# FOCUS: A First-Order Control Method for Observation-Only Imitation Learning Supervised by Optimal Transport

- Source: arXiv cs.RO
- Published: 2026-11-02T05:00:00.000Z
- RoboHot: https://robohot.news/en/items/yn3zadydl53m42jxqym7nib1z
- Original: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41540

## Summary

FOCUS combines local optimal transport alignment with short-horizon differentiable actor-critic learning for observation-only imitation learning, requiring neither temporally aligned expert trajectories nor expert-aligned initialization. The method matches agent rollout windows to multiple sampled expert segments using a soft best-of-K objective, with the transport cost providing a differentiable imitation reward and a learned critic bootstrapping value beyond the rollout horizon.