Hongjie Cao

h-index2
2papers
29citations

2 Papers

16.4ROJun 3
Potential-Guided Flow Matching for Vision-Language-Action Policy Improvement

Yunpeng Mei, Jiakai He, Hongjie Cao et al.

Large vision-language-action (VLA) policies are increasingly trained as conditional generative models over action chunks. Yet deployment produces mixed-quality experience-successful demonstrations, partial completions, recoverable mistakes, and failures-that is difficult to use with standard imitation. Full behavior cloning (BC) imitates failures, filtered BC discards useful sub-trajectories, and offline reinforcement learning adds a large critic. We introduce ForesightFlow, a self-guided flow-matching policy that augments each generated action chunk with a learned success-potential trajectory. The same flow proposes and scores candidate actions, enabling best-of-$K$ inference without an external critic. The key issue is that policy improvement and value calibration require different supervision: advantage weighting should emphasize high-quality actions, but applying the same weights to potential coordinates suppresses failure gradients and creates overconfident scores. We address this with decoupled advantage-weighted flow matching, applying exponentiated advantage weights only to action velocities while training potential velocities uniformly. We further derive a one-step boundary estimator for conditional flow matching, allowing advantage computation with a single stop-gradient forward pass. Across five BEHAVIOR-1K simulation tasks and five real-world bimanual tasks, ForesightFlow improves over imitation baselines, matches the strongest separate-critic baseline in simulation success, improves real-world success, and reduces training compute by $38\%$. Ablations show that decoupling prevents value hallucination, the one-step estimator preserves candidate-ranking fidelity, and self-guided sampling improves long-horizon execution.

5.7ROMar 28, 2025
Robust Offline Imitation Learning Through State-level Trajectory Stitching

Shuze Wang, Yunpeng Mei, Hongjie Cao et al.

Imitation learning (IL) has proven effective for enabling robots to acquire visuomotor skills through expert demonstrations. However, traditional IL methods are limited by their reliance on high-quality, often scarce, expert data, and suffer from covariate shift. To address these challenges, recent advances in offline IL have incorporated suboptimal, unlabeled datasets into the training. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to enhance policy learning from mixed-quality offline datasets by leveraging task-relevant trajectory fragments and rich environmental dynamics. Specifically, we introduce a state-based search framework that stitches state-action pairs from imperfect demonstrations, generating more diverse and informative training trajectories. Experimental results on standard IL benchmarks and real-world robotic tasks showcase that our proposed method significantly improves both generalization and performance.