ALIGN: Aligning Condition Estimation and Expression in Advantage-Conditioned Behavior Cloning

arXiv:2610.26455 · cs.RO, cs.AI · Submitted 2026-10-19 · Read on arXiv

cs.RO, cs.AI

Submitted: 2026-10-19

Updated: 2026-10-19

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: Human-collected robot manipulation data often mix successful behavior with retries, pauses, recoveries, and failures.

Abstract

Human-collected robot manipulation data often mix successful behavior with retries, pauses, recoveries, and failures. Advantage-Conditioned Behavior Cloning (AC-BC) can exploit such mixed-quality data, but only if the conditioning signal is both accurately constructed from offline trajectories and effectively incorporated into the policy's action-vector-field prediction. Existing pipelines can weaken this signal by thresholding estimator-derived advantage scores into noisy conditions, and by routing conditions through prompts that weakly affect the action vector field. We introduce ALIGN, a condition-aligned AC-BC framework for vision-language-action policies. ALIGN directly predicts categorical pairwise conditions in the policy-facing label space and injects them into a DiT action expert through AdaRMS modulation fused with flow time. We evaluate ALIGN on deliberately mixed real-robot datasets for ARX X5 bowl stacking and Franka key hanging, each combining standard demonstrations with retry-heavy trajectories. ALIGN improves condition fidelity, strengthens conditional vector-field separability, and achieves 90.0% and 56.7% closed-loop success, compared with 56.7% and 33.3% for the strongest AC-BC baseline. These results indicate that aligning conditions from estimation to action prediction is an effective way to extract robust manipulation policies from data in which success, recovery and error coexist.

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