Workshop on Reinforcement Learning in the Era of Imitation Learning
Exploring How RL Can Enhance Real-World Robot Policies Trained with Imitation Learning
ICRA 2026 • Full-Day Workshop
Imitation learning (IL) has rapidly become the dominant paradigm for training robot policies, powering recent advances in dexterous manipulation, household tasks, and large-scale foundation models. Despite this success, IL methods face persistent challenges in data efficiency, robustness, and generalization to unseen conditions.
Reinforcement learning (RL), with its emphasis on exploration and reward optimization, offers complementary strengths that could help address these limitations—but its integration with IL remains an open problem.
How can reinforcement learning improve the real-world performance of robot policies, especially when complementing imitation learning?
This workshop aims to convene leading researchers from academia and industry to examine challenges and opportunities at this intersection, including efficient fine-tuning of pretrained policies, uncertainty-aware and human-in-the-loop adaptation, the use of real-to-sim digital twins for continuous policy improvement, and benchmarks for real-world evaluation.
| Time | Session |
|---|---|
| 08:45–09:00 | Opening remarks (organizers) |
| 09:00–09:30 | Invited Talk: Sergey Levine |
| 09:30–10:00 | Invited Talk: Chelsea Finn |
| 10:00–10:30 | Lightning Talks I for Accepted Papers (3–5 minutes each) |
| 10:30–11:00 | Coffee break + Posters I |
| 11:00–11:30 | Invited Talk: Robert Platt |
| 11:30–12:00 | Invited Talk: Pulkit Agrawal |
| 12:00–12:30 | Panel Discussion: "Imitate or Reinforce: Practical Challenges of RL from Real Robot Data" |
| 12:30–14:00 | Lunch |
| 14:00–14:30 | Invited Talk: Jason Ma |
| 14:30–15:00 | Invited Talk: Georgia Chalvatzaki |
| 15:00–15:30 | Invited Talk: TBD |
| 15:30–16:00 | Lightning Talks II for Accepted Papers (3–5 minutes each) |
| 16:00–16:30 | Coffee break + Posters II |
| 16:30–17:00 | Award Announcement and Closing Remarks |
We invite submissions on all aspects of combining reinforcement learning with imitation learning, including but not limited to:
Accepted papers will be presented through lightning talks and poster sessions, with opportunities for in-depth technical discussions.
For questions about the workshop, please contact the organizers at: workshop-rl-il-icra2026@googlegroups.com
