[2603.03278] Tether: Autonomous Functional Play with Correspondence-Driven Trajectory Warping

Computer Science > Robotics arXiv:2603.03278 (cs) [Submitted on 3 Mar 2026] Title:Tether: Autonomous Functional Play with Correspondence-Driven Trajectory Warping Authors:William Liang, Sam Wang, Hung-Ju Wang, Osbert Bastani, Yecheng Jason Ma, Dinesh Jayaraman View a PDF of the paper titled Tether: Autonomous Functional Play with Correspondence-Driven Trajectory Warping, by William Liang and 5 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract:The ability to conduct and learn from interaction and experience is a central challenge in robotics, offering a scalable alternative to labor-intensive human demonstrations. However, realizing such "play" requires (1) a policy robust to diverse, potentially out-of-distribution environment states, and (2) a procedure that continuously produces useful robot experience. To address these challenges, we introduce Tether, a method for autonomous functional play involving structured, task-directed interactions. First, we design a novel open-loop policy that warps actions from a small set of source demonstrations (<=10) by anchoring them to semantic keypoint correspondences in the target scene. We show that this design is extremely data-efficient and robust even under significant spatial and semantic variations. Second, we deploy this policy for autonomous functional play in the real world via a continuous cycle of task selection, execution, evaluation, and improvement, guided by the visual understanding capabilities of vision-language mode...