Imitation Learning from a Single Temporally Misaligned Video

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Huey, William, Wang, Huaxiaoyue, Wu, Anne, Artzi, Yoav, Choudhury, Sanjiban
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Huey, William
Wang, Huaxiaoyue
Wu, Anne
Artzi, Yoav
Choudhury, Sanjiban
author_facet Huey, William
Wang, Huaxiaoyue
Wu, Anne
Artzi, Yoav
Choudhury, Sanjiban
contents We examine the problem of learning sequential tasks from a single visual demonstration. A key challenge arises when demonstrations are temporally misaligned due to variations in timing, differences in embodiment, or inconsistencies in execution. Existing approaches treat imitation as a distribution-matching problem, aligning individual frames between the agent and the demonstration. However, we show that such frame-level matching fails to enforce temporal ordering or ensure consistent progress. Our key insight is that matching should instead be defined at the level of sequences. We propose that perfect matching occurs when one sequence successfully covers all the subgoals in the same order as the other sequence. We present ORCA (ORdered Coverage Alignment), a dense per-timestep reward function that measures the probability of the agent covering demonstration frames in the correct order. On temporally misaligned demonstrations, we show that agents trained with the ORCA reward achieve $4.5$x improvement ($0.11 \rightarrow 0.50$ average normalized returns) for Meta-world tasks and $6.6$x improvement ($6.55 \rightarrow 43.3$ average returns) for Humanoid-v4 tasks compared to the best frame-level matching algorithms. We also provide empirical analysis showing that ORCA is robust to varying levels of temporal misalignment. Our code is available at https://github.com/portal-cornell/orca/
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_05397
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Imitation Learning from a Single Temporally Misaligned Video
Huey, William
Wang, Huaxiaoyue
Wu, Anne
Artzi, Yoav
Choudhury, Sanjiban
Machine Learning
We examine the problem of learning sequential tasks from a single visual demonstration. A key challenge arises when demonstrations are temporally misaligned due to variations in timing, differences in embodiment, or inconsistencies in execution. Existing approaches treat imitation as a distribution-matching problem, aligning individual frames between the agent and the demonstration. However, we show that such frame-level matching fails to enforce temporal ordering or ensure consistent progress. Our key insight is that matching should instead be defined at the level of sequences. We propose that perfect matching occurs when one sequence successfully covers all the subgoals in the same order as the other sequence. We present ORCA (ORdered Coverage Alignment), a dense per-timestep reward function that measures the probability of the agent covering demonstration frames in the correct order. On temporally misaligned demonstrations, we show that agents trained with the ORCA reward achieve $4.5$x improvement ($0.11 \rightarrow 0.50$ average normalized returns) for Meta-world tasks and $6.6$x improvement ($6.55 \rightarrow 43.3$ average returns) for Humanoid-v4 tasks compared to the best frame-level matching algorithms. We also provide empirical analysis showing that ORCA is robust to varying levels of temporal misalignment. Our code is available at https://github.com/portal-cornell/orca/
title Imitation Learning from a Single Temporally Misaligned Video
topic Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.05397