Action Tokenizer Matters in In-Context Imitation Learning

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Vuong, An Dinh, Vu, Minh Nhat, An, Dong, Reid, Ian
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866909982847401984
author Vuong, An Dinh
Vu, Minh Nhat
An, Dong
Reid, Ian
author_facet Vuong, An Dinh
Vu, Minh Nhat
An, Dong
Reid, Ian
contents In-context imitation learning (ICIL) is a new paradigm that enables robots to generalize from demonstrations to unseen tasks without retraining. A well-structured action representation is the key to capturing demonstration information effectively, yet action tokenizer (the process of discretizing and encoding actions) remains largely unexplored in ICIL. In this work, we first systematically evaluate existing action tokenizer methods in ICIL and reveal a critical limitation: while they effectively encode action trajectories, they fail to preserve temporal smoothness, which is crucial for stable robotic execution. To address this, we propose LipVQ-VAE, a variational autoencoder that enforces the Lipschitz condition in the latent action space via weight normalization. By propagating smoothness constraints from raw action inputs to a quantized latent codebook, LipVQ-VAE generates more stable and smoother actions. When integrating into ICIL, LipVQ-VAE improves performance by more than 5.3% in high-fidelity simulators, with real-world experiments confirming its ability to produce smoother, more reliable trajectories. Code and checkpoints are available at https://action-tokenizer-matters.github.io/
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_01206
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Action Tokenizer Matters in In-Context Imitation Learning
Vuong, An Dinh
Vu, Minh Nhat
An, Dong
Reid, Ian
Robotics
In-context imitation learning (ICIL) is a new paradigm that enables robots to generalize from demonstrations to unseen tasks without retraining. A well-structured action representation is the key to capturing demonstration information effectively, yet action tokenizer (the process of discretizing and encoding actions) remains largely unexplored in ICIL. In this work, we first systematically evaluate existing action tokenizer methods in ICIL and reveal a critical limitation: while they effectively encode action trajectories, they fail to preserve temporal smoothness, which is crucial for stable robotic execution. To address this, we propose LipVQ-VAE, a variational autoencoder that enforces the Lipschitz condition in the latent action space via weight normalization. By propagating smoothness constraints from raw action inputs to a quantized latent codebook, LipVQ-VAE generates more stable and smoother actions. When integrating into ICIL, LipVQ-VAE improves performance by more than 5.3% in high-fidelity simulators, with real-world experiments confirming its ability to produce smoother, more reliable trajectories. Code and checkpoints are available at https://action-tokenizer-matters.github.io/
title Action Tokenizer Matters in In-Context Imitation Learning
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.01206