RACE：面向机器人策略检查点选择的无 rollout 校准累积评分方法

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Abstract: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.

Submission history

From: Changyeon Kim [view email]
[v1] Wed, 4 Nov 2026 02:26:29 UTC (2,603 KB)