Quality over Quantity: Demonstration Curation via Influence Functions for Data-Centric Robot Learning

Learning from demonstrations has emerged as a promising paradigm for end-to-end robot control, particularly when scaled to diverse and large datasets. However, the quality of demonstration data, often collected through human teleoperation, remains a critical bottleneck for effective data-driven robot learning. Human errors, operational constraints, and teleoperator variability introduce noise and suboptimal behaviors, making data curation essential yet largely manual and heuristic-driven. In this work, we propose Quality over Quantity (QoQ), a grounded and systematic approach to identifying high-quality data by defining data quality as the contribution of each training sample to reducing loss on validation demonstrations. To efficiently estimate this contribution, we leverage influence functions, which quantify the impact of individual training samples on model performance. We further introduce two key techniques to adapt influence functions for robot demonstrations: (i) using maximum influence across validation samples to capture the most relevant state-action pairs, and (ii) aggregating influence scores of state-action pairs within the same trajectory to reduce noise and improve data coverage. Experiments in both simulated and real-world settings show that QoQ consistently improves policy performances over prior data selection methods.

Understanding Impact of Human Feedback via Influence Functions

In Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), it is crucial to learn suitable reward models from human feedback to align large language models (LLMs) with human intentions. However, human feedback can often be noisy, inconsistent, or biased, especially when evaluating complex responses. Such feedback can lead to misaligned reward signals, potentially causing unintended side effects during the RLHF process. To address these challenges, we explore the use of influence functions to measure the impact of human feedback on the performance of reward models. We propose a compute-efficient approximation method that enables the application of influence functions to LLM-based reward models and large-scale preference datasets. In our experiments, we demonstrate two key applications of influence functions: (1) detecting common forms of labeler bias in human feedback datasets and (2) guiding labelers to refine their strategies to align more closely with expert feedback. By quantifying the impact of human feedback on reward models, we believe that influence functions can enhance feedback interpretability and contribute to scalable oversight in RLHF, helping labelers provide more accurate and consistent feedback. Source code is available at https://github.com/mintaywon/IF_RLHF

Benchmarking Mobile Device Control Agents across Diverse Configurations

Developing autonomous agents for mobile devices can significantly enhance user interactions by offering increased efficiency and accessibility. However, despite the growing interest in mobile device control agents, the absence of a commonly adopted benchmark makes it challenging to quantify scientific progress in this area. In this work, we introduce B-MoCA: a novel benchmark designed specifically for evaluating mobile device control agents. To create a realistic benchmark, we develop B-MoCA based on the Android operating system and define 60 common daily tasks. Importantly, we incorporate a randomization feature that changes various aspects of mobile devices, including user interface layouts and language settings, to assess generalization performance. We benchmark diverse agents, including agents employing large language models (LLMs) or multi-modal LLMs as well as agents trained from scratch using human expert demonstrations. While these agents demonstrate proficiency in executing straightforward tasks, their poor performance on complex tasks highlights significant opportunities for future research to enhance their effectiveness. Our source code is publicly available at https://b-moca.github.io.