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Main Authors: Chen, Ye, Zhou, Zichen, Dou, Jianyu, Cui, Te, Yang, Yi, Yue, Yufeng
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.23220
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author Chen, Ye
Zhou, Zichen
Dou, Jianyu
Cui, Te
Yang, Yi
Yue, Yufeng
author_facet Chen, Ye
Zhou, Zichen
Dou, Jianyu
Cui, Te
Yang, Yi
Yue, Yufeng
contents In recent years, visual representation learning has gained widespread attention in robotic imitation learning. However, in complex Out-of-Distribution(OOD) settings characterized by clutter and occlusion, the attention of global visual representations can be diluted or interfered, leading to degraded policy performance. The invariance of local representations for task-relevant objects offers a solution. By efficiently utilizing these local representations, training and testing data can be mapped to a more similar feature space, thereby mitigating the covariate shift problem. Accordingly, we propose GLUE, a global-local unified encoding framework for imitation learning based on key-patch tracking. GLUE selects and tracks key-patches as critical local representations by employing a text-guided mechanism. It features a novel fusion framework where global patch features query local patches to distill essential information, yielding fine-grained local features with low heterogeneity relative to the global context. This fused representation steers the robot's visual attention toward task-relevant objects and preserves precise global context, which together align the training and testing distributions into a similar and task-informative feature space, ultimately enhancing the robustness of the imitation learning policy. Experiments demonstrate that GLUE achieves strong performance across diverse tasks in both simulation and real-world settings, outperforming the strongest baseline by 17.6% in simulation, 36.3% in real-world environments, and 58.3% on real-world generalization settings. The project website of GLUE is available at https://GLUE666.github.io/.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_23220
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle GLUE: Global-Local Unified Encoding for Imitation Learning via Key-Patch Tracking
Chen, Ye
Zhou, Zichen
Dou, Jianyu
Cui, Te
Yang, Yi
Yue, Yufeng
Robotics
In recent years, visual representation learning has gained widespread attention in robotic imitation learning. However, in complex Out-of-Distribution(OOD) settings characterized by clutter and occlusion, the attention of global visual representations can be diluted or interfered, leading to degraded policy performance. The invariance of local representations for task-relevant objects offers a solution. By efficiently utilizing these local representations, training and testing data can be mapped to a more similar feature space, thereby mitigating the covariate shift problem. Accordingly, we propose GLUE, a global-local unified encoding framework for imitation learning based on key-patch tracking. GLUE selects and tracks key-patches as critical local representations by employing a text-guided mechanism. It features a novel fusion framework where global patch features query local patches to distill essential information, yielding fine-grained local features with low heterogeneity relative to the global context. This fused representation steers the robot's visual attention toward task-relevant objects and preserves precise global context, which together align the training and testing distributions into a similar and task-informative feature space, ultimately enhancing the robustness of the imitation learning policy. Experiments demonstrate that GLUE achieves strong performance across diverse tasks in both simulation and real-world settings, outperforming the strongest baseline by 17.6% in simulation, 36.3% in real-world environments, and 58.3% on real-world generalization settings. The project website of GLUE is available at https://GLUE666.github.io/.
title GLUE: Global-Local Unified Encoding for Imitation Learning via Key-Patch Tracking
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.23220