Beyond Validation Loss: Coverage and Reliability Dynamics in Robot Policy Pretraining
Zhanyi Sun, Max Simchowitz, Shuran Song
In modern robot learning, generative robot policies are first pretrained through supervised learning from demonstrations, then refined through reinforcement learning, supervised finetuning, or other forms of posttraining. Yet conventional pretraining metrics, such as validation loss and average task success, provide an incomplete account of which policies support both effective direct deployment and subsequent posttraining. In this work, we study closed-loop pass@k, which evaluates the probability that k rollouts from the same initial condition attain at least one success. Thus, pass@1 measures mean task success; large-k pass@k measures whether success remains reachable under repeated sampling. Across a wide range of posttraining recipes, we show that large-k pass@k reveals posttraining differences not captured by pass@1. In particular, checkpoints with similar pass@1 but different large-k pass@k have different posttraining performance. Moreover, we show pass@k peaks at different checkpoints during supervised pretraining, revealing a coverage-reliability tradeoff over the course of training. Based on these observations, we propose two practical interventions: (1) a purely offline checkpoint-selection criterion that balances coverage and reliability without closed-loop evaluation, and (2) a generative data augmentation procedure that expands supervision beyond the finite demonstration set, preserving large-k pass@k while maintaining or improving pass@1 and raising the observed coverage-reliability Pareto frontier. Together, our results motivate evaluation, checkpoint selection, and training procedures that explicitly account for posttraining. Blog post, visualizations, and code are available at https://zhanyisun.github.io/robot-policy-learning-dynamics/.
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