Compliant Residual DAgger: Improving Real-World Contact-Rich Manipulation with Human Corrections

Xiaomeng Xu, Yifan Hou, Zeyi Liu, Shuran Song

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 38 (NeurIPS 2025) Main Conference Track

We address key challenges in Dataset Aggregation (DAgger) for real-world contact- rich manipulation: how to collect informative human correction data and how to effectively update policies with this new data. We introduce Compliant Residual DAgger (CR-DAgger), which contains two novel components: 1) a Compliant Intervention Interface that leverages compliance control, allowing humans to pro- vide gentle, accurate delta action corrections without interrupting the ongoing robot policy execution; and 2) a Compliant Residual Policy formulation that learns from human corrections while incorporating force feedback and force control. Our system significantly enhances performance on precise contact-rich manipu- lation tasks using minimal correction data, improving base policy success rates by over 60% on two challenging tasks (book flipping and belt assembly) while outperforming both retraining-from-scratch and finetuning approaches. Through extensive real-world experiments, we provide practical guidance for implementing effective DAgger in real-world robot learning tasks.