Episode

An episode is a single, complete attempt at a task — from the initial state to either task success, failure, or a timeout. In reinforcement learning, the agent interacts with the environment for one episode, accumulates rewards, and then the environment is reset. In imitation learning, each recorded demonstration constitutes one episode. Episodes are the fundamental unit of robot learning datasets: a dataset of 1,000 episodes contains 1,000 task attempts with associated observations, actions, and outcomes. Episode length, reset conditions, and success criteria must be precisely defined to ensure consistent data collection.