Glossary

Imitation learning

Training a policy to reproduce demonstrated behavior from example trajectories.

Definition

Imitation learning trains a policy to reproduce demonstrated behavior from example trajectories rather than from a hand-designed reward. Behavioral cloning is the simplest form: predict the demonstrator’s action from their observation, learned over many demonstrations.

01

Why it matters

Human demonstration is often the fastest route to a working manipulation policy, and its ceiling is set by demonstration quality — viewpoint, coverage and label fidelity — which is exactly what egocentric data controls.

02

How Firsthand handles it

Firsthand captures human demonstrations from the first-person viewpoint with hand pose and action segments, the signals imitation-learning policies consume directly.