Zero-shot Imitation Learning by Latent Topology Mapping

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Jacobson, Maxwell J., Xue, Yexiang
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Jacobson, Maxwell J.
Xue, Yexiang
author_facet Jacobson, Maxwell J.
Xue, Yexiang
contents Imitation learning is effective for training agents when expert demonstrations are available, but collecting demonstrations for every complex task in an environment is costly. We study the long-horizon, goal-conditioned setting where a fixed demonstration dataset contains useful behavior, but not complete examples for every task the agent must solve. Existing imitation learning methods can learn strong policies from demonstrations, but when solving long-horizon tasks, small errors accumulate over long primitive-action trajectories and make zero-shot adaptation to new tasks unreliable. We introduce Zero-shot Agents from Latent Topologies (ZALT), an imitation-learning method that solves unseen start-goal tasks beyond those demonstrated during training. ZALT identifies latent hub states where trajectories converge or diverge, learns policies and a dynamics model over hub-to-hub transitions, and plans over the hub topology to complete new tasks. This topology makes demonstrated behaviors explicitly composable while compressing long tasks into shorter sequences of abstract transitions -- combined, these enable ZALT to perform zero-shot adaptation. In a complex 3D maze environment, ZALT achieves 55% zero-shot success on unseen tasks, compared to 6% for the strongest baseline.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_08450
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Zero-shot Imitation Learning by Latent Topology Mapping
Jacobson, Maxwell J.
Xue, Yexiang
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Imitation learning is effective for training agents when expert demonstrations are available, but collecting demonstrations for every complex task in an environment is costly. We study the long-horizon, goal-conditioned setting where a fixed demonstration dataset contains useful behavior, but not complete examples for every task the agent must solve. Existing imitation learning methods can learn strong policies from demonstrations, but when solving long-horizon tasks, small errors accumulate over long primitive-action trajectories and make zero-shot adaptation to new tasks unreliable. We introduce Zero-shot Agents from Latent Topologies (ZALT), an imitation-learning method that solves unseen start-goal tasks beyond those demonstrated during training. ZALT identifies latent hub states where trajectories converge or diverge, learns policies and a dynamics model over hub-to-hub transitions, and plans over the hub topology to complete new tasks. This topology makes demonstrated behaviors explicitly composable while compressing long tasks into shorter sequences of abstract transitions -- combined, these enable ZALT to perform zero-shot adaptation. In a complex 3D maze environment, ZALT achieves 55% zero-shot success on unseen tasks, compared to 6% for the strongest baseline.
title Zero-shot Imitation Learning by Latent Topology Mapping
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08450