# LOTUS: Continual Imitation Learning for Robot Manipulation Through Unsupervised Skill Discovery

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.02058 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.02058/

## Key facts

- Cited by 67 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Robot manipulation imitation learning, one of 13 directions in Offline RL and imitation learning from data.
- Builds on 47 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Nov 2023.

## Placed in

- Offline RL and imitation learning from data / [Robot manipulation imitation learning](https://mlsanity.com/offlinerl/robot-manipulation-imitation-learning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [Overcoming catastrophic forgetting in neural networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00796/) (2016)
- [Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04137/) (2023)
- [Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16291/) (2023)
- [Gradient Episodic Memory for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.08840/) (2017)
- [LIBERO: Benchmarking Knowledge Transfer for Lifelong Robot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03310/) (2023)
- [A Comprehensive Survey of Continual Learning: Theory, Method and Application](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00487/) (2023)
- [Diversity is All You Need: Learning Skills without a Reward Function](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.06070/) (2018)
- [What Matters in Learning from Offline Human Demonstrations for Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03298/) (2021)
- [R3M: A Universal Visual Representation for Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12601/) (2022)
- [Relay Policy Learning: Solving Long-Horizon Tasks via Imitation and Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.11956/) (2019)
- [FeUdal Networks for Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01161/) (2017)
- [Learning Latent Plans from Play](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.01973/) (2019)
- [Dynamics-Aware Unsupervised Discovery of Skills](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.01657/) (2019)
- [Variational Intrinsic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.07507/) (2016)
- [Selective Experience Replay for Lifelong Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.10269/) (2018)
- [MimicPlay: Long-Horizon Imitation Learning by Watching Human Play](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12422/) (2023)
- [VIOLA: Imitation Learning for Vision-Based Manipulation with Object Proposal Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11339/) (2022)
- [Don't forget, there is more than forgetting: new metrics for Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.13166/) (2018)
- [Learning to Generalize Across Long-Horizon Tasks from Human Demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.06085/) (2020)
- [A Deep Hierarchical Approach to Lifelong Learning in Minecraft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.07255/) (2016)
- [Hierarchical Imitation and Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.00590/) (2018)
- [IRIS: Implicit Reinforcement without Interaction at Scale for Learning Control from Offline Robot Manipulation Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05321/) (2019)
- [Bottom-Up Skill Discovery from Unsegmented Demonstrations for Long-Horizon Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.13841/) (2021)
- [MUTEX: Learning Unified Policies from Multimodal Task Specifications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14320/) (2023)
- [TACO: Learning Task Decomposition via Temporal Alignment for Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.01840/) (2018)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 67)

- [Sparse Diffusion Policy: A Sparse, Reusable, and Flexible Policy for Robot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01531/) (2024)
- [Deep Generative Models in Robotics: A Survey on Learning from Multimodal Demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04380/) (2024)
- [Practice Makes Perfect: Planning to Learn Skill Parameter Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15025/) (2024)
- [Robust Finetuning of Vision-Language-Action Robot Policies via Parameter Merging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.08333/) (2025)
- [Playful Agentic Robot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19419/) (2026)
- [Dexterous Manipulation through Imitation Learning: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.03515/) (2025)
- [Incremental Learning of Retrievable Skills For Efficient Continual Task Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22658/) (2024)
- [CLARE: Continual Learning for Vision-Language-Action Models via Autonomous Adapter Routing and Expansion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.09512/) (2026)
- [Pretrained Vision-Language-Action Models are Surprisingly Resistant to Forgetting in Continual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.03818/) (2026)
- [AtomicVLA: Unlocking the Potential of Atomic Skill Learning in Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.07648/) (2026)
- [Learning Compositional Behaviors from Demonstration and Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21981/) (2025)
- [Think Small, Act Big: Primitive Prompt Learning for Lifelong Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.00420/) (2025)
- [A Survey on Imitation Learning for Contact-Rich Tasks in Robotics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13498/) (2025)
- [EXTRACT: Efficient Policy Learning by Extracting Transferable Robot Skills from Offline Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17768/) (2024)
- [Towards Long-Lived Robots: Continual Learning VLA Models via Reinforcement Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.10503/) (2026)
- [Continual Learning for Generative AI: From LLMs to MLLMs and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13045/) (2025)
- [M2Distill: Multi-Modal Distillation for Lifelong Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00064/) (2024)
- [Never-Ending Behavior-Cloning Agent for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00336/) (2024)
- [X-IL: Exploring the Design Space of Imitation Learning Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.12330/) (2025)
- [GuidedVLA: Specifying Task-Relevant Factors via Plug-and-Play Action Attention Specialization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12369/) (2026)
- [SPECI: Skill Prompts based Hierarchical Continual Imitation Learning for Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15561/) (2025)
- [Dynamic Mixture of Progressive Parameter-Efficient Expert Library for Lifelong Robot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05985/) (2025)
- [Scalable and Efficient Continual Learning from Demonstration via a Hypernetwork-generated Stable Dynamics Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.03600/) (2023)
- [DABI: Evaluation of Data Augmentation Methods Using Downsampling in Bilateral Control-Based Imitation Learning with Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04370/) (2024)
- [Solving Continual Offline RL through Selective Weights Activation on Aligned Spaces](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.15698/) (2024)
- [VER: Vision Expert Transformer for Robot Learning via Foundation Distillation and Dynamic Routing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05213/) (2025)
- [DreamProver: Evolving Transferable Lemma Libraries via a Wake-Sleep Theorem-Proving Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.26311/) (2026)
- [Continual Adaptation for Autonomous Driving with the Mixture of Progressive Experts Network](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05943/) (2025)
- [Scalable Strategies for Continual Learning with Replay](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12512/) (2025)
- [ADPro: a Test-time Adaptive Diffusion Policy via Manifold-constrained Denoising and Task-aware Initialization for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06266/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We introduce LOTUS, a continual imitation learning algorithm that empowers a physical robot to continuously and efficiently learn to solve new manipulation tasks throughout its lifespan. The core idea behind LOTUS is constructing an ever-growing skill library from a sequence of new tasks with a small number of human demonstrations. LOTUS starts with a continual skill discovery process using an open-vocabulary vision model, which extracts skills as recurring patterns presented in unsegmented demonstrations. Continual skill discovery updates existing skills to avoid catastrophic forgetting of previous tasks and adds new skills to solve novel tasks. LOTUS trains a meta-controller that flexibly composes various skills to tackle vision-based manipulation tasks in the lifelong learning process. Our comprehensive experiments show that LOTUS outperforms state-of-the-art baselines by over 11% in success rate, showing its superior knowledge transfer ability compared to prior methods. More results and videos can be found on the project website: https://ut-austin-rpl.github.io/Lotus/.