DataMIL: Selecting Data for Robot Imitation Learning with Datamodels

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Dass, Shivin, Khaddaj, Alaa, Engstrom, Logan, Madry, Aleksander, Ilyas, Andrew, Martín-Martín, Roberto
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Dass, Shivin
Khaddaj, Alaa
Engstrom, Logan
Madry, Aleksander
Ilyas, Andrew
Martín-Martín, Roberto
author_facet Dass, Shivin
Khaddaj, Alaa
Engstrom, Logan
Madry, Aleksander
Ilyas, Andrew
Martín-Martín, Roberto
contents Recently, the robotics community has amassed ever larger and more diverse datasets to train generalist robot policies. However, while these policies achieve strong mean performance across a variety of tasks, they often underperform on individual, specialized tasks and require further tuning on newly acquired task-specific data. Combining task-specific data with carefully curated subsets of large prior datasets via co-training can produce better specialized policies, but selecting data naively may actually harm downstream performance. To address this, we introduce DataMIL, a policy-driven data selection framework built on the datamodels paradigm that reasons about data selection in an end-to-end manner, using the policy itself to identify which data points will most improve performance. Unlike standard practices that filter data using human notions of quality (e.g., based on semantic or visual similarity), DataMIL directly optimizes data selection for task success, allowing us to select data that enhance the policy while dropping data that degrade it. To avoid performing expensive rollouts in the environment during selection, we use a novel surrogate loss function on task-specific data, allowing us to use DataMIL in the real world without degrading performance. We validate our approach on a suite of more than 60 simulation and real-world manipulation tasks - most notably showing successful data selection from the Open X-Embodiment datasets-demonstrating consistent gains in success rates and superior performance over multiple baselines. Our results underscore the importance of end-to-end, performance-aware data selection for unlocking the potential of large prior datasets in robotics. More information at https://robin-lab.cs.utexas.edu/datamodels4imitation/
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_09603
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DataMIL: Selecting Data for Robot Imitation Learning with Datamodels
Dass, Shivin
Khaddaj, Alaa
Engstrom, Logan
Madry, Aleksander
Ilyas, Andrew
Martín-Martín, Roberto
Robotics
Machine Learning
Recently, the robotics community has amassed ever larger and more diverse datasets to train generalist robot policies. However, while these policies achieve strong mean performance across a variety of tasks, they often underperform on individual, specialized tasks and require further tuning on newly acquired task-specific data. Combining task-specific data with carefully curated subsets of large prior datasets via co-training can produce better specialized policies, but selecting data naively may actually harm downstream performance. To address this, we introduce DataMIL, a policy-driven data selection framework built on the datamodels paradigm that reasons about data selection in an end-to-end manner, using the policy itself to identify which data points will most improve performance. Unlike standard practices that filter data using human notions of quality (e.g., based on semantic or visual similarity), DataMIL directly optimizes data selection for task success, allowing us to select data that enhance the policy while dropping data that degrade it. To avoid performing expensive rollouts in the environment during selection, we use a novel surrogate loss function on task-specific data, allowing us to use DataMIL in the real world without degrading performance. We validate our approach on a suite of more than 60 simulation and real-world manipulation tasks - most notably showing successful data selection from the Open X-Embodiment datasets-demonstrating consistent gains in success rates and superior performance over multiple baselines. Our results underscore the importance of end-to-end, performance-aware data selection for unlocking the potential of large prior datasets in robotics. More information at https://robin-lab.cs.utexas.edu/datamodels4imitation/
title DataMIL: Selecting Data for Robot Imitation Learning with Datamodels
topic Robotics
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.09603