient Pointscited by 9
  16. 2024PRIME: Scaffolding Manipulation Tasks with Behavior Primitives for Data-Efficient Imitation Learningcited by 8
  17. 2025CodeDiffuser: Attention-Enhanced Diffusion Policy via VLM-Generated Code for Instruction Ambiguitycited by 8
  18. 2025Subtask-Aware Visual Reward Learning from Segmented Demonstrationscited by 7
  19. 2025Mind to Hand: Purposeful Robotic Control via Embodied Reasoningcited by 7
  20. 2024Out-of-Distribution Recovery with Object-Centric Keypoint Inverse Policy for Visuomotor Imitation Learningcited by 6
  21. 2024BiKC: Keypose-Conditioned Consistency Policy for Bimanual Robotic Manipulationcited by 5
  22. 2024MaxMI: A Maximal Mutual Information Criterion for Manipulation Concept Discoverycited by 5
  23. 2025Modality-Composable Diffusion Policy via Inference-Time Distribution-level Compositioncited by 5
  24. 2025D-CODA: Diffusion for Coordinated Dual-Arm Data Augmentationcited by 4
  25. 2025ESPADA: Execution Speedup via Semantics Aware Demonstration Data Downsampling for Imitation Learningcited by 4
  26. 2024InfoCon: Concept Discovery with Generative and Discriminative Informativenesscited by 3
  27. 2025Bootstrapping Imitation Learning for Long-horizon Manipulation via Hierarchical Data Collection Spacecited by 3
  28. 2025SimGenHOI: Physically Realistic Whole-Body Humanoid-Object Interaction via Generative Modeling and Reinforcement Learningcited by 3
  29. 2026Speedup Patch: Learning a Plug-and-Play Policy to Accelerate Embodied Manipulationcited by 3
  30. 2024Goal-Reaching Policy Learning from Non-Expert Observations via Effective Subgoal Guidancecited by 2
  31. 2025Near-Optimal Second-Order Guarantees for Model-Based Adversarial Imitation Learningcited by 2
  32. 2026Improving Vision-Language-Action Model Fine-Tuning with Structured Stage and Keyframe Supervisioncited by 2
  33. 2024Hierarchical Deep Learning for Intention Estimation of Teleoperation Manipulation in Assembly Taskscited by 1
  34. 2024Single-Shot Learning of Stable Dynamical Systems for Long-Horizon Manipulation Taskscited by 1
  35. 2024Implicit Contact Diffuser: Sequential Contact Reasoning with Latent Point Cloud Diffusioncited by 1
  36. 2025M2R2: MultiModal Robotic Representation for Temporal Action Segmentationcited by 1
  37. 2025ACG: Action Coherence Guidance for Flow-based Vision-Language-Action modelscited by 1
  38. 2025Continuous Vision-Language-Action Co-Learning with Semantic-Physical Alignment for Behavioral Cloningcited by 1

50 most cited of 59 All 59 (JSON)

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  1. 2025Annotation-Free One-Shot Imitation Learning for Multi-Step Manipulation Tasks
  2. 2025RoboManipBaselines: A Unified Framework for Imitation Learning in Robotic Manipulation across Real and Simulation Environments
  3. 2025Robotic Manipulation via Imitation Learning: Taxonomy, Evolution, Benchmark, and Challenges
  4. 2024A Comparison of Imitation Learning Algorithms for Bimanual Manipulation
  5. 2020Learning to Generalize Across Long-Horizon Tasks from Human Demonstrations
  6. 2026MinInter: Minimizing Trajectory Interpolation During Data Augmentation for Imitation Learning
  7. 2025Learning a Thousand Tasks in a Day
  8. 2025Interactive Imitation Learning for Dexterous Robotic Manipulation: Challenges and Perspectives -- A Survey