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Main Authors: Wang, Yilong, Qian, Cheng, Fan, Ruomeng, Johns, Edward
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.18140
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author Wang, Yilong
Qian, Cheng
Fan, Ruomeng
Johns, Edward
author_facet Wang, Yilong
Qian, Cheng
Fan, Ruomeng
Johns, Edward
contents We propose Observer Actor (ObAct), a novel framework for active vision imitation learning in which the observer moves to optimal visual observations for the actor. We study ObAct on a dual-arm robotic system equipped with wrist-mounted cameras. At test time, ObAct dynamically assigns observer and actor roles: the observer arm constructs a 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) representation from three images, virtually explores this to find an optimal camera pose, then moves to this pose; the actor arm then executes a policy using the observer's observations. This formulation enhances the clarity and visibility of both the object and the gripper in the policy's observations. As a result, we enable the training of ambidextrous policies on observations that remain closer to the occlusion-free training distribution, leading to more robust policies. We study this formulation with two existing imitation learning methods -- trajectory transfer and behavior cloning -- and experiments show that ObAct significantly outperforms static-camera setups: trajectory transfer improves by 145% without occlusion and 233% with occlusion, while behavior cloning improves by 75% and 143%, respectively. Videos are available at https://obact.github.io.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_18140
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Observer-Actor: Active Vision Imitation Learning with Sparse-View Gaussian Splatting
Wang, Yilong
Qian, Cheng
Fan, Ruomeng
Johns, Edward
Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
We propose Observer Actor (ObAct), a novel framework for active vision imitation learning in which the observer moves to optimal visual observations for the actor. We study ObAct on a dual-arm robotic system equipped with wrist-mounted cameras. At test time, ObAct dynamically assigns observer and actor roles: the observer arm constructs a 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) representation from three images, virtually explores this to find an optimal camera pose, then moves to this pose; the actor arm then executes a policy using the observer's observations. This formulation enhances the clarity and visibility of both the object and the gripper in the policy's observations. As a result, we enable the training of ambidextrous policies on observations that remain closer to the occlusion-free training distribution, leading to more robust policies. We study this formulation with two existing imitation learning methods -- trajectory transfer and behavior cloning -- and experiments show that ObAct significantly outperforms static-camera setups: trajectory transfer improves by 145% without occlusion and 233% with occlusion, while behavior cloning improves by 75% and 143%, respectively. Videos are available at https://obact.github.io.
title Observer-Actor: Active Vision Imitation Learning with Sparse-View Gaussian Splatting
topic Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.18140