Implicit-Behavior Coordination from Unlabeled Sub-Task Demonstrations for Rearrangement Tasks
2026-07-10 • Robotics
Robotics
AI summaryⓘ
The authors study how robots can move and rearrange objects over long tasks without needing predefined skills or labels. Instead, they teach the robot by showing many examples mixed together and let it figure out what to do using a value-based system that picks the best actions. Their experiments show this method works well, even better than some approaches that need detailed plans or skill labels, and it scales to more complex tasks. They conclude that robots can learn to coordinate behaviors implicitly, avoiding the complexity of explicitly defining skills.
robotic rearrangementskill sequencingimitation learningvalue-guided action selectionbehavior cloningcritic-guided selectionmulti-modal behaviorslong-horizon tasksHabitat environment
Authors
Ahmed Shokry, Usama Ahmed Siddiquie, Sicong Pan, Maren Bennewitz
Abstract
Long-horizon robotic rearrangement tasks are often treated as skill sequencing problems, requiring predefined skills, skill labels, or boundaries, and task-specific switching logic. Although effective, such explicit skill abstractions can become difficult to scale as the number of behaviors and the task horizon increase. We instead formulate rearrangement as implicit-behavior coordination from unlabeled sub-task demonstrations, where skill-like behaviors are learned directly from mixed behavior data and coordinated through value-guided action selection. Experiments in Habitat rearrangement tasks support this formulation in three ways. First, our method outperforms task-specific imitation baselines on more complex rearrangement tasks and approaches an oracle-planner baseline with behavior-cloned skills, while using no oracle task plan or skill-labeled full-task demonstrations. Second, ablations show that reliable critic-guided candidate selection is essential for coordinating multi-modal behaviors. Third, scaling experiments show that the method handles larger behavior repertoires and maintains stronger performance than task-specific imitation baselines as chained targets extend the horizon. These results suggest that explicit skill abstraction is not a prerequisite for long-horizon rearrangement, and that implicit-behavior coordination offers a promising data-driven alternative to explicit skill-based pipelines.