Behavioral Cloning & Offline Imitation Reading List

Curated by Mouhssine Rifaki | Stanford Electrical Engineering | Last updated August 2026

Core readings on behavioral cloning and offline imitation — from supervised imitation and DAgger to modern analysis of compounding errors and robust offline cloning.

Behavioral Cloning & Offline Imitation: 10 key papers

1. Learning Fine-Grained Bimanual Manipulation with Low-Cost Hardware
   Zhao et al. arXiv 2023.
2. Implicit Behavioral Cloning
   Florence et al. arXiv 2021.
3. Behavioral Cloning from Observation
   Torabi et al. arXiv 2018.
4. Error Bounds of Imitating Policies and Environments
   Xu et al. arXiv 2020.
5. What Matters in Learning from Offline Human Demonstrations for Robot Manipulation
   Mandlekar et al. arXiv 2021.
6. RT-1: Robotics Transformer for Real-World Control at Scale
   Brohan et al. arXiv 2022.
7. Feedback in Imitation Learning: The Three Regimes of Covariate Shift
   Spencer et al. arXiv 2021.
8. Mobile ALOHA: Learning Bimanual Mobile Manipulation with Low-Cost Whole-Body Teleoperation
   Fu et al. arXiv 2024.
9. Behavior Transformers: Cloning $k$ modes with one stone
   Shafiullah et al. arXiv 2022.
10. BC-Z: Zero-Shot Task Generalization with Robotic Imitation Learning
    Jang et al. arXiv 2022.

Related reading lists

• Offline Imitation Learning
• Imitation Learning and Inverse RL
• Offline Reinforcement Learning
• Transformers for Sequential Decision Making
• Sim-to-Real Transfer
• Inverse Reinforcement Learning
• Diffusion Models for Decision Making
• RL from Human Feedback (RLHF)