Papers

RACE:无需真实试跑的机器人策略检查点评估方法

RACE: Calibrated Cumulative Scoring for Rollout-Free Robot Policy Checkpoint Selection

Why we picked it

训练机器人策略想挑最好的 checkpoint 又不想真机一遍遍试,这篇 arXiv 论文给出的 RACE 指标用成功轨迹就能校准打分,实测排名和部署成功率对得上。

论文提出 RACE,一种 rollout-free 的机器人策略检查点选择指标,无需对每个候选 checkpoint 做昂贵的真实任务试跑。RACE 利用一组固定的成功轨迹,将动作偏差与基于状态条件的阈值进行校准,并通过连乘方式聚合得分,让早期大偏差降低后续参考预测的权重。在仿真中,RACE 优于验证损失等基线,且基线在验证集变化时排名会大幅退化。在真实机器人上,其排名与部署成功率在多种策略骨架和不同难度任务上保持一致。

Original · arXiv cs.AI

RACE: Calibrated Cumulative Scoring for Rollout-Free Robot Policy Checkpoint Selection

Assessing the deployment performance of learned robot policies during training is challenging, as directly measuring task success requires costly real-world trials for each candidate checkpoint. Averaged validation loss offers a rollout-free alternative, but its checkpoint rankings can be inconsistent with deployment performance. We analyze two limitations of this criterion: it penalizes action deviations without considering whether the policy can recover from them, and gives later reference predictions equal weight even when earlier deviations may lead execution away from the reference. We propose RACE, a novel rollout-free metric for ranking checkpoints using a fixed set of held-out successful trajectories. RACE calibrates action deviations against state-conditional thresholds derived from action differences at similar states in these trajectories. We aggregate these scores through a running product, so that a substantial deviation reduces the contribution of subsequent reference predictions. Averaging the resulting cumulative scores over time and across trajectories yields the checkpoint score. In simulation, RACE outperforms baselines across validation sources, while several baselines degrade sharply when the validation set changes. On real robots, its rankings align with deployment success across the evaluated policy backbones and tasks of varying difficulty. Perturbation analyses further show that RACE distinguishes deviations with markedly different effects on task success, even when baselines respond similarly.