Adversarial Data Collection: Human-Collaborative Perturbations for
  Efficient and Robust Robotic Imitation Learning
Authors: name: Siyuan Huang; name: Yue Liao; name: Siyuan Feng; name: Shu Jiang; name: Si Liu; name: Hongsheng Li; name: Maoqing Yao; name: Guanghui Ren
Published: 2025-03-14 17:59:07

Abstract: The pursuit of data efficiency, where quality outweighs quantity, has emerged
as a cornerstone in robotic manipulation, especially given the high costs
associated with real-world data collection. We propose that maximizing the
informational density of individual demonstrations can dramatically reduce
reliance on large-scale datasets while improving task performance. To this end,
we introduce Adversarial Data Collection, a Human-in-the-Loop (HiL) framework
that redefines robotic data acquisition through real-time, bidirectional
human-environment interactions. Unlike conventional pipelines that passively
record static demonstrations, ADC adopts a collaborative perturbation paradigm:
during a single episode, an adversarial operator dynamically alters object
states, environmental conditions, and linguistic commands, while the
tele-operator adaptively adjusts actions to overcome these evolving challenges.
This process compresses diverse failure-recovery behaviors, compositional task
variations, and environmental perturbations into minimal demonstrations. Our
experiments demonstrate that ADC-trained models achieve superior compositional
generalization to unseen task instructions, enhanced robustness to perceptual
perturbations, and emergent error recovery capabilities. Strikingly, models
trained with merely 20% of the demonstration volume collected through ADC
significantly outperform traditional approaches using full datasets. These
advances bridge the gap between data-centric learning paradigms and practical
robotic deployment, demonstrating that strategic data acquisition, not merely
post-hoc processing, is critical for scalable, real-world robot learning.
Additionally, we are curating a large-scale ADC-Robotics dataset comprising
real-world manipulation tasks with adversarial perturbations. This benchmark
will be open-sourced to facilitate advancements in robotic imitation learning.