{"id":1179853,"date":"2026-07-09T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-07-09T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2026-07-26T11:38:53","modified_gmt":"2026-07-26T18:38:53","slug":"flowdagger-human-in-the-loop-adaptation-of-generative-robot-policies-in-latent-space","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/flowdagger-human-in-the-loop-adaptation-of-generative-robot-policies-in-latent-space\/","title":{"rendered":"FlowDAgger: Human-in-the-Loop Adaptation of Generative Robot Policies in Latent Space"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Pretrained generative robot policies based on flow matching and diffusion have achieved impressive results across a wide range of manipulation tasks. Yet real-world deployments routinely expose failure modes outside the pretraining distribution. Closing these gaps typically requires large-scale data collection or online reinforcement learning on physical hardware, which is impractical for rapid and safe adaptation. We present FlowDAgger, a sample- and compute-efficient method for adapting frozen generative robot policies from human interventions in latent space. Our key idea is action inversion: each human expert action is mapped to the noise that would have produced it under the frozen base policy, using reverse-time integration followed by local refinement. The resulting inverted noise provides supervision for a lightweight latent policy that steers the base model at deployment time, enabling rapid skill acquisition while preserving its behavioral priors. We evaluate FlowDAgger in simulation and on real-world bimanual and single-arm manipulation, adapting both action-head VLAs and world-action models from a handful of interventions. FlowDAgger outperforms supervised fine-tuning and latent-space RL baselines and preserves pretrained skills on held-out tasks, offering a practical path for adapting robot foundation models in the real world. Website: https:\/\/microsoft.github.io\/FlowDAgger<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Pretrained generative robot policies based on flow matching and diffusion have achieved impressive results across a wide range of manipulation tasks. Yet real-world deployments routinely expose failure modes outside the pretraining distribution. Closing these gaps typically requires large-scale data collection or online reinforcement learning on physical hardware, which is impractical for rapid and safe adaptation. 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