mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Learning from Mixed-Quality Deployment Experience for Robot Manipulation

arXiv 2609.29000 ↗First posted 24 Sep 2026cs.LGcited by 0

On the map: Offline RL and imitation learning from data → Robot manipulation imitation learning also fits: Real-world robot offline RL

Abstract (arXiv)

Robot policies deployed in real environments naturally accumulate mixed-quality experience, including successful executions, partial progress, and failures. Although these rollouts provide valuable information for further learning, directly incorporating them into imitation learning may reinforce undesirable behaviors, while offline reinforcement learning often suffers from unreliable value estimation under sparse rewards and limited data coverage. We consider a practical post-deployment setting where learning relies only on naturally accumulated autonomous rollouts, without additional human corrections or exploratory interaction. To effectively exploit such experience, we propose Predictive Action Chunk Learning (PACL). PACL first learns a predictive chunk-level critic that evaluates temporally extended action sequences and augments temporal difference learning with future latent prediction, providing richer supervision for long-horizon value estimation. The learned critic then converts chunk-level Q-values into discrete quality conditions, which guide a diffusion actor to learn jointly from these mixed-quality experiences without treating all behaviors as equivalent supervision. At inference, the actor generates multiple action chunks and the critic selects the highest valued candidate. Experiments across simulated and real-world robot manipulation tasks show that PACL consistently improves the pretrained policy and outperforms strong imitation learning and offline reinforcement learning baselines.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (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 28 of its 32 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 24 Sep 2026.

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28 of 32 references.

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  1. 2023Learning to Discern: Imitating Heterogeneous Human Demonstrations with Preference and Representation Learning22 Oct

Other references · 27

  1. 2023RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Controlcited by 2,993
  2. 2024OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Modelcited by 2,777
  3. 2023Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusioncited by 2,730
  4. 2024π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Controlcited by 2,297
  5. 2024Octo: An Open-Source Generalist Robot Policycited by 1,427
  6. 2021Offline Reinforcement Learning with Implicit Q-Learningcited by 1,245
  7. 2021What Matters in Learning from Offline Human Demonstrations for Robot Manipulationcited by 699
  8. 2022Diffusion Policies as an Expressive Policy Class for Offline Reinforcement Learningcited by 543
  9. 2023IDQL: Implicit Q-Learning as an Actor-Critic Method with Diffusion Policiescited by 307
  10. 2025π*0.6: a VLA That Learns From Experiencecited by 280
  11. 2025Interactive Post-Training for Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 129
  12. 2019Imitation Learning from Imperfect Demonstrationcited by 112
15 more
  1. 2024Steering Your Generalists: Improving Robotic Foundation Models via Value Guidancecited by 100
  2. 2025Reinforcement Learning with Action Chunkingcited by 97
  3. 2022Discriminator-Weighted Offline Imitation Learning from Suboptimal Demonstrationscited by 89
  4. 2022Imitation Learning by Estimating Expertise of Demonstratorscited by 50
  5. 2025RL-100: Performant Robotic Manipulation with Real-World Reinforcement Learningcited by 47
  6. 2025RaC: Robot Learning for Long-Horizon Tasks by Scaling Recovery and Correctioncited by 35
  7. 2024So You Think You Can Scale Up Autonomous Robot Data Collection?cited by 17
  8. 2024Learning from Imperfect Demonstrations with Self-Supervision for Robotic Manipulationcited by 13
  9. 2025Actor-Critic for Continuous Action Chunks: A Reinforcement Learning Framework for Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation with Sparse Rewardcited by 13
  10. 2026Learning While Deploying: Fleet-Scale Reinforcement Learning for Generalist Robot Policiescited by 12
  11. 2024How to Leverage Diverse Demonstrations in Offline Imitation Learningcited by 11
  12. 2023Improving Behavioural Cloning with Positive Unlabeled Learningcited by 8
  13. 2024Towards Effective Utilization of Mixed-Quality Demonstrations in Robotic Manipulation via Segment-Level Selection and Optimizationcited by 8
  14. 2025Using Non-Expert Data to Robustify Imitation Learning via Offline Reinforcement Learningcited by 5
  15. 2026WCM: A World Critic Model for Vision-Language-Action Reinforcement Learningcited by 4

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  3. 2026Adaptive Action Chunking via Multi-Chunk Q Value Estimation
  4. 2025LiPo: A Lightweight Post-optimization Framework for Smoothing Action Chunks Generated by Learned Policies
  5. 2026Beyond Imitation: Self-Improving Robot Policies via Off-Policy Q-Planning
  6. 2026Beyond Action Residuals: Real-World Robot Policy Steering via Bottleneck Latent Reinforcement Learning
  7. 2025Action Chunking and Exploratory Data Collection Yield Exponential Improvements in Behavior Cloning for Continuous Control
  8. 2025Beyond Success: Refining Elegant Robot Manipulation from Mixed-Quality Data via Just-in-Time Intervention