{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/imitation-learning-from-a-single-temporally","title":"Imitation Learning from a Single Temporally Misaligned Video","arxiv_id":"2502.05397","date":"2025-02-08","proceeding":null,"authors":["William Huey","Huaxiaoyue Wang","Anne Wu","Yoav Artzi","Sanjiban Choudhury"],"abstract":"We examine the problem of learning sequential tasks from a single visual demonstration. A key challenge arises when demonstrations are temporally misaligned due to variations in timing, differences in embodiment, or inconsistencies in execution. Existing approaches treat imitation as a distribution-matching problem, aligning individual frames between the agent and the demonstration. However, we show that such frame-level matching fails to enforce temporal ordering or ensure consistent progress. Our key insight is that matching should instead be defined at the level of sequences. We propose that perfect matching occurs when one sequence successfully covers all the subgoals in the same order as the other sequence. We present ORCA (ORdered Coverage Alignment), a dense per-timestep reward function that measures the probability of the agent covering demonstration frames in the correct order. On temporally misaligned demonstrations, we show that agents trained with the ORCA reward achieve $4.5$x improvement ($0.11 \\rightarrow 0.50$ average normalized returns) for Meta-world tasks and $6.6$x improvement ($6.55 \\rightarrow 43.3$ average returns) for Humanoid-v4 tasks compared to the best frame-level matching algorithms. We also provide empirical analysis showing that ORCA is robust to varying levels of temporal misalignment. Our code is available at https://github.com/portal-cornell/orca/","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.05397v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.05397v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"imitation-learning-from-a-single-temporally","repo_url":"https://github.com/portal-cornell/orca","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"imitation-learning","task_name":"Imitation Learning"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2502.05397","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2502.05397"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/portal-cornell/orca","reach":null}],"summary":{"ran_draft_wrong":1},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":1,"ran":1,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":0,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"b551dd417706973e","entry":"compute_orca_reward","repo":"portal-cornell/orca","repo_kind":"official","path":"seq_matching/orca.py","file_url":"https://github.com/portal-cornell/orca/blob/HEAD/seq_matching/orca.py","link_basis":"first_harvest_node","language":"python","status":"ran_draft_wrong","verification_level":1,"contract_check":"OUTPUT_MISDECLARED","metamorphic_tier":"deterministic","behaviour_fingerprint":true,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"b551dd417706973e"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}