ReGIL: Retrieval-Guided Imitation Learning from a Single Demonstration

Learning robot manipulation policies with deep neural networks from a single demonstration remains highly challenging, as even small deviations from the demonstrated trajectory can quickly compound into failure, while collecting substantial online interaction data is costly. We propose ReGIL, a retrieval-guided imitation learning framework that treats a single demonstration as an external memory. ReGIL repeatedly queries this static memory throughout training to simultaneously guide exploration, generate the regularization buffer, and construct rewards. Specifically, it computes rewards through local temporal alignment between the current trajectory and the retrieved segment, providing step-wise and informative feedback for policy improvement. We evaluate ReGIL on robotic manipulation tasks from the LIBERO and Meta-World benchmarks under the single demonstration setting. ReGIL outperforms prior baselines in both success rate and training efficiency. In real-robot experiments, using only one demonstration and less than one hour of online training, ReGIL achieves over 75% success rate across three manipulation tasks with randomness in both initial robot pose and target position. These results demonstrate that leveraging the single demonstration as reusable memory can provide more than static supervision for efficient robot learning. More details can be found on our website: https://regil2026.github.io/