aiqbench analysis
This research introduces a manifold-guided method for trajectory planning that eliminates the need for costly expert trajectory data, relying instead on state observations to learn the underlying geometry of the motion space. By leveraging this geometric structure, the approach achieves strong generalization to unseen start-goal pairs and remains competitive with supervised models on high-dimensional robotic tasks like dual-arm manipulation. The work addresses critical scalability and data-efficiency bottlenecks in generative robotics by shifting from data-heavy supervision to intrinsic manifold learning.
Trajectory Planning without Trajectory Data: A Manifold-Guided Approach
arXiv:2610.08863v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A common way for trajectory planning is to leverage generative models trained on large collections of expert trajectories. At inference time, the model generates executable trajectories by conditioning on task goal constraints. However, trajectory-based methods rely on costly supervision, scale poorly with sequence length, and often generalize poorly to unseen constraints such as novel start-goal pairs. We propose an alternative to learn the underlying state-space manifold and use the geometry of the manifold for trajectory planning. This approach requires only state observations and enables generalization to unseen constraints by con- structing trajectories on the learned manifold of the state space. Experiments on Maze2D and robotic motion-planning benchmarks show that Ariadne constructs feasible paths from state-only supervision and generalizes to unseen start-goal combinations. On high-dimensional dual-arm planning, it remains competitive with trajectory-supervised and classical planners, while requiring no trajectory data for training.
Abstract:A common way for trajectory planning is to leverage generative models trained on large collections of expert trajectories. At inference time, the model generates executable trajectories by conditioning on task goal constraints. However, trajectory-based methods rely on costly supervision, scale poorly with sequence length, and often generalize poorly to unseen constraints such as novel start-goal pairs. We propose an alternative to learn the underlying state-space manifold and use the geometry of the manifold for trajectory planning. This approach requires only state observations and enables generalization to unseen constraints by con- structing trajectories on the learned manifold of the state space. Experiments on Maze2D and robotic motion-planning benchmarks show that Ariadne constructs feasible paths from state-only supervision and generalizes to unseen start-goal combinations. On high-dimensional dual-arm planning, it remains competitive with trajectory-supervised and classical planners, while requiring no trajectory data for training.
Accepted at NeurIPS 2026. Code can be found in this https URL
Robotics (cs.RO)
arXiv:2610.08863 [cs.RO]
(or arXiv:2610.08863v1 [cs.RO] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.08863 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
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Full text under the publisher's open licence · 244 words
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