Topic

Imitation & diffusion policies

Behaviour cloning at scale, and the generative-model action heads that made it work.

73papers in 2026-07

6.26%of all cs.RO that month

-0.32ppshare change, last 6 vs prior 12 months

24-month volume

arXiv query: cat:cs.RO AND (abs:"imitation learning" OR abs:"diffusion policy" OR abs:"behavior cloning")

Presented at reading clubs

These already have a slide kit, so they are the fastest ones to pick up and present.

2026-05-24

HumanEgo: Zero-Shot Robot Learning from Minutes of Human Egocentric Videos

Zhi Wang, Botao He, Kelin Yu +4 · 9 citations

clubEgocentric & human data Imitation & diffusion policies

2025-09-23

EgoBridge: Domain Adaptation for Generalizable Imitation from Egocentric Human Data

Ryan Punamiya, Dhruv Patel, Patcharapong Aphiwetsa +5 · 30 citations

clubNeurIPSEgocentric & human data Imitation & diffusion policies

2025-09-04

EMMA: Scaling Mobile Manipulation via Egocentric Human Data

Lawrence Y. Zhu, Pranav Kuppili, Ryan Punamiya +5 · 35 citations

clubRA-LEgocentric & human data Imitation & diffusion policies

2025-07-16

EgoVLA: Learning Vision-Language-Action Models from Egocentric Human Videos

Ruihan Yang, Qinxi Yu, Yecheng Wu +12 · 131 citations

clubVision-language-action Humanoids & locomotion

2025-05-16

EgoDex: Learning Dexterous Manipulation from Large-Scale Egocentric Video

Ryan Hoque, Peide Huang, David J. Yoon +2 · 193 citations

clubICLR 2026Dexterous manipulation Egocentric & human data

2024-10-31

EgoMimic: Scaling Imitation Learning via Egocentric Video

Simar Kareer, Dhruv Patel, Ryan Punamiya +5 · 219 citations

clubICRAEgocentric & human data Imitation & diffusion policies

Recent work

2026-08-27

PredVLA: A Sub-Million-Parameter Predictive-Coding Policy for Robot Manipulation

Hiroki Sawada, Shunichi Kasahara

Vision-language-action Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks

2026-08-26

$R^3$: Training Robots to Reason in Natural Language via Reinforcement Learning

Lehong Wu, Yuxiao Qu, Zheyuan Hu +4

Imitation & diffusion policies Reinforcement learning & control

2026-08-26

VISTA: Visually Inferred Spatial ConTact Attention for Contact-Rich Manipulation

Jiayi Chen, Wenlong Dong, Yan Huang +5

Dexterous manipulation Tactile & force sensing

2026-08-26

Advantage-Driven Explicit Memory for Social Navigation

Yeonsoo Park, Mattia Racca, Guillaume Bono +4

Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks Imitation & diffusion policies

2026-08-26

RA-VLA: Retrieval-Augmented VLA for Test-Time Adaptation

Sanghwan Jang, Minjin Jeon, Minsoo Kim +3 · 1 citation

ICML 2026Vision-language-action Imitation & diffusion policies

2026-08-26

Generative Action-Chunk Sampling for Adaptive Stiffness Control in Physical Human-Robot Collaboration

Aoi Otake, Ferdinand Hartmann, Ko Igari +1

Imitation & diffusion policies Human-robot interaction

2026-08-25

SkyDrive: Learning to Drive in a New City from Aerial Traffic Monitoring

Weijiang Xiong, Lan Feng, Alexandre Alahi +1

Egocentric & human data Imitation & diffusion policies

2026-08-25

RoG-DAgger: Rollout-Guided Post-Training for End-to-End Driving

Liangyu Zhong, Joachim Sicking, Fabian Hueger +1

Imitation & diffusion policies Safety & evaluation

2026-08-25

NeurRAFT: Robot Motion Planning via Anchor-Level Flow Matching with Clearance-Aware Preference Tuning

Sibo Tian, Chang Liu, Minghui Zheng +1

Imitation & diffusion policies

2026-08-25

CoDrift: Compositional Drifting for Offline Reinforcement Learning

Xiewei Ni, Ruofeng Mei, Xiangyu Xu

Imitation & diffusion policies Reinforcement learning & control

2026-08-25

Dynamical System-Based Imitation Learning and Neuroadaptive Control for Trajectory Recovery in Autonomous Ships

Yeyson A. Becerra-Mora, José Ángel Acosta

Egocentric & human data Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks

2026-08-24

Act with Intent: Distilling Behavior Intent for Vision-Language-Action Models

Sangoh Lee, Sangwoo Mo, Wook-Shin Han

Vision-language-action Imitation & diffusion policies

2026-08-24

Triplet2Track: A Hierarchical System with Object-Centric Representations for Reliable Long-Horizon Manipulation

Jianxiang Liu, Gaojing Zhang, Chuan Wen +4

Vision-language-action Egocentric & human data

2026-08-23

WorldToken: Time-First Sequence Modeling for Robotic Imitation Learning

Chunkai Yang, Andong Yang, Chao Gao

Imitation & diffusion policies

2026-08-22

Contact-Rich Robotic Manipulation in Construction via Zero-Shot Learning: A Diffusion Policy-Guided Adaptive Control

Roman Ibrahimov, Salma Mozaffari, Arash Adel

Tactile & force sensing Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks

2026-08-22

Vision Guided Target Conditioned Control for Autonomous Excavation

Shuai Zhao, Ji-An Pan, Junwei Li +5

Tactile & force sensing Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks

2026-08-22

CounterAlign: Counterfactual Supervision for Vision-Language-Action Models

Haru Kondoh, Kei Ota, Asako Kanezaki +1

Vision-language-action Imitation & diffusion policies

2026-08-21

Beyond Imitation: Self-Improving Robot Policies via Off-Policy Q-Planning

Varun Giridhar, Anant Khandelwal, Jeremy A. Collins +2

Egocentric & human data Tactile & force sensing

2026-08-21

Neural-Primitive: An Efficient End-to-end Local Planner with Primitive-based Imitation Learning for Autonomous Flight

Zhitao Liu, Guangtong Xu, Zihan Wang +3

Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks Imitation & diffusion policies

2026-08-21

Decoupling Policy Extraction for Offline Reinforcement Learning

Xuyao Lin, Yixiang Shan, Jinru Duan +7

Imitation & diffusion policies Reinforcement learning & control

2026-08-21

Rethinking Demonstration Unlearning in Imitation Learning for Robotics

Jiazhuo Li, Yu Zhang, Yiming Fei +4

Egocentric & human data Imitation & diffusion policies

2026-08-20

Planning-Oriented End-to-End Autonomous Driving: Architectures, Evaluation, and Emerging Paradigms

Yanchen Guan, Xingcheng Liu, Bin Rao +7

World models Vision-language-action

2026-08-20

Learning Highly Dynamic Skills Transition for Quadruped Jumping Through Constrained Space

Zeren Luo, Jiahui Zhang, Yimin Han +4 · 1 citation

Humanoids & locomotion Imitation & diffusion policies

2026-08-19

SoftVTBench: A Deformation-Aware Visuo-Tactile Dataset and Benchmark for Deformable-Object Manipulation

Bowen Jing, Mingxin Wang, Ruiyang Hao +15

Tactile & force sensing Imitation & diffusion policies

2026-08-19

HarvestPoint-ACT: Explicit Target Selection and Harvest-Point Conditioning for Robotic Fruit Harvesting under Occlusion

Hanying Hu, Weipeng Li, Yikun Huang +4

Dexterous manipulation Imitation & diffusion policies

2026-08-18

VERAGMIL: Virtual Environment for Scooping Granular Foods with Imitation Learning Models

Amanuel Ergogo, Diego Dall'Alba, Przemyslaw Korzeniowski

IROSEgocentric & human data Simulation, sim-to-real & benchmarks

2026-08-18

Revisiting the "Push-T" Robot Manipulation Task with Agentic Robotics

Shuangyu Xie, Kaiyuan Chen, Ken Goldberg

Egocentric & human data Imitation & diffusion policies

2026-08-18

UniReflex: Plug-and-Play Force Control for Pretrained Generative Policies via Fast-Slow Reflex

Yan Huang, Shoujie Li, Ziwu Song +1

Imitation & diffusion policies

2026-08-18

Repetition as Reinforcement: Enhancing Sample Efficiency via Instant Episode Repetition in Reinforcement Learning

Hoda Yamani, Yuning Xing, Koen van Rijnsoever +2

Imitation & diffusion policies Reinforcement learning & control

2026-08-18

ORPA: Online Residual Policy Adaptation for Robot Manipulation Control with Human Feedback

Muhammad A. Muttaqien, Tomohiro Motoda, Ryo Hanai +1

Imitation & diffusion policies

2026-08-18

Robust Brachiation on a Life-Sized Dual-Arm Robot Using Waypoint-Guided Reinforcement Learning

Ayumu Iwata, Kento Kawaharazuka, Keita Yoneda +2

IROS 2026Dexterous manipulation Humanoids & locomotion

2026-08-17

FetchMan: Learning Visual Humanoid Loco-Manipulation Policies from Simulated Experiences

Omar Rayyan, Zhi Li, Max Argus +4

Dexterous manipulation Humanoids & locomotion

2026-08-17

HAF: Adapting Generalist VLAs to Humanoid Whole-Body Loco-manipulation via Hierarchical Action Flow and Spectral Latent RL

Langzhe Gu, Chengkai Hou, Meng Li +14

Vision-language-action Humanoids & locomotion

2026-08-17

MatchingPolicy: Correspondence-Aware Policy Enables Cross-Object In-Context Learning

Qijin She, Hanyang Yu, Zeming Li +1

Imitation & diffusion policies Foundation models & pretraining

2026-08-17

Planner-Conditioned Diffusion for Coordinated Multi-Agent Exploration

Marcus Yu Siong Teo, Jeric Lew, Tanishq Duhan +1

Imitation & diffusion policies Navigation & mobility

2026-08-17

SparkVLA: Stop-Aware Hierarchical VLA with Adaptive Action Chunking for Long-Horizon Manipulation

Xunyao Lei, Renjun Wu, Tianlin Huo +1

Vision-language-action Imitation & diffusion policies

2026-08-17

SurgVIL: Scaling Surgical Robot Imitation Learning with Open-source Surgical Videos

Xinhao Chen, JuoTung Chen, Nigel Nelson +4

Imitation & diffusion policies Safety & evaluation

2026-08-16

Revisiting Open-Loop Execution in Robotics: Toward Reactive, Higher-Performing Policies

Michael Zeng, Abhinav Agarwal, Ajay Bati +3

Imitation & diffusion policies

2026-08-16

Pre-training Visual Dexterity in Simulation

Sarthak Kamat, Adam Rashid, Satvik Sharma +4

Dexterous manipulation Imitation & diffusion policies

2026-08-14

PILOT: Privileged Imitation Learning for End-to-End Motion Planning of Autonomous UAVs under Partial Observability

Qingrui Zhang, Feng Xue, Xiang Zhou +1

Imitation & diffusion policies Navigation & mobility

257 papers in this corpus carry the imitation & diffusion policies tag. How tagging works.