TILDE: Teacher-in-the-Loop Distillation from Embodied Foundation Models

Yuxiang Lu, Yantong Liu, Jinghua Hou, Xueli Sun, Ruihua Han, Zhe Liu, Hengshuang Zhao

TILDE: Teacher-in-the-Loop Distillation from Embodied Foundation Models: 14 upvotes on Hugging Face Daily Papers, #40 of 50 papers on 2026-10-23. Day-by-day upvote history.

Large-scale action pretraining equips Embodied Foundation Models (EFMs) with strong manipulation capabilities, with particular strengths in generalization and closed-loop robustness, but reproducing such pretraining requires substantial robot data and computation. To transfer these capabilities from pretrained EFMs to policies without action pretraining, we introduce TILDE (Teacher-In-the-Loop Distillation from EFMs), which synergizes on-policy distillation at student-induced states with learning from teacher-executed recovery trajectories. We further propose AutoDAgger, an autonomous data aggregation pipeline in which a robotic reward model is utilized to monitor task progress and trigger teacher intervention, thereby collecting recovery experience without human monitoring or manual control. AutoDAgger accelerates recovery-trajectory collection by more than 2times compared with the human-in-the-loop method. By unifying learning from demonstrations, on-policy teacher supervision, and teacher's corrective behavior, TILDE improves task performance by up to 4.1times over behavior cloning across three real-world tasks and supports effective cross-architecture distillation.

Paper page on Hugging Face · arXiv

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