TILDE: Teacher-in-the-Loop Distillation from Embodied Foundation Models

Abstract:Large-scale action pretraining equips Embodied Foundation Models (EFMs) with strong manipulation capabilities, with particular strengths in generalization and closed-loop robustness, but reproducing such pretraining requires substantial robot data and computation. To transfer these capabilities from pretrained EFMs to policies without action pretraining, we introduce TILDE (Teacher-In-the-Loop Distillation from EFMs), which synergizes on-policy distillation at student-induced states with learning from teacher-executed recovery trajectories. We further propose AutoDAgger, an autonomous data aggregation pipeline in which a robotic reward model is utilized to monitor task progress and trigger teacher intervention, thereby collecting recovery experience without human monitoring or manual control. AutoDAgger accelerates recovery-trajectory collection by more than $2\times$ compared with the human-in-the-loop method. By unifying learning from demonstrations, on-policy teacher supervision, and teacher's corrective behavior, TILDE improves task performance by up to $4.1\times$ over behavior cloning across three real-world tasks and supports effective cross-architecture distillation.

Robotics (cs.RO); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2610.25376 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2610.25376v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.25376 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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