What Matters in Learning from Large-Scale Datasets for Robot Manipulation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Saxena, Vaibhav, Bronars, Matthew, Arachchige, Nadun Ranawaka, Wang, Kuancheng, Shin, Woo Chul, Nasiriany, Soroush, Mandlekar, Ajay, Xu, Danfei
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Saxena, Vaibhav
Bronars, Matthew
Arachchige, Nadun Ranawaka
Wang, Kuancheng
Shin, Woo Chul
Nasiriany, Soroush
Mandlekar, Ajay
Xu, Danfei
author_facet Saxena, Vaibhav
Bronars, Matthew
Arachchige, Nadun Ranawaka
Wang, Kuancheng
Shin, Woo Chul
Nasiriany, Soroush
Mandlekar, Ajay
Xu, Danfei
contents Imitation learning from large multi-task demonstration datasets has emerged as a promising path for building generally-capable robots. As a result, 1000s of hours have been spent on building such large-scale datasets around the globe. Despite the continuous growth of such efforts, we still lack a systematic understanding of what data should be collected to improve the utility of a robotics dataset and facilitate downstream policy learning. In this work, we conduct a large-scale dataset composition study to answer this question. We develop a data generation framework to procedurally emulate common sources of diversity in existing datasets (such as sensor placements and object types and arrangements), and use it to generate large-scale robot datasets with controlled compositions, enabling a suite of dataset composition studies that would be prohibitively expensive in the real world. We focus on two practical settings: (1) what types of diversity should be emphasized when future researchers collect large-scale datasets for robotics, and (2) how should current practitioners retrieve relevant demonstrations from existing datasets to maximize downstream policy performance on tasks of interest. Our study yields several critical insights -- for example, we find that camera poses and spatial arrangements are crucial dimensions for both diversity in collection and alignment in retrieval. In real-world robot learning settings, we find that not only do our insights from simulation carry over, but our retrieval strategies on existing datasets such as DROID allow us to consistently outperform existing training strategies by up to 70%. More results at https://robo-mimiclabs.github.io/
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_13536
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle What Matters in Learning from Large-Scale Datasets for Robot Manipulation
Saxena, Vaibhav
Bronars, Matthew
Arachchige, Nadun Ranawaka
Wang, Kuancheng
Shin, Woo Chul
Nasiriany, Soroush
Mandlekar, Ajay
Xu, Danfei
Robotics
Machine Learning
Imitation learning from large multi-task demonstration datasets has emerged as a promising path for building generally-capable robots. As a result, 1000s of hours have been spent on building such large-scale datasets around the globe. Despite the continuous growth of such efforts, we still lack a systematic understanding of what data should be collected to improve the utility of a robotics dataset and facilitate downstream policy learning. In this work, we conduct a large-scale dataset composition study to answer this question. We develop a data generation framework to procedurally emulate common sources of diversity in existing datasets (such as sensor placements and object types and arrangements), and use it to generate large-scale robot datasets with controlled compositions, enabling a suite of dataset composition studies that would be prohibitively expensive in the real world. We focus on two practical settings: (1) what types of diversity should be emphasized when future researchers collect large-scale datasets for robotics, and (2) how should current practitioners retrieve relevant demonstrations from existing datasets to maximize downstream policy performance on tasks of interest. Our study yields several critical insights -- for example, we find that camera poses and spatial arrangements are crucial dimensions for both diversity in collection and alignment in retrieval. In real-world robot learning settings, we find that not only do our insights from simulation carry over, but our retrieval strategies on existing datasets such as DROID allow us to consistently outperform existing training strategies by up to 70%. More results at https://robo-mimiclabs.github.io/
title What Matters in Learning from Large-Scale Datasets for Robot Manipulation
topic Robotics
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13536