DARIL: When Imitation Learning outperforms Reinforcement Learning in Surgical Action Planning

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Boels, Maxence, Robertshaw, Harry, Booth, Thomas C, Dasgupta, Prokar, Granados, Alejandro, Ourselin, Sebastien
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Boels, Maxence
Robertshaw, Harry
Booth, Thomas C
Dasgupta, Prokar
Granados, Alejandro
Ourselin, Sebastien
author_facet Boels, Maxence
Robertshaw, Harry
Booth, Thomas C
Dasgupta, Prokar
Granados, Alejandro
Ourselin, Sebastien
contents Surgical action planning requires predicting future instrument-verb-target triplets for real-time assistance. While teleoperated robotic surgery provides natural expert demonstrations for imitation learning (IL), reinforcement learning (RL) could potentially discover superior strategies through self-exploration. We present the first comprehensive comparison of IL versus RL for surgical action planning on CholecT50. Our Dual-task Autoregressive Imitation Learning (DARIL) baseline achieves 34.6% action triplet recognition mAP and 33.6% next frame prediction mAP with smooth planning degradation to 29.2% at 10-second horizons. We evaluated three RL variants: world model-based RL, direct video RL, and inverse RL enhancement. Surprisingly, all RL approaches underperformed DARIL--world model RL dropped to 3.1% mAP at 10s while direct video RL achieved only 15.9%. Our analysis reveals that distribution matching on expert-annotated test sets systematically favors IL over potentially valid RL policies that differ from training demonstrations. This challenges assumptions about RL superiority in sequential decision making and provides crucial insights for surgical AI development.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_05011
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DARIL: When Imitation Learning outperforms Reinforcement Learning in Surgical Action Planning
Boels, Maxence
Robertshaw, Harry
Booth, Thomas C
Dasgupta, Prokar
Granados, Alejandro
Ourselin, Sebastien
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Surgical action planning requires predicting future instrument-verb-target triplets for real-time assistance. While teleoperated robotic surgery provides natural expert demonstrations for imitation learning (IL), reinforcement learning (RL) could potentially discover superior strategies through self-exploration. We present the first comprehensive comparison of IL versus RL for surgical action planning on CholecT50. Our Dual-task Autoregressive Imitation Learning (DARIL) baseline achieves 34.6% action triplet recognition mAP and 33.6% next frame prediction mAP with smooth planning degradation to 29.2% at 10-second horizons. We evaluated three RL variants: world model-based RL, direct video RL, and inverse RL enhancement. Surprisingly, all RL approaches underperformed DARIL--world model RL dropped to 3.1% mAP at 10s while direct video RL achieved only 15.9%. Our analysis reveals that distribution matching on expert-annotated test sets systematically favors IL over potentially valid RL policies that differ from training demonstrations. This challenges assumptions about RL superiority in sequential decision making and provides crucial insights for surgical AI development.
title DARIL: When Imitation Learning outperforms Reinforcement Learning in Surgical Action Planning
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05011