Mastering Agile Tasks with Limited Trials

Embodied robots nowadays can already handle many real-world manipulation tasks. However, certain other real-world tasks (e.g., shooting a basketball into a hoop) are highly agile and require high execution precision, presenting additional challenges for methods primarily designed for quasi-static manipulation tasks. This leads to increased efforts in costly data collection, laborious reward design, or complex motion planning. Such tasks, however, are far less challenging for humans. Say a novice basketball player typically needs only $\sim$10 attempts to make their first successful shot, by roughly imitating a motion prior and then iteratively adjusting their motion based on the past outcomes. Inspired by this human learning paradigm, we propose the Adaptive Diffusion Action Plannin (ADAP) algorithm, a simple & scalable approach which iteratively refines its action plan by few real-world trials within a learned prior motion pattern, until reaching a specific goal. Experiments demonstrated that ADAP can learn and accomplish a wide range of goal-conditioned agile dynamic tasks with human-level precision and efficiency directly in real-world, such as throwing a basketball into the hoop in fewer than 10 trials. Project website:this https URL.

@article{hu2025_2505.21916,
  title={ Mastering Agile Tasks with Limited Trials },
  author={ Yihang Hu and Pingyue Sheng and Shengjie Wang and Yang Gao },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.21916},
  year={ 2025 }
}