TUCO: Curating Simulation Demonstrations for Sim-to-Real Robot Policy Co-Training
cs.RO
Submitted: 2026-10-04
Updated: 2026-10-04
Comments: 28 pages
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: Simulation demonstrations can supplement scarce real-world data for robot policy co-training.
Abstract
Simulation demonstrations can supplement scarce real-world data for robot policy co-training. However, the value of using data curation to actively select these demonstrations for sim-to-real co-training remains underexplored. Existing curation methods also lack a unified criterion for measuring trajectory-level utility and set-level coverage from closed-loop target behavior. To address these gaps, we present the first systematic study of data curation for sim-to-real robot policy co-training and propose Trajectory-level Utility and set-level Coverage Optimization (TUCO). TUCO uses influence functions to trace how each source demonstration affects target-domain scoring rollouts. Our key insight is that these effects can be decomposed into an overall contribution to target return and variation across rollouts, providing a common closed-loop basis for measuring trajectory utility and set coverage. We further propose a performance-aligned subset optimizer that combines these measures in a unified curation objective to reduce redundancy and select complementary demonstrations. Extensive experiments on RoboMimic and OmniReset establish the value of active simulation data curation for sim-to-real policy co-training and show that TUCO achieves state-of-the-art performance across single-simulator, sim-to-sim, and sim-to-real settings.
Sources
- What Demonstration Curation Metrics Do to Your Policy
- OpenGVL -- Benchmarking Visual Temporal Progress for Data Curation
- Curating Demonstrations using Online Experience
- Sim-and-Human Co-training for Data-Efficient and Scene-Generalizable Bimanual Manipulation
- World Model for Robot Learning: A Comprehensive Survey
- MARS Policy: Multimodality Only When It Matters
- Action-to-Action Flow Matching
- RoboCurate: Harnessing Diversity with Action-Verified Neural Trajectory for Robot Learning
- Learning from the Best: Smoothness-Driven Metrics for Data Quality in Imitation Learning
- Quality over Quantity: Demonstration Curation via Influence Functions for Data-Centric Robot Learning
- A Mechanistic Analysis of Sim-and-Real Co-Training in Generative Robot Policies
- A Systematic Study of Data Modalities and Strategies for Co-training Large Behavior Models for Robot Manipulation
- SiMDex: Mining Similar Egocentric Videos for Cross-Embodiment Dexterous Manipulation
- DCoM: Active Learning for All Learners
- How to Utilize Failure Demo Data?: Effective Data Selection for Imitation Learning Using Distribution Differences in Attention Mechanism
- Quality Over Quantity: Curating Contact-Based Robot Datasets Improves Learning
- Beyond Imitation: Reinforcement Learning-Based Sim-Real Co-Training for VLA Models
- Is Diversity All You Need for Scalable Robotic Manipulation?
- Diversity You Can Actually Measure: A Fast, Model-Free Diversity Metric for Robotics Datasets
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