Multi-agent imitation learning with function approximation: Linear Markov games and beyond

In this work, we present the first theoretical analysis of multi-agent imitation learning (MAIL) in linear Markov games where both the transition dynamics and each agent's reward function are linear in some given features. We demonstrate that by leveraging this structure, it is possible to replace the state-action level "all policy deviation concentrability coefficient" (Freihaut et al., arXiv:2510.09325) with a concentrability coefficient defined at the feature level which can be much smaller than the state-action analog when the features are informative about states' similarity. Furthermore, to circumvent the need for any concentrability coefficient, we turn to the interactive setting. We provide the first, computationally efficient, interactive MAIL algorithm for linear Markov games and show that its sample complexity depends only on the dimension of the feature map $d$. Building on these theoretical findings, we propose a deep MAIL interactive algorithm which clearly outperforms BC on games such as Tic-Tac-Toe and Connect4.

GraspLDP: Towards Generalizable Grasping Policy via Latent Diffusion

This paper focuses on enhancing the grasping precision and generalization of manipulation policies learned via imitation learning. Diffusion-based policy learning methods have recently become the mainstream approach for robotic manipulation tasks. As grasping is a critical subtask in manipulation, the ability of imitation-learned policies to execute precise and generalizable grasps merits particular attention. Existing imitation learning techniques for grasping often suffer from imprecise grasp executions, limited spatial generalization, and poor object generalization. To address these challenges, we incorporate grasp prior knowledge into the diffusion policy framework. In particular, we employ a latent diffusion policy to guide action chunk decoding with grasp pose prior, ensuring that generated motion trajectories adhere closely to feasible grasp configurations. Furthermore, we introduce a self-supervised reconstruction objective during diffusion to embed the graspness prior: at each reverse diffusion step, we reconstruct wrist-camera images back-projected the graspness from the intermediate representations. Both simulation and real robot experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms baseline methods and exhibits strong dynamic grasping capabilities.

Risk-Aware World Model Predictive Control for Generalizable End-to-End Autonomous Driving

With advances in imitation learning (IL) and large-scale driving datasets, end-to-end autonomous driving (E2E-AD) has made great progress recently. Currently, IL-based methods have become a mainstream paradigm: models rely on standard driving behaviors given by experts, and learn to minimize the discrepancy between their actions and expert actions. However, this objective of "only driving like the expert" suffers from limited generalization: when encountering rare or unseen long-tail scenarios outside the distribution of expert demonstrations, models tend to produce unsafe decisions in the absence of prior experience. This raises a fundamental question: Can an E2E-AD system make reliable decisions without any expert action supervision? Motivated by this, we propose a unified framework named Risk-aware World Model Predictive Control (RaWMPC) to address this generalization dilemma through robust control, without reliance on expert demonstrations. Practically, RaWMPC leverages a world model to predict the consequences of multiple candidate actions and selects low-risk actions through explicit risk evaluation. To endow the world model with the ability to predict the outcomes of risky driving behaviors, we design a risk-aware interaction strategy that systematically exposes the world model to hazardous behaviors, making catastrophic outcomes predictable and thus avoidable. Furthermore, to generate low-risk candidate actions at test time, we introduce a self-evaluation distillation method to distill riskavoidance capabilities from the well-trained world model into a generative action proposal network without any expert demonstration. Extensive experiments show that RaWMPC outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both in-distribution and out-of-distribution scenarios, while providing superior decision interpretability.

Biomechanical Comparisons Reveal Divergence of Human and Humanoid Gaits

It remains challenging to achieve human-like locomotion in legged robots due to fundamental discrepancies between biological and mechanical structures. Although imitation learning has emerged as a promising approach for generating natural robotic movements, simply replicating joint angle trajectories fails to capture the underlying principles of human motion. This study proposes a Gait Divergence Analysis Framework (GDAF), a unified biomechanical evaluation framework that systematically quantifies kinematic and kinetic discrepancies between humans and bipedal robots. We apply GDAF to systematically compare human and humanoid locomotion across 28 walking speeds. To enable reproducible analysis, we collect and release a speed-continuous humanoid locomotion dataset from a state-of-the-art humanoid controller. We further provide an open-source implementation of GDAF, including analysis, visualization, and MuJoCo-based tools, enabling quantitative, interpretable, and reproducible biomechanical analysis of humanoid locomotion. Results demonstrate that despite visually human-like motion generated by modern humanoid controllers, significant biomechanical divergence persists across speeds. Robots exhibit systematic deviations in gait symmetry, energy distribution, and joint coordination, indicating that substantial room remains for improving the biomechanical fidelity and energetic efficiency of humanoid locomotion. This work provides a quantitative benchmark for evaluating humanoid locomotion and offers data and versatile tools to support the development of more human-like and energetically efficient locomotion controllers. The data and code will be made publicly available upon acceptance of the paper.

Primary-Fine Decoupling for Action Generation in Robotic Imitation

Multi-modal distribution in robotic manipulation action sequences poses critical challenges for imitation learning. To this end, existing approaches often model the action space as either a discrete set of tokens or a continuous, latent-variable distribution. However, both approaches present trade-offs: some methods discretize actions into tokens and therefore lose fine-grained action variations, while others generate continuous actions in a single stage tend to produce unstable mode transitions. To address these limitations, we propose Primary-Fine Decoupling for Action Generation (PF-DAG), a two-stage framework that decouples coarse action consistency from fine-grained variations. First, we compress action chunks into a small set of discrete modes, enabling a lightweight policy to select consistent coarse modes and avoid mode bouncing. Second, a mode conditioned MeanFlow policy is learned to generate high-fidelity continuous actions. Theoretically, we prove PF-DAG's two-stage design achieves a strictly lower MSE bound than single-stage generative policies. Empirically, PF-DAG outperforms state-of-the-art baselines across 56 tasks from Adroit, DexArt, and MetaWorld benchmarks. It further generalizes to real-world tactile dexterous manipulation tasks. Our work demonstrates that explicit mode-level decoupling enables both robust multi-modal modeling and reactive closed-loop control for robotic manipulation.

Reinforcement-aware Knowledge Distillation for LLM Reasoning

Reinforcement learning (RL) post-training has recently driven major gains in long chain-of-thought reasoning large language models (LLMs), but the high inference cost of such models motivates distillation into smaller students. Most existing knowledge distillation (KD) methods are designed for supervised fine-tuning (SFT), relying on fixed teacher traces or teacher-student Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence-based regularization. When combined with RL, these approaches often suffer from distribution mismatch and objective interference: teacher supervision may not align with the student's evolving rollout distribution, and the KL regularizer can compete with reward maximization and require careful loss balancing. To address these issues, we propose RL-aware distillation (RLAD), which performs selective imitation during RL -- guiding the student toward the teacher only when it improves the current policy update. Our core component, Trust Region Ratio Distillation (TRRD), replaces the teacher-student KL regularizer with a PPO/GRPO-style likelihood-ratio objective anchored to a teacher--old-policy mixture, yielding advantage-aware, trust-region-bounded distillation on student rollouts and naturally balancing exploration, exploitation, and imitation. Across diverse logic reasoning and math benchmarks, RLAD consistently outperforms offline distillation, standard GRPO, and KL-based on-policy teacher-student knowledge distillation.

Matching Multiple Experts: On the Exploitability of Multi-Agent Imitation Learning

Multi-agent imitation learning (MA-IL) aims to learn optimal policies from expert demonstrations of interactions in multi-agent interactive domains. Despite existing guarantees on the performance of the resulting learned policies, characterizations of how far the learned polices are from a Nash equilibrium are missing for offline MA-IL. In this paper, we demonstrate impossibility and hardness results of learning low-exploitable policies in general $n$-player Markov Games. We do so by providing examples where even exact measure matching fails, and demonstrating a new hardness result on characterizing the Nash gap given a fixed measure matching error. We then show how these challenges can be overcome using strategic dominance assumptions on the expert equilibrium. Specifically, for the case of dominant strategy expert equilibria, assuming Behavioral Cloning error $ε_{\text{BC}}$, this provides a Nash imitation gap of $\mathcal{O}\left(nε_{\text{BC}}/(1-γ)^2\right)$ for a discount factor $γ$. We generalize this result with a new notion of best-response continuity, and argue that this is implicitly encouraged by standard regularization techniques.

RADAR: Reasoning as Discrimination with Aligned Representations for LLM-based Knowledge Graph Reasoning

Knowledge graph reasoning (KGR) infers missing facts, with recent advances increasingly harnessing the semantic priors and reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, prevailing generative paradigms are prone to memorizing surface-level co-occurrences rather than learning genuine relational semantics, limiting out-of-distribution generalization. To address this, we propose RADAR, which reformulates KGR from generative pattern matching to discriminative relational reasoning. We recast KGR as discriminative entity selection, where reinforcement learning enforces relative entity separability beyond token-likelihood imitation. Leveraging this separability, inference operates directly in representation space, ensuring consistency with the discriminative optimization and bypassing generation-induced hallucinations. Across four benchmarks, RADAR achieves 5-6% relative gains on link prediction and triple classification over strong LLM baselines, while increasing task-relevant mutual information in intermediate representations by 62.9%, indicating more robust and transferable relational reasoning.

EgoAVFlow: Robot Policy Learning with Active Vision from Human Egocentric Videos via 3D Flow

Egocentric human videos provide a scalable source of manipulation demonstrations; however, deploying them on robots requires active viewpoint control to maintain task-critical visibility, which human viewpoint imitation often fails to provide due to human-specific priors. We propose EgoAVFlow, which learns manipulation and active vision from egocentric videos through a shared 3D flow representation that supports geometric visibility reasoning and transfers without robot demonstrations. EgoAVFlow uses diffusion models to predict robot actions, future 3D flow, and camera trajectories, and refines viewpoints at test time with reward-maximizing denoising under a visibility-aware reward computed from predicted motion and scene geometry. Real-world experiments under actively changing viewpoints show that EgoAVFlow consistently outperforms prior human-demo-based baselines, demonstrating effective visibility maintenance and robust manipulation without robot demonstrations.

Beyond Mimicry: Toward Lifelong Adaptability in Imitation Learning

Imitation learning stands at a crossroads: despite decades of progress, current imitation learning agents remain sophisticated memorisation machines, excelling at replay but failing when contexts shift or goals evolve. This paper argues that this failure is not technical but foundational: imitation learning has been optimised for the wrong objective. We propose a research agenda that redefines success from perfect replay to compositional adaptability. Such adaptability hinges on learning behavioural primitives once and recombining them through novel contexts without retraining. We establish metrics for compositional generalisation, propose hybrid architectures, and outline interdisciplinary research directions drawing on cognitive science and cultural evolution. Agents that embed adaptability at the core of imitation learning thus have an essential capability for operating in an open-ended world.