ALIGN: Aligning Condition Estimation and Expression in Advantage-Conditioned Behavior Cloning

Overview & Synopsis

Human-collected robot manipulation data often mix successful behavior with retries, pauses, recoveries, and failures. Advantage-Conditioned Behavior Cloning (AC-BC) can exploit such mixed-quality data, but only if the conditioning signal is both accurately constructed from offline trajectories and effectively incorporated into the policy's action-vector-field prediction. Existing pipelines can weaken this signal by thresholding estimator-derived advantage scores into noisy conditions, and by routing conditions through prompts that weakly affect the action vector field. We introduce ALIGN, a condition-aligned AC-BC framework for vision-language-action policies. ALIGN directly predicts categorical pairwise conditions in the policy-facing label space and injects them into a DiT action expert through AdaRMS modulation fused with flow time. We evaluate ALIGN on deliberately mixed real-robot datasets for ARX X5 bowl stacking and Franka key hanging, each combining standard demonstrations with retry-heavy trajectories. ALIGN improves condition fidelity, strengthens conditional vector-field separability, and achieves 90.0% and 56.7% closed-loop success, compared with 56.7% and 33.3% for the strongest AC-BC baseline. These results indicate that aligning conditions from estimation to action prediction is an effective way to extract robust manipulation policies from data in which success, recovery and error coexist.