FlowDAgger: Human-in-the-Loop Adaptation of Generative Robot Policies in Latent Space
On the map: Diffusion models → Diffusion and flow policies for robotics
Abstract (arXiv)
Pretrained generative robot policies based on flow matching and diffusion have achieved impressive results across a wide range of manipulation tasks. Yet real-world deployments routinely expose failure modes outside the pretraining distribution. Closing these gaps typically requires large-scale data collection or online reinforcement learning on physical hardware, which is impractical for rapid and safe adaptation. We present FlowDAgger, a sample- and compute-efficient method for adapting frozen generative robot policies from human interventions in latent space. Our key idea is action inversion: each human expert action is mapped to the noise that would have produced it under the frozen base policy, using reverse-time integration followed by local refinement. The resulting inverted noise provides supervision for a lightweight latent policy that steers the base model at deployment time, enabling rapid skill acquisition while preserving its behavioral priors. We evaluate FlowDAgger in simulation and on real-world bimanual and single-arm manipulation, adapting both action-head VLAs and world-action models from a handful of interventions. FlowDAgger outperforms supervised fine-tuning and latent-space RL baselines and preserves pretrained skills on held-out tasks, offering a practical path for adapting robot foundation models in the real world. Website: https://microsoft.github.io/FlowDAgger
Key facts. Cited by 4 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Diffusion and flow policies for robotics, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models. Builds on 29 of its 30 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 9 Jul 2026.
Builds on
29 of 30 references.
Closest ancestors · 5
Same direction, newest first
- 2026World Action Models are Zero-shot Policies17 Feb
- 2026Cosmos Policy: Fine-Tuning Video Models for Visuomotor Control and Planning22 Jan
- 2025Steering Your Diffusion Policy with Latent Space Reinforcement Learning18 Jun
- 2024The Ingredients for Robotic Diffusion Transformers14 Oct
- 2023Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusion7 Mar
Other references · 24
- 2020Denoising Diffusion Implicit Modelscited by 9,781
- 2022Flow Matching for Generative Modelingcited by 5,702
- 2025π0.5: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalizationcited by 1,761
- 2024Octo: An Open-Source Generalist Robot Policycited by 1,484
- 2025GR00T N1: An Open Foundation Model for Generalist Humanoid Robotscited by 1,225
- 2019Meta-World: A Benchmark and Evaluation for Multi-Task and Meta Reinforcement Learningcited by 1,204
- 2022Null-text Inversion for Editing Real Images using Guided Diffusion Modelscited by 1,179
- 2021What Matters in Learning from Offline Human Demonstrations for Robot Manipulationcited by 725
- 2019Learning Latent Plans from Playcited by 316
- 2018Residual Reinforcement Learning for Robot Controlcited by 274
- 2018HG-DAgger: Interactive Imitation Learning with Human Expertscited by 266
- 2024Precise and Dexterous Robotic Manipulation via Human-in-the-Loop Reinforcement Learningcited by 189
12 more
- 2024Semantic Image Inversion and Editing using Rectified Stochastic Differential Equationscited by 165
- 2018Residual Policy Learningcited by 164
- 2025mimic-video: Video-Action Models for Generalizable Robot Control Beyond VLAscited by 142
- 2025A Careful Examination of Large Behavior Models for Multitask Dexterous Manipulationcited by 129
- 2020Human-in-the-Loop Imitation Learning using Remote Teleoperationcited by 112
- 2022Robot Learning on the Job: Human-in-the-Loop Autonomy and Learning During Deploymentcited by 108
- 2024TRANSIC: Sim-to-Real Policy Transfer by Learning from Online Correctioncited by 59
- 2026World Model for Robot Learning: A Comprehensive Surveycited by 46
- 2024Multi-Task Interactive Robot Fleet Learning with Visual World Modelscited by 36
- 2023RLIF: Interactive Imitation Learning as Reinforcement Learningcited by 30
- 2025Compliant Residual DAgger: Improving Real-World Contact-Rich Manipulation with Human Correctionscited by 29
- 2026Benchmarking Affordance Generalization with BusyBoxcited by 2
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 4.
4 papers.
- 2026Learning to Act While Waiting: RL Finetuning of Generalist Robot Policies Under Inference Latencycited by 2
- 2026PreferenceFlow: Test-Time Guidance of Flow-Matching Robot Policies from Human Interventionscited by 0
- 2026Rho: A Foundation for Efficiently Adaptable VLA Modelscited by 0
- 2026Dream to Remember: Continual Steering of Generalist Robot Policies with World Modelscited by 0
- 2026Dream to Remember: Continual Steering of Generalist Robot Policies with World Models9 Oct 2026
- 2026Rho: A Foundation for Efficiently Adaptable VLA Models29 Sep 2026
- 2026PreferenceFlow: Test-Time Guidance of Flow-Matching Robot Policies from Human Interventions29 Sep 2026
- 2026Learning to Act While Waiting: RL Finetuning of Generalist Robot Policies Under Inference Latency24 Aug 2026
Similar, not cited
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- 2026FlowCorrect: Efficient Interactive Correction of Generative Flow Policies for Robotic Manipulation
- 2026Where Should Action Generation Begin? A Learnable Source Prior for Generative Robot Policies
- 2026Lagrangian Perturbation Diffusion Steering: Latent Reinforcement Learning for Generative Policies
- 2026Flowing With Purpose: Latent Action Guided Flow Matching Policies For Robotic Manipulation
- 2026HybridFlow: A 2-NFE Generative Policy for Real-Time Robotic Manipulation
- 2026WarmPrior: Straightening Flow-Matching Policies with Temporal Priors
- 2025Inference-Time Enhancement of Generative Robot Policies via Predictive World Modeling
- 2026FlowDPG: Deterministic Policy Gradient on Flow Matching Policies for Real-World Manipulation