DexPIE: Stable Dexterous Policy Improvement from Real-World Experience

arXiv:2606.09615v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Dexterous manipulation presents substantial challenges for imitation learning due to its high-dimensional action space and complex contact-rich dynamics. Policies trained purely from demonstrations often suffer from compounding errors during deployment and require large amounts of expert data to achieve reliable performance. To move beyond the limitations of demonstration data, in this work, we propose DexPIE, a post-training framework for dexterous policy improvement from experience collected through real-world deployment. First, DexPIE enables effective exploration coverage through a dexterous-hand-adapted intervention system and multi-stage DAgger-style data collection across initial and intermediate task stages. Meanwhile, we enhance consistency between training and inference to reduce the distribution shift between rollouts and demonstration data, better aligning rollout behavior with demonstrations, allowing the critic to learn a value function induced by a more consistent underlying policy. Together, these components provide reliable supervision for policy evaluation. Finally, DexPIE improves the policy through conditioning on a continuous optimality indicator, allowing the policy to leverage the quality of data in a more fine-grained manner. Across three challenging real-world dexterous manipulation tasks, DexPIE achieves a 37.3% improvement in success rate over the demonstration-based reference policy, outperforming all baseline methods and demonstrating stronger robustness. The source code and dataset will be made publicly available.

Abstract:Dexterous manipulation presents substantial challenges for imitation learning due to its high-dimensional action space and complex contact-rich dynamics. Policies trained purely from demonstrations often suffer from compounding errors during deployment and require large amounts of expert data to achieve reliable performance. To move beyond the limitations of demonstration data, in this work, we propose DexPIE, a post-training framework for dexterous policy improvement from experience collected through real-world deployment. First, DexPIE enables effective exploration coverage through a dexterous-hand-adapted intervention system and multi-stage DAgger-style data collection across initial and intermediate task stages. Meanwhile, we enhance consistency between training and inference to reduce the distribution shift between rollouts and demonstration data, better aligning rollout behavior with demonstrations, allowing the critic to learn a value function induced by a more consistent underlying policy. Together, these components provide reliable supervision for policy evaluation. Finally, DexPIE improves the policy through conditioning on a continuous optimality indicator, allowing the policy to leverage the quality of data in a more fine-grained manner. Across three challenging real-world dexterous manipulation tasks, DexPIE achieves a 37.3% improvement in success rate over the demonstration-based reference policy, outperforming all baseline methods and demonstrating stronger robustness. The source code and dataset will be made publicly available.

Robotics (cs.RO); Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (cs.CV)

arXiv:2606.09615 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2606.09615v2 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.09615 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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DexPIE: Stable Dexterous Policy Improvement from Real-World Experience

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