mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Towards Diverse Behaviors: A Benchmark for Imitation Learning with Human Demonstrations

arXiv 2402.14606 ↗First posted 22 Feb 2024cs.ROcited by 51

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

Abstract (arXiv)

Imitation learning with human data has demonstrated remarkable success in teaching robots in a wide range of skills. However, the inherent diversity in human behavior leads to the emergence of multi-modal data distributions, thereby presenting a formidable challenge for existing imitation learning algorithms. Quantifying a model's capacity to capture and replicate this diversity effectively is still an open problem. In this work, we introduce simulation benchmark environments and the corresponding Datasets with Diverse human Demonstrations for Imitation Learning (D3IL), designed explicitly to evaluate a model's ability to learn multi-modal behavior. Our environments are designed to involve multiple sub-tasks that need to be solved, consider manipulation of multiple objects which increases the diversity of the behavior and can only be solved by policies that rely on closed loop sensory feedback. Other available datasets are missing at least one of these challenging properties. To address the challenge of diversity quantification, we introduce tractable metrics that provide valuable insights into a model's ability to acquire and reproduce diverse behaviors. These metrics offer a practical means to assess the robustness and versatility of imitation learning algorithms. Furthermore, we conduct a thorough evaluation of state-of-the-art methods on the proposed task suite. This evaluation serves as a benchmark for assessing their capability to learn diverse behaviors. Our findings shed light on the effectiveness of these methods in tackling the intricate problem of capturing and generalizing multi-modal human behaviors, offering a valuable reference for the design of future imitation learning algorithms.

Key facts. Cited by 51 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 35 of its 40 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 22 Feb 2024.

Builds on

35 of 40 references.

Closest ancestors · 6

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2023BridgeData V2: A Dataset for Robot Learning at Scale24 Aug
  2. 2023FurnitureBench: Reproducible Real-World Benchmark for Long-Horizon Complex Manipulation22 May
  3. 2023Learning Fine-Grained Bimanual Manipulation with Low-Cost Hardware23 Apr
  4. 2022Behavior Transformers: Cloning k modes with one stone22 Jun
  5. 2019Relay Policy Learning: Solving Long-Horizon Tasks via Imitation and Reinforcement Learning25 Oct
  6. 2018RoboTurk: A Crowdsourcing Platform for Robotic Skill Learning through Imitation7 Nov

Other references · 29

  1. 2017Attention Is All You Needcited by 59,932
  2. 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 20,851
  3. 2020Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equationscited by 8,964
  4. 2013Auto-Encoding Variational Bayescited by 3,980
  5. 2023Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusioncited by 2,730
  6. 2022RT-1: Robotics Transformer for Real-World Control at Scalecited by 2,007
  7. 2021Ego4D: Around the World in 3,000 Hours of Egocentric Videocited by 1,530
  8. 2020D4RL: Datasets for Deep Data-Driven Reinforcement Learningcited by 1,406
  9. 2019Meta-World: A Benchmark and Evaluation for Multi-Task and Meta Reinforcement Learningcited by 1,168
  10. 2021What Matters in Learning from Offline Human Demonstrations for Robot Manipulationcited by 699
  11. 2019RLBench: The Robot Learning Benchmark & Learning Environmentcited by 669
  12. 2021CALVIN: A Benchmark for Language-Conditioned Policy Learning for Long-Horizon Robot Manipulation Taskscited by 564
17 more
  1. 2018An Algorithmic Perspective on Imitation Learningcited by 455
  2. 2021Implicit Behavioral Cloningcited by 442
  3. 2022VIMA: General Robot Manipulation with Multimodal Promptscited by 403
  4. 2020Transporter Networks: Rearranging the Visual World for Robotic Manipulationcited by 342
  5. 2023ManiSkill2: A Unified Benchmark for Generalizable Manipulation Skillscited by 313
  6. 2019Learning Latent Plans from Playcited by 310
  7. 2023Imitating Human Behaviour with Diffusion Modelscited by 260
  8. 2023Goal-Conditioned Imitation Learning using Score-based Diffusion Policiescited by 229
  9. 2022Interactive Language: Talking to Robots in Real Timecited by 217
  10. 2021ManiSkill: Generalizable Manipulation Skill Benchmark with Large-Scale Demonstrationscited by 193
  11. 2023RoboAgent: Generalization and Efficiency in Robot Manipulation via Semantic Augmentations and Action Chunkingcited by 167
  12. 2020Hyperparameter Selection for Offline Reinforcement Learningcited by 113
  13. 2018Neural probabilistic motor primitives for humanoid controlcited by 96
  14. 2021Benchmarks for Deep Off-Policy Evaluationcited by 89
  15. 2020One Solution is Not All You Need: Few-Shot Extrapolation via Structured MaxEnt RLcited by 79
  16. 2023ARNOLD: A Benchmark for Language-Grounded Task Learning With Continuous States in Realistic 3D Scenescited by 68
  17. 2021Specializing Versatile Skill Libraries using Local Mixture of Expertscited by 24

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2024: 17; 2025: 13; 2026: 21.

51 papers.

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  1. 2024RDT-1B: a Diffusion Foundation Model for Bimanual Manipulationcited by 670
  2. 2024Diffusion Policy Policy Optimizationcited by 255
  3. 2025FLOWER: Democratizing Generalist Robot Policies with Efficient Vision-Language-Action Flow Policiescited by 56
  4. 2024Efficient Diffusion Transformer Policies with Mixture of Expert Denoisers for Multitask Learningcited by 46
  5. 2025Diffusion Models for Robotic Manipulation: A Surveycited by 39
  6. 2025Failure Prediction at Runtime for Generative Robot Policiescited by 36
  7. 2024Deep Generative Models in Robotics: A Survey on Learning from Multimodal Demonstrationscited by 35
  8. 2024Diffusion Predictive Control with Constraintscited by 32
  9. 2024ManipVQA: Injecting Robotic Affordance and Physically Grounded Information into Multi-Modal Large Language Modelscited by 25
  10. 2025BEAST: Efficient Tokenization of B-Splines Encoded Action Sequences for Imitation Learningcited by 25
  11. 2024Position: Towards Bidirectional Human-AI Alignmentcited by 15
  12. 2024Acquiring Diverse Skills using Curriculum Reinforcement Learning with Mixture of Expertscited by 14
38 more
  1. 2024Variational Distillation of Diffusion Policies into Mixture of Expertscited by 14
  2. 2024A Large Recurrent Action Model: xLSTM enables Fast Inference for Robotics Taskscited by 14
  3. 2024Mimicking-Bench: A Benchmark for Generalizable Humanoid-Scene Interaction Learning via Human Mimickingcited by 14
  4. 2024Learning Diverse Bimanual Dexterous Manipulation Skills from Human Demonstrationscited by 12
  5. 2024MaIL: Improving Imitation Learning with Mambacited by 11
  6. 2025PointMapPolicy: Structured Point Cloud Processing for Multi-Modal Imitation Learningcited by 10
  7. 2025HardFlow: Hard-Constrained Sampling for Flow-Matching Models via Trajectory Optimizationcited by 10
  8. 2025VFP: Variational Flow-Matching Policy for Multi-Modal Robot Manipulationcited by 9
  9. 2024Learning Diffusion Policies from Demonstrations For Compliant Contact-rich Manipulationcited by 6
  10. 2025Time-Unified Diffusion Policy with Action Discrimination for Robotic Manipulationcited by 5
  11. 2026Action Hallucination in Generative Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 5
  12. 2026You've Got a Golden Ticket: Improving Generative Robot Policies With A Single Noise Vectorcited by 5
  13. 2024Enhancing Exploration with Diffusion Policies in Hybrid Off-Policy RL: Application to Non-Prehensile Manipulationcited by 3
  14. 2025RoboManipBaselines: A Unified Framework for Imitation Learning in Robotic Manipulation across Real and Simulation Environmentscited by 3
  15. 2024Imitation Learning with Limited Actions via Diffusion Planners and Deep Koopman Controllerscited by 2
  16. 2025IRIS: An Immersive Robot Interaction Systemcited by 2
  17. 2025Self-Guided Action Diffusioncited by 2
  18. 2026Inner Speech as Behavior Guides: Steerable Imitation of Diverse Behaviors for Human-AI coordinationcited by 2
  19. 2026Behavioral Mode Discovery for Fine-tuning Multimodal Generative Policiescited by 2
  20. 2026Lagrangian Perturbation Diffusion Steering: Latent Reinforcement Learning for Generative Policiescited by 2
  21. 2026The Geometry of Flow-Matching Uncertainty: A Cost-free Uncertainty Proxy and Its Application in Flow-based VLA Failure Detectioncited by 2
  22. 2025CAPE: Context-Aware Diffusion Policy Via Proximal Mode Expansion for Collision Avoidancecited by 1
  23. 2026RoDiF: Robust Direct Fine-Tuning of Diffusion Policies with Corrupted Human Feedbackcited by 1
  24. 2026Runtime Monitoring of Perception-Based Autonomous Systems via Embedding Temporal Logiccited by 1
  25. 2026DiRecT: Safe Diffusion-Based Planning via Receding-Horizon Denoisingcited by 1
  26. 2026Behavior Uncloning: Distilling Mode Redirection into Policy Weights without Inference-Time Steeringcited by 1
  27. 2026Motion Planning with Model-Based Diffusion via Constraint Optimization and Adaptive Schedulingcited by 1
  28. 2026Steering Generative Robot Policies with Lexicographic Preferencescited by 1
  29. 2024AI-Guided Molecular Simulations in VR: Exploring Strategies for Imitation Learning in Hyperdimensional Molecular Systemscited by 0
  30. 2025Act to See, See to Act: Diffusion-Driven Perception-Action Interplay for Adaptive Policiescited by 0
  31. 2026Offline Reinforcement Learning of High-Quality Behaviors Under Robust Style Alignmentcited by 0
  32. 2026From Noise to Control: Parameterized Diffusion Policiescited by 0
  33. 2026Trust-Region Diffusion Policies for Massively Parallel On-Policy RLcited by 0
  34. 2026Geometric Entropy: When Trajectory Diversity Helps and Hurts in Imitation Learningcited by 0
  35. 2026CoRDE: Concept-Prior Routed Diffusion Experts for Structural Generalization in Robot Manipulationcited by 0
  36. 2026Source-Lifted Flow Matching for Intervenable Multimodal Imitationcited by 0
  37. 2026D-SafeMPC: Diffusion-Driven Safe Model Predictive Control with Discrete-Time Control Barrier Functionscited by 0
  38. 2026DIA: Denoising Intermediate Advantage for Diffusion Policy Optimizationcited by 0

50 most cited of 51 All 51 (JSON)

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  1. 2025Offline Learning of Controllable Diverse Behaviors
  2. 2022Eliciting Compatible Demonstrations for Multi-Human Imitation Learning
  3. 2019Simitate: A Hybrid Imitation Learning Benchmark
  4. 2024VITAL: Interactive Few-Shot Imitation Learning via Visual Human-in-the-Loop Corrections
  5. 2024How to Leverage Diverse Demonstrations in Offline Imitation Learning
  6. 2026Diversity You Can Actually Measure: A Fast, Model-Free Diversity Metric for Robotics Datasets
  7. 2021Imitation Learning: Progress, Taxonomies and Challenges
  8. 2023MimicPlay: Long-Horizon Imitation Learning by Watching Human Play