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Hauptverfasser: Zisselman, Ev, Mutti, Mirco, Francis-Meretzki, Shelly, Shafer, Elisei, Tamar, Aviv
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.24194
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author Zisselman, Ev
Mutti, Mirco
Francis-Meretzki, Shelly
Shafer, Elisei
Tamar, Aviv
author_facet Zisselman, Ev
Mutti, Mirco
Francis-Meretzki, Shelly
Shafer, Elisei
Tamar, Aviv
contents Behavioral cloning is a simple yet effective technique for learning sequential decision-making from demonstrations. Recently, it has gained prominence as the core of foundation models for the physical world, where achieving generalization requires countless demonstrations of a multitude of tasks. Typically, a human expert with full information on the task demonstrates a (nearly) optimal behavior. In this paper, we propose to hide some of the task's information from the demonstrator. This ``blindfolded'' expert is compelled to employ non-trivial exploration to solve the task. We show that cloning the blindfolded expert generalizes better to unseen tasks than its fully-informed counterpart. We conduct experiments of real-world robot peg insertion tasks with (limited) human demonstrations, alongside videogames from the Procgen benchmark. Additionally, we support our findings with theoretical analysis, which confirms that the generalization error scales with $\sqrt{I/m}$, where $I$ measures the amount of task information available to the demonstrator, and $m$ is the number of demonstrated tasks. Both theory and practice indicate that cloning blindfolded experts generalizes better with fewer demonstrated tasks. Project page with videos and code: https://sites.google.com/view/blindfoldedexperts/home
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_24194
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Blindfolded Experts Generalize Better: Insights from Robotic Manipulation and Videogames
Zisselman, Ev
Mutti, Mirco
Francis-Meretzki, Shelly
Shafer, Elisei
Tamar, Aviv
Robotics
Machine Learning
Behavioral cloning is a simple yet effective technique for learning sequential decision-making from demonstrations. Recently, it has gained prominence as the core of foundation models for the physical world, where achieving generalization requires countless demonstrations of a multitude of tasks. Typically, a human expert with full information on the task demonstrates a (nearly) optimal behavior. In this paper, we propose to hide some of the task's information from the demonstrator. This ``blindfolded'' expert is compelled to employ non-trivial exploration to solve the task. We show that cloning the blindfolded expert generalizes better to unseen tasks than its fully-informed counterpart. We conduct experiments of real-world robot peg insertion tasks with (limited) human demonstrations, alongside videogames from the Procgen benchmark. Additionally, we support our findings with theoretical analysis, which confirms that the generalization error scales with $\sqrt{I/m}$, where $I$ measures the amount of task information available to the demonstrator, and $m$ is the number of demonstrated tasks. Both theory and practice indicate that cloning blindfolded experts generalizes better with fewer demonstrated tasks. Project page with videos and code: https://sites.google.com/view/blindfoldedexperts/home
title Blindfolded Experts Generalize Better: Insights from Robotic Manipulation and Videogames
topic Robotics
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.24194