Abstract: Hierarchical imitation learning has become an effective approach for robotic manipulation: a high-level policy predicts a sub-goal end-effector pose, while a low-level policy executes the actions needed to reach it. This decomposition improves generalization and provides an interpretable interface, but the design of the high-level goal predictor remains an open question. This thesis studies [...]

Abstract: Generalist robot policies, vision-language-action models that combine a large pretrained vision-language model backbone with a diffusion or flow-matching action head, are increasingly capable, yet hard to deploy in the real world. Three gaps separate such a policy from a deployable one: a data gap (adapting to a new task still demands task-specific teleoperation data), an inference gap (the policy [...]

Abstract: Humanoid robots operating in human environments must manipulate articulated objects under contact and kinematic constraints that human demonstrations do not satisfy. That mismatch makes the human--humanoid embodiment gap the central bottleneck for learning from human data: robot demonstrations are expensive and sparse, while human demonstrations inhabit a different state-action space and often violate robot [...]