Deployment-Time Reliability of Learned Robot Policies

Fuente: arXiv
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Autore principale: Agia, Christopher
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Agia, Christopher
author_facet Agia, Christopher
contents Recent advances in learning-based robot manipulation have produced policies with remarkable capabilities. Yet, reliability at deployment remains a fundamental barrier to real-world use, where distribution shift, compounding errors, and complex task dependencies collectively undermine system performance. This dissertation investigates how the reliability of learned robot policies can be improved at deployment time through mechanisms that operate around them. We develop three complementary classes of deployment-time mechanisms. First, we introduce runtime monitoring methods that detect impending failures by identifying inconsistencies in closed-loop policy behavior and deviations in task progress, without requiring failure data or task-specific supervision. Second, we propose a data-centric framework for policy interpretability that traces deployment-time successes and failures to influential training demonstrations using influence functions, enabling principled diagnosis and dataset curation. Third, we address reliable long-horizon task execution by formulating policy coordination as the problem of estimating and maximizing the success probability of behavior sequences, and we extend this formulation to open-ended, language-specified tasks through feasibility-aware task planning. By centering on core challenges of deployment, these contributions advance practical foundations for the reliable, real-world use of learned robot policies. Continued progress on these foundations will be essential for enabling trustworthy and scalable robot autonomy in the future.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_11400
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Deployment-Time Reliability of Learned Robot Policies
Agia, Christopher
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
I.2.6; I.2.7; I.2.8; I.2.9; I.2.10; I.2.11
Recent advances in learning-based robot manipulation have produced policies with remarkable capabilities. Yet, reliability at deployment remains a fundamental barrier to real-world use, where distribution shift, compounding errors, and complex task dependencies collectively undermine system performance. This dissertation investigates how the reliability of learned robot policies can be improved at deployment time through mechanisms that operate around them. We develop three complementary classes of deployment-time mechanisms. First, we introduce runtime monitoring methods that detect impending failures by identifying inconsistencies in closed-loop policy behavior and deviations in task progress, without requiring failure data or task-specific supervision. Second, we propose a data-centric framework for policy interpretability that traces deployment-time successes and failures to influential training demonstrations using influence functions, enabling principled diagnosis and dataset curation. Third, we address reliable long-horizon task execution by formulating policy coordination as the problem of estimating and maximizing the success probability of behavior sequences, and we extend this formulation to open-ended, language-specified tasks through feasibility-aware task planning. By centering on core challenges of deployment, these contributions advance practical foundations for the reliable, real-world use of learned robot policies. Continued progress on these foundations will be essential for enabling trustworthy and scalable robot autonomy in the future.
title Deployment-Time Reliability of Learned Robot Policies
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
I.2.6; I.2.7; I.2.8; I.2.9; I.2.10; I.2.11
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.11400