GUILD: Guided Iterative Data Collection for Imitation Learning
Shivin Dass, Kevin Nguyen, Rohan Yelandur, Junhong Xu, Roberto Martín-Martín
AI 速览：GUILD 提出一种引导式数据收集方法，利用视觉语言模型的语义先验提出采集任务，并用预测性数据归因评估轨迹对目标部署性能的影响，形成迭代闭环以提升模仿学习的数据效率与部署表现。
Imitation learning policies in robotics are trained on datasets collected through costly real-world teleoperation. Often, the data-collection process is unguided, relying on the teleoperator's intuition, resulting in data that contributes little to overall policy performance. Recent work has shown that curating such unguided datasets can substantially improve policy performance, but these approaches operate by filtering existing datasets after collection and therefore do not prevent the acquisition of uninformative data. In this work, we propose GUILD, a novel Guided Data Collection (GDC) method that actively reasons about which data should be collected to maximize downstream policy performance. We introduce an iterative framework that alternates between 1) task proposal and data collection and 2) data evaluation to close the loop. For task proposal, we leverage semantic priors from vision-language models to identify relevant environments, object configurations, and goals for data collection. However, since semantic relevance does not imply policy improvement, we perform data evaluation. By leveraging predictive data attribution we approximate how the collected trajectories influence policy performance on a target deployment setting. This signal is then used as feedback to guide subsequent data collection, closing the data collection loop. We evaluate our approach in simulation and real robot settings, demonstrating that guided data collection substantially improves sample efficiency and deployment performance compared to passive data collection strategies, multiple baselines and experienced roboticists. More information at https://robin-lab.cs.utexas.edu/guild2026/
Rikhil Amonkar, Stuti Mohan, Kevin Nguyen, Ceyhun Efe Kayan, Ronan Le Bras, Li Zhang
In the LLM-as-formalizer paradigm, a large language model translates a problem into a formal program and leaves the search to a solver, gaining the solver's guarantees. Formalizers are now often reasoning models that write a long reasoning trace before the program, yet they are judged only by the program's output. We find that the trace routinely does the solver's job, assigning, testing and ruling out values until it often reaches the full answer; we call this solver-like behavior (SLB). We define an ontology of SLB over the trace, the program and its output, and use LLM judges, checked against human labels, to label 2,000 generations from three reasoning models on four constraint satisfaction datasets, each formalized in a declarative and an imperative formal language. SLB appears in 85% of traces and takes 24% of reasoning tokens, yet the program usually recomputes the answer, so the effort is redundant. The 9% of programs that inherit the trace's answer also inherit its errors, and pass output-based evaluation whenever that answer is correct. The amount of SLB is not associated with accuracy, and SLB is more common in imperative Python than in declarative Z3 or PDDL. Cautionary prompts reduce it by only a quarter, but hiding the problem's values behind placeholders, which the program receives only at run time, removes 97% of it without loss of accuracy. Formalizers should therefore be evaluated by how their programs are reached, not only by what they output.