Temporal Action Selection for Action Chunking

Abstract

Action chunking is a widely adopted approach in Learning from Demonstration (LfD). By modeling multi-step action chunks rather than single-step actions, action chunking significantly enhances modeling capabilities for human expert policies. However, because action chunking makes a single decision only after a complete action block has been executed, the resulting reduction in decision frequency restricts the utilization of real-time observations, impairing reactivity in dynamic or noisy environments. Existing efforts to address this issue have primarily resorted to trading off reactivity against decision consistency, without achieving both. To address this limitation, we propose a novel algorithm, Temporal Action Selection (TAS), which caches predicted action chunks from multiple timesteps and dynamically selects the optimal action through a lightweight selector network. TAS achieves balanced optimization across both reactivity and decision consistency. Experiments across multiple tasks with diverse base policy architectures show that TAS significantly improves success rates. Furthermore, integrating TAS as a base policy with residual reinforcement learning (RL) improves both training efficiency and the performance ceiling. Experiments in both simulation and physical robots confirm the method's efficacy.