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Rethinking Latent Redundancy in Behavior Cloning: An Information Bottleneck Approach for Robot Manipulation

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arxiv 2502.02853 v5 pith:5RCVWDSA submitted 2025-02-05 cs.RO cs.LG

Rethinking Latent Redundancy in Behavior Cloning: An Information Bottleneck Approach for Robot Manipulation

classification cs.RO cs.LG
keywords informationredundancylatentrepresentationsbehaviorbottleneckcloninggithub
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Behavior Cloning (BC) is a widely adopted visual imitation learning method in robot manipulation. Current BC approaches often enhance generalization by leveraging large datasets and incorporating additional visual and textual modalities to capture more diverse information. However, these methods overlook whether the learned representations contain redundant information and lack a solid theoretical foundation to guide the learning process. To address these limitations, we adopt an information-theoretic perspective and introduce mutual information to quantify and mitigate redundancy in latent representations. Building on this, we incorporate the Information Bottleneck (IB) principle into BC, which extends the idea of reducing redundancy by providing a structured framework for compressing irrelevant information while preserving task-relevant features. This work presents the first comprehensive study on redundancy in latent representations across various methods, backbones, and experimental settings, while extending the generalizability of the IB to BC. Extensive experiments and analyses on the CortexBench and LIBERO benchmarks demonstrate significant performance improvements with IB, underscoring the importance of reducing input data redundancy and highlighting its practical value for more practical applications. Project Page: https://baishuanghao.github.io/BC-IB.github.io.

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Cited by 7 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

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    cs.RO 2026-01 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Variational Regularization imposes an adaptive information bottleneck on noisy intermediate features in DP3-UNet and DP3-DiT policies, consistently raising task success rates on RoboTwin2.0, Adroit, and MetaWorld whil...

  2. Hierarchical Policy Learning via Spectral Decomposition

    cs.RO 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Causal Spectral Policy decomposes actions spectrally into coarse motion from obs/language and conditional fine corrections, outperforming baselines on precision manipulation tasks.

  3. Tri-Info: Generalizable, Interpretable Failure Prediction for VLA Models via Information Theory

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    Tri-Info uses three information theory signals on action diversity, temporal consistency, and state coupling to predict VLA model failures with cross-domain generalization to 83% real-world accuracy.

  4. FiberTune: Preserving Action-Fiber Visual Residuals in Vision-Language-Action Fine-Tuning

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    FiberTune is a new fine-tuning objective that preserves action-fiber visual residuals in VLA policies, yielding performance gains on simulation and physical robot tasks.

  5. VolumeDP: Modeling Volumetric Representation for Manipulation Policy Learning

    cs.RO 2026-03 conditional novelty 6.0

    An RGB-only diffusion policy that builds an explicit volumetric representation, distills it into spatial tokens, and conditions a multi-token decoder reaches 88.8% average success on LIBERO.

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