用运动基元表示平滑动作分块,改进机器人模仿学习
Smooth Action Chunking Via Movement-Primitive Representations for Imitation Learning
机器人模仿学习的轨迹总是抖,这篇把轨迹写成基函数组合,抖动降一个数量级,还不用重新训练。
论文提出在动作分块中引入运动基元表示,把轨迹段写成平滑基函数的线性组合,使轨迹在构造上就是平滑的。该方法不改变策略架构、训练目标和推理流程,并在 ACT 和 DiT 两种主干上实例化。在单次推理主干上块内抖动降低一个数量级,迭代主干上降低 2.4 倍。通过对预测系数施加条件,使新分块经过上一分块最后一个动作点,可消除 73-84% 的分块边界不连续,且无需重新训练。
Smooth Action Chunking Via Movement-Primitive Representations for Imitation Learning
Imitation learning has become a widely adopted approach for vision-based robot policies, owing to its conceptual simplicity, scalability, and ability to leverage large-scale datasets. As these policies have grown more capable, action chunking has become their standard interface. At each decision step the policy outputs several future actions at once. Backbones from diffusion policies to large vision-language-action models all share it. Whatever backbone produces the chunk, its temporal structure is learned only implicitly. The commanded trajectory is therefore jerky both within a chunk and between successive chunks. On real hardware this appears as visible vibration and as repeated saturation of the follower's velocity limit. We address this issue by incorporating a movement-primitive-based trajectory representation into action chunking. Specifically, a trajectory segment is represented as a linear combination of smooth basis functions, yielding smooth trajectories by construction while leaving the policy architecture, training objective, and inference procedure unchanged. The same representation also yields a closed-form, inference-time correction for the second source of jerk. We condition the predicted coefficients so that the new chunk passes through a via-point at the previous chunk's last commanded action. This correction needs no retraining and, unlike asynchronous Real-Time Chunking, applies to policies queried in one shot. We instantiate it on a one-shot (ACT) and an iterative (DiT) backbone and evaluate in simulation and on a real bimanual ALOHA platform. The representation lowers within-chunk jerk by an order of magnitude on the one-shot backbone and by 2.4 times on the iterative one, with task success statistically non-inferior. The conditioning then removes 73-84% of the boundary discontinuity, at negligible per-step cost.