MinInter: Minimizing Trajectory Interpolation During Data Augmentation for Imitation Learning
arXiv:2606.24078v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Imitation learning enables robots to acquire complex manipulation skills from demonstrations, but its effectiveness is limited by the cost of collecting high-quality data. Trajectory-level data augmentation methods alleviate this challenge by recombining expert demonstrations under varied initial states. However, such methods typically insert interpolations or other non-expert transition segments between disjoint parts, and such non-expert segments could reduce the quality of the generated data. This paper introduces Minimizing Interpolation (MinInter), an effective trajectory selection method that, for each sampled initial configuration, chooses the source demonstration requiring the least interpolation to form a complete trajectory. By explicitly minimizing interpolations during data generation, MinInter produces higher-quality synthetic demonstrations while remaining compatible with existing data generation frameworks. Experiments on 12 manipulation tasks with 26 variants from the MimicGen benchmark show that MinInter consistently improves both data generation success rates and policy success rates, with the largest gains on contact-rich, long-horizon and high-variance settings. Compared to the recent SkillGen framework, MinInter achieves higher policy success rates despite its conceptual simplicity, underscoring the value of interpolation minimization for data augmentation.
[2606.24078] MinInter: Minimizing Trajectory Interpolation During Data Augmentation for Imitation Learning
[Submitted on 23 Jun 2026]
Title:MinInter: Minimizing Trajectory Interpolation During Data Augmentation for Imitation Learning
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Abstract:Imitation learning enables robots to acquire complex manipulation skills from demonstrations, but its effectiveness is limited by the cost of collecting high-quality data. Trajectory-level data augmentation methods alleviate this challenge by recombining expert demonstrations under varied initial states. However, such methods typically insert interpolations or other non-expert transition segments between disjoint parts, and such non-expert segments could reduce the quality of the generated data. This paper introduces Minimizing Interpolation (MinInter), an effective trajectory selection method that, for each sampled initial configuration, chooses the source demonstration requiring the least interpolation to form a complete trajectory. By explicitly minimizing interpolations during data generation, MinInter produces higher-quality synthetic demonstrations while remaining compatible with existing data generation frameworks. Experiments on 12 manipulation tasks with 26 variants from the MimicGen benchmark show that MinInter consistently improves both data generation success rates and policy success rates, with the largest gains on contact-rich, long-horizon and high-variance settings. Compared to the recent SkillGen framework, MinInter achieves higher policy success rates despite its conceptual simplicity, underscoring the value of interpolation minimization for data augmentation.
Comments: Accepted by IEEE CASE 2026
Subjects:
Robotics (cs.RO)
Cite as: arXiv:2606.24078 [cs.RO]
(or arXiv:2606.24078v1 [cs.RO] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.24078
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
Submission history
From: Qingyang Wang [view email] [v1] Tue, 23 Jun 2026 02:47:11 UTC (4,506 KB)
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