Critical Interval MSE: Toward Reliable Offline Validation for Robot Manipulation Policies

Real-world evaluation is the gold standard for robot policies because it tests them against the physical conditions and deployment challenges they are ultimately designed to handle. However, real-world evaluation is also the bottleneck for iterating on robot policies: it is costly, difficult to reproduce, and often too sparse to reliably compare nearby model variants. A straightforward proxy for performance is validation loss on expert demonstrations, but this proxy is often poorly correlated with real-world performance. In this paper, we introduce Critical Interval MSE (CI-MSE), an intuitively simple yet effective offline validation metric. CI-MSE restricts error computation to task-critical segments and pairs it with simple action-alignment procedures that better match rollout-time behavior. Across simulation and real-world experiments, CI-MSE yields a stronger correlation between validation error and rollout performance than raw MSE. Across a wide range of policy checkpoints, CI-MSE achieves a Spearman's rank correlation of -0.87, much closer to the ideal value of -1 than raw MSE's -0.61, demonstrating a significant improvement. We show through sensitivity analysis that our metric is robust to a wide range of hyperparameters. We further study the effectiveness of CI-MSE under evaluation distribution shifts and suggest design boundaries when using this metric. In summary, this paper provides a simple and reliable offline validation tool for accelerating policy iteration. Project webpage: https://ci-mse.github.io/