Human-to-Robot Interaction: Learning from Video Demonstration for Robot Imitation

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Canh, Thanh Nguyen, Tran, Thanh-Tuan, Zhang, Haolan, Gao, Ziyan, Chong, Nak Young, HoangVan, Xiem
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Canh, Thanh Nguyen
Tran, Thanh-Tuan
Zhang, Haolan
Gao, Ziyan
Chong, Nak Young
HoangVan, Xiem
author_facet Canh, Thanh Nguyen
Tran, Thanh-Tuan
Zhang, Haolan
Gao, Ziyan
Chong, Nak Young
HoangVan, Xiem
contents Learning from Demonstration (LfD) offers a promising paradigm for robot skill acquisition. Recent approaches attempt to extract manipulation commands directly from video demonstrations, yet face two critical challenges: (1) general video captioning models prioritize global scene features over task-relevant objects, producing descriptions unsuitable for precise robotic execution, and (2) end-to-end architectures coupling visual understanding with policy learning require extensive paired datasets and struggle to generalize across objects and scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose a novel ``Human-to-Robot'' imitation learning pipeline that enables robots to acquire manipulation skills directly from unstructured video demonstrations, inspired by the human ability to learn by watching and imitating. Our key innovation is a modular framework that decouples the learning process into two distinct stages: (1) Video Understanding, which combines Temporal Shift Modules (TSM) with Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to extract actions and identify interacted objects, and (2) Robot Imitation, which employs TD3-based deep reinforcement learning to execute the demonstrated manipulations. We validated our approach in PyBullet simulation environments with a UR5e manipulator and in a real-world experiment with a UF850 manipulator across four fundamental actions: reach, pick, move, and put. For video understanding, our method achieves 89.97% action classification accuracy and BLEU-4 scores of 0.351 on standard objects and 0.265 on novel objects, representing improvements of 76.4% and 128.4% over the best baseline, respectively. For robot manipulation, our framework achieves an average success rate of 87.5% across all actions, with 100% success on reaching tasks and up to 90% on complex pick-and-place operations. The project website is available at https://thanhnguyencanh.github.io/LfD4hri.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_19184
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Human-to-Robot Interaction: Learning from Video Demonstration for Robot Imitation
Canh, Thanh Nguyen
Tran, Thanh-Tuan
Zhang, Haolan
Gao, Ziyan
Chong, Nak Young
HoangVan, Xiem
Robotics
Learning from Demonstration (LfD) offers a promising paradigm for robot skill acquisition. Recent approaches attempt to extract manipulation commands directly from video demonstrations, yet face two critical challenges: (1) general video captioning models prioritize global scene features over task-relevant objects, producing descriptions unsuitable for precise robotic execution, and (2) end-to-end architectures coupling visual understanding with policy learning require extensive paired datasets and struggle to generalize across objects and scenarios. To address these limitations, we propose a novel ``Human-to-Robot'' imitation learning pipeline that enables robots to acquire manipulation skills directly from unstructured video demonstrations, inspired by the human ability to learn by watching and imitating. Our key innovation is a modular framework that decouples the learning process into two distinct stages: (1) Video Understanding, which combines Temporal Shift Modules (TSM) with Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to extract actions and identify interacted objects, and (2) Robot Imitation, which employs TD3-based deep reinforcement learning to execute the demonstrated manipulations. We validated our approach in PyBullet simulation environments with a UR5e manipulator and in a real-world experiment with a UF850 manipulator across four fundamental actions: reach, pick, move, and put. For video understanding, our method achieves 89.97% action classification accuracy and BLEU-4 scores of 0.351 on standard objects and 0.265 on novel objects, representing improvements of 76.4% and 128.4% over the best baseline, respectively. For robot manipulation, our framework achieves an average success rate of 87.5% across all actions, with 100% success on reaching tasks and up to 90% on complex pick-and-place operations. The project website is available at https://thanhnguyencanh.github.io/LfD4hri.
title Human-to-Robot Interaction: Learning from Video Demonstration for Robot Imitation
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.19184