Retiming Robot Demonstrations with a Learned Speed Prior
arXiv:2610.32676v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The pace of a robot demonstration is often determined by the teleoperator rather than by the task itself. As a result, the same motion can appear at widely different speeds across demonstrations, and policies trained on such data may inherit operator-specific timing along with task behavior. We propose to learn a speed prior directly from large-scale demonstration data. Given a task instruction, a motion path and the images along it, it predicts a distribution over execution speed along the path, from which a chosen quantile defines a consistent clock for retiming each demonstration. Existing methods derive the acceleration signal from the very data they accelerate, so each new task costs another fit, annotation, or pair of predefined rates. A single trained speed prior instead covers every task in a corpus. We fit a speed prior on both robot teleoperation data and handheld demonstrations in which a human arm, rather than a robot arm, m



