CLASS: Contrastive Learning via Action Sequence Supervision for Robot Manipulation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Lee, Sung-Wook, Kang, Xuhui, Yang, Brandon, Kuo, Yen-Ling
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Lee, Sung-Wook
Kang, Xuhui
Yang, Brandon
Kuo, Yen-Ling
author_facet Lee, Sung-Wook
Kang, Xuhui
Yang, Brandon
Kuo, Yen-Ling
contents Recent advances in Behavior Cloning (BC) have led to strong performance in robotic manipulation, driven by expressive models, sequence modeling of actions, and large-scale demonstration data. However, BC faces significant challenges when applied to heterogeneous datasets, such as visual shift with different camera poses or object appearances, where performance degrades despite the benefits of learning at scale. This stems from BC's tendency to overfit individual demonstrations rather than capture shared structure, limiting generalization. To address this, we introduce Contrastive Learning via Action Sequence Supervision (CLASS), a method for learning behavioral representations from demonstrations using supervised contrastive learning. CLASS leverages weak supervision from similar action sequences identified via Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) and optimizes a soft InfoNCE loss with similarity-weighted positive pairs. We evaluate CLASS on 5 simulation benchmarks and 3 real-world tasks to achieve competitive results using retrieval-based control with representations only. Most notably, for downstream policy learning under significant visual shifts, Diffusion Policy with CLASS pre-training achieves an average success rate of 75%, while all other baseline methods fail to perform competitively. Project webpage: https://class-robot.github.io.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_01600
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CLASS: Contrastive Learning via Action Sequence Supervision for Robot Manipulation
Lee, Sung-Wook
Kang, Xuhui
Yang, Brandon
Kuo, Yen-Ling
Robotics
Recent advances in Behavior Cloning (BC) have led to strong performance in robotic manipulation, driven by expressive models, sequence modeling of actions, and large-scale demonstration data. However, BC faces significant challenges when applied to heterogeneous datasets, such as visual shift with different camera poses or object appearances, where performance degrades despite the benefits of learning at scale. This stems from BC's tendency to overfit individual demonstrations rather than capture shared structure, limiting generalization. To address this, we introduce Contrastive Learning via Action Sequence Supervision (CLASS), a method for learning behavioral representations from demonstrations using supervised contrastive learning. CLASS leverages weak supervision from similar action sequences identified via Dynamic Time Warping (DTW) and optimizes a soft InfoNCE loss with similarity-weighted positive pairs. We evaluate CLASS on 5 simulation benchmarks and 3 real-world tasks to achieve competitive results using retrieval-based control with representations only. Most notably, for downstream policy learning under significant visual shifts, Diffusion Policy with CLASS pre-training achieves an average success rate of 75%, while all other baseline methods fail to perform competitively. Project webpage: https://class-robot.github.io.
title CLASS: Contrastive Learning via Action Sequence Supervision for Robot Manipulation
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01600