Data Augmentation for Instruction Following Policies via Trajectory Segmentation

The scalability of instructable agents in robotics or gaming is often hindered by limited data that pairs instructions with agent trajectories. However, large datasets of unannotated trajectories containing sequences of various agent behaviour (play trajectories) are often available. In a semi-supervised setup, we explore methods to extract labelled segments from play trajectories. The goal is to augment a small annotated dataset of instruction-trajectory pairs to improve the performance of an instruction-following policy trained downstream via imitation learning. Assuming little variation in segment length, recent video segmentation methods can effectively extract labelled segments. To address the constraint of segment length, we propose Play Segmentation (PS), a probabilistic model that finds maximum likely segmentations of extended subsegments, while only being trained on individual instruction segments. Our results in a game environment and a simulated robotic gripper setting underscore the importance of segmentation; randomly sampled segments diminish performance, while incorporating labelled segments from PS improves policy performance to the level of a policy trained on twice the amount of labelled data.

@article{höpner2025_2503.01871,
  title={ Data Augmentation for Instruction Following Policies via Trajectory Segmentation },
  author={ Niklas Höpner and Ilaria Tiddi and Herke van Hoof },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.01871},
  year={ 2025 }
}