Daily Papers

Integrating visual-language instructions into visuomotor policies is gaining momentum in robot learning for enhancing open-world generalization. Despite promising advances, existing approaches face two challenges: limited language steerability when no generated reasoning is used as a condition, or significant inference latency when reasoning is incorporated. In this work, we introduce MoTVLA, a mixture-of-transformers (MoT)-based vision-language-action (VLA) model that integrates fast-slow unified reasoning with behavior policy learning. MoTVLA preserves the general intelligence of pre-trained VLMs (serving as the generalist) for tasks such as perception, scene understanding, and semantic planning, while incorporating a domain expert, a second transformer that shares knowledge with the pretrained VLM, to generate domain-specific fast reasoning (e.g., robot motion decomposition), thereby improving policy execution efficiency. By conditioning the action expert on decomposed motion instructions, MoTVLA can learn diverse behaviors and substantially improve language steerability. Extensive evaluations across natural language processing benchmarks, robotic simulation environments, and real-world experiments confirm the superiority of MoTVLA in both fast-slow reasoning and manipulation task performance.

The application of vision-language models (VLMs) has achieved impressive success in various robotics tasks, but there are few explorations for foundation models used in quadruped robot navigation. We introduce Cross Anything System (CAS), an innovative system composed of a high-level reasoning module and a low-level control policy, enabling the robot to navigate across complex 3D terrains and reach the goal position. For high-level reasoning and motion planning, we propose a novel algorithmic system taking advantage of a VLM, with a design of task decomposition and a closed-loop sub-task execution mechanism. For low-level locomotion control, we utilize the Probability Annealing Selection (PAS) method to train a control policy by reinforcement learning. Numerous experiments show that our whole system can accurately and robustly navigate across complex 3D terrains, and its strong generalization ability ensures the applications in diverse indoor and outdoor scenarios and terrains. Project page: https://cross-anything.github.io/

Recent advances in video diffusion models have demonstrated strong potential for generating robotic decision-making data, with trajectory conditions further enabling fine-grained control. However, existing trajectory-based methods primarily focus on individual object motion and struggle to capture multi-object interaction crucial in complex robotic manipulation. This limitation arises from multi-feature entanglement in overlapping regions, which leads to degraded visual fidelity. To address this, we present RoboMaster, a novel framework that models inter-object dynamics through a collaborative trajectory formulation. Unlike prior methods that decompose objects, our core is to decompose the interaction process into three sub-stages: pre-interaction, interaction, and post-interaction. Each stage is modeled using the feature of the dominant object, specifically the robotic arm in the pre- and post-interaction phases and the manipulated object during interaction, thereby mitigating the drawback of multi-object feature fusion present during interaction in prior work. To further ensure subject semantic consistency throughout the video, we incorporate appearance- and shape-aware latent representations for objects. Extensive experiments on the challenging Bridge V2 dataset, as well as in-the-wild evaluation, demonstrate that our method outperforms existing approaches, establishing new state-of-the-art performance in trajectory-controlled video generation for robotic manipulation.

Recent works in robotic manipulation through reinforcement learning (RL) or imitation learning (IL) have shown potential for tackling a range of tasks e.g., opening a drawer or a cupboard. However, these techniques generalize poorly to unseen objects. We conjecture that this is due to the high-dimensional action space for joint control. In this paper, we take an alternative approach and separate the task of learning 'what to do' from 'how to do it' i.e., whole-body control. We pose the RL problem as one of determining the skill dynamics for a disembodied virtual manipulator interacting with articulated objects. The whole-body robotic kinematic control is optimized to execute the high-dimensional joint motion to reach the goals in the workspace. It does so by solving a quadratic programming (QP) model with robotic singularity and kinematic constraints. Our experiments on manipulating complex articulated objects show that the proposed approach is more generalizable to unseen objects with large intra-class variations, outperforming previous approaches. The evaluation results indicate that our approach generates more compliant robotic motion and outperforms the pure RL and IL baselines in task success rates. Additional information and videos are available at https://kl-research.github.io/decoupskill

Real-world robotic tasks stretch over extended horizons and encompass multiple stages. Learning long-horizon manipulation tasks, however, is a long-standing challenge, and demands decomposing the overarching task into several manageable subtasks to facilitate policy learning and generalization to unseen tasks. Prior task decomposition methods require task-specific knowledge, are computationally intensive, and cannot readily be applied to new tasks. To address these shortcomings, we propose Universal Visual Decomposer (UVD), an off-the-shelf task decomposition method for visual long horizon manipulation using pre-trained visual representations designed for robotic control. At a high level, UVD discovers subgoals by detecting phase shifts in the embedding space of the pre-trained representation. Operating purely on visual demonstrations without auxiliary information, UVD can effectively extract visual subgoals embedded in the videos, while incurring zero additional training cost on top of standard visuomotor policy training. Goal-conditioned policies learned with UVD-discovered subgoals exhibit significantly improved compositional generalization at test time to unseen tasks. Furthermore, UVD-discovered subgoals can be used to construct goal-based reward shaping that jump-starts temporally extended exploration for reinforcement learning. We extensively evaluate UVD on both simulation and real-world tasks, and in all cases, UVD substantially outperforms baselines across imitation and reinforcement learning settings on in-domain and out-of-domain task sequences alike, validating the clear advantage of automated visual task decomposition within the simple, compact UVD framework.

This work focuses on the 3D reconstruction of non-rigid objects based on monocular RGB video sequences. Concretely, we aim at building high-fidelity models for generic object categories and casually captured scenes. To this end, we do not assume known root poses of objects, and do not utilize category-specific templates or dense pose priors. The key idea of our method, Root Pose Decomposition (RPD), is to maintain a per-frame root pose transformation, meanwhile building a dense field with local transformations to rectify the root pose. The optimization of local transformations is performed by point registration to the canonical space. We also adapt RPD to multi-object scenarios with object occlusions and individual differences. As a result, RPD allows non-rigid 3D reconstruction for complicated scenarios containing objects with large deformations, complex motion patterns, occlusions, and scale diversities of different individuals. Such a pipeline potentially scales to diverse sets of objects in the wild. We experimentally show that RPD surpasses state-of-the-art methods on the challenging DAVIS, OVIS, and AMA datasets.

Humans are remarkably efficient at learning tasks from demonstrations, but today's imitation learning methods for robot manipulation often require hundreds or thousands of demonstrations per task. We investigate two fundamental priors for improving learning efficiency: decomposing manipulation trajectories into sequential alignment and interaction phases, and retrieval-based generalisation. Through 3,450 real-world rollouts, we systematically study this decomposition. We compare different design choices for the alignment and interaction phases, and examine generalisation and scaling trends relative to today's dominant paradigm of behavioural cloning with a single-phase monolithic policy. In the few-demonstrations-per-task regime (<10 demonstrations), decomposition achieves an order of magnitude improvement in data efficiency over single-phase learning, with retrieval consistently outperforming behavioural cloning for both alignment and interaction. Building on these insights, we develop Multi-Task Trajectory Transfer (MT3), an imitation learning method based on decomposition and retrieval. MT3 learns everyday manipulation tasks from as little as a single demonstration each, whilst also generalising to novel object instances. This efficiency enables us to teach a robot 1,000 distinct everyday tasks in under 24 hours of human demonstrator time. Through 2,200 additional real-world rollouts, we reveal MT3's capabilities and limitations across different task families. Videos of our experiments can be found on at https://www.robot-learning.uk/learning-1000-tasks.

Many complex robotic manipulation tasks can be decomposed as a sequence of pick and place actions. Training a robotic agent to learn this sequence over many different starting conditions typically requires many iterations or demonstrations, especially in 3D environments. In this work, we propose Fourier Transporter (FourTran) which leverages the two-fold SE(d)xSE(d) symmetry in the pick-place problem to achieve much higher sample efficiency. FourTran is an open-loop behavior cloning method trained using expert demonstrations to predict pick-place actions on new environments. FourTran is constrained to incorporate symmetries of the pick and place actions independently. Our method utilizes a fiber space Fourier transformation that allows for memory-efficient construction. We test our proposed network on the RLbench benchmark and achieve state-of-the-art results across various tasks.

Text-to-motion generation is a crucial task in computer vision, which generates the target 3D motion by the given text. The existing annotated datasets are limited in scale, resulting in most existing methods overfitting to the small datasets and unable to generalize to the motions of the open domain. Some methods attempt to solve the open-vocabulary motion generation problem by aligning to the CLIP space or using the Pretrain-then-Finetuning paradigm. However, the current annotated dataset's limited scale only allows them to achieve mapping from sub-text-space to sub-motion-space, instead of mapping between full-text-space and full-motion-space (full mapping), which is the key to attaining open-vocabulary motion generation. To this end, this paper proposes to leverage the atomic motion (simple body part motions over a short time period) as an intermediate representation, and leverage two orderly coupled steps, i.e., Textual Decomposition and Sub-motion-space Scattering, to address the full mapping problem. For Textual Decomposition, we design a fine-grained description conversion algorithm, and combine it with the generalization ability of a large language model to convert any given motion text into atomic texts. Sub-motion-space Scattering learns the compositional process from atomic motions to the target motions, to make the learned sub-motion-space scattered to form the full-motion-space. For a given motion of the open domain, it transforms the extrapolation into interpolation and thereby significantly improves generalization. Our network, DSO-Net, combines textual decomposition and sub-motion-space scattering to solve the open-vocabulary motion generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our DSO-Net achieves significant improvements over the state-of-the-art methods on open-vocabulary motion generation. Code is available at https://vankouf.github.io/DSONet/.

Large language models (LLMs) are shown to possess a wealth of actionable knowledge that can be extracted for robot manipulation in the form of reasoning and planning. Despite the progress, most still rely on pre-defined motion primitives to carry out the physical interactions with the environment, which remains a major bottleneck. In this work, we aim to synthesize robot trajectories, i.e., a dense sequence of 6-DoF end-effector waypoints, for a large variety of manipulation tasks given an open-set of instructions and an open-set of objects. We achieve this by first observing that LLMs excel at inferring affordances and constraints given a free-form language instruction. More importantly, by leveraging their code-writing capabilities, they can interact with a visual-language model (VLM) to compose 3D value maps to ground the knowledge into the observation space of the agent. The composed value maps are then used in a model-based planning framework to zero-shot synthesize closed-loop robot trajectories with robustness to dynamic perturbations. We further demonstrate how the proposed framework can benefit from online experiences by efficiently learning a dynamics model for scenes that involve contact-rich interactions. We present a large-scale study of the proposed method in both simulated and real-robot environments, showcasing the ability to perform a large variety of everyday manipulation tasks specified in free-form natural language. Project website: https://voxposer.github.io

Recent advancements in robotics have enabled robots to navigate complex scenes or manipulate diverse objects independently. However, robots are still impotent in many household tasks requiring coordinated behaviors such as opening doors. The factorization of navigation and manipulation, while effective for some tasks, fails in scenarios requiring coordinated actions. To address this challenge, we introduce, HarmonicMM, an end-to-end learning method that optimizes both navigation and manipulation, showing notable improvement over existing techniques in everyday tasks. This approach is validated in simulated and real-world environments and adapts to novel unseen settings without additional tuning. Our contributions include a new benchmark for mobile manipulation and the successful deployment with only RGB visual observation in a real unseen apartment, demonstrating the potential for practical indoor robot deployment in daily life. More results are on our project site: https://rchalyang.github.io/HarmonicMM/

Learning transferable latent actions from large-scale object manipulation videos can significantly enhance generalization in downstream robotics tasks, as such representations are agnostic to different robot embodiments. Existing approaches primarily rely on visual reconstruction objectives while neglecting physical priors, leading to sub-optimal performance in learning universal representations. To address these challenges, we propose a Universal Latent Action Learning framework that takes task instructions and multiple frames as inputs, and optimizes both future frame reconstruction and action sequence prediction. Unlike prior works, incorporating action predictions (e.g., gripper or hand trajectories and orientations) allows the model to capture richer physical priors such as real-world distances and orientations, thereby enabling seamless transferability to downstream tasks. We further decompose the latent actions into learnable motion and scene tokens to distinguish the robot's active movements from environmental changes, thus filtering out irrelevant dynamics. By distilling the learned latent actions into the latest VLA models, we achieve strong performance across both simulated (SIMPLER and LIBERO) and real-world robot settings. Notably, with only 10 real-world trajectories per task collected on a Franka robot, our approach successfully completes all five challenging tasks, demonstrating strong few-shot transferability in robotic manipulation.

We present a novel approach for generating motion primitives for kinodynamic motion planning using diffusion models. The motions generated by our approach are adapted to each problem instance by utilizing problem-specific parameters, allowing for finding solutions faster and of better quality. The diffusion models used in our approach are trained on randomly cut solution trajectories. These trajectories are created by solving randomly generated problem instances with a kinodynamic motion planner. Experimental results show significant improvements up to 30 percent in both computation time and solution quality across varying robot dynamics such as second-order unicycle or car with trailer.

The scarcity of manipulation data has motivated the use of pretrained large models from other modalities in robotics. In this work, we build upon autoregressive video generation models to propose a Physical Autoregressive Model (PAR), where physical tokens combine frames and actions to represent the joint evolution of the robot and its environment. PAR leverages the world knowledge embedded in video pretraining to understand physical dynamics without requiring action pretraining, enabling accurate video prediction and consistent action trajectories. It also adopts a DiT-based de-tokenizer to model frames and actions as continuous tokens, mitigating quantization errors and facilitating mutual enhancement. Furthermore, we incorporate a causal mask with inverse kinematics, parallel training, and the KV-cache mechanism to further improve performance and efficiency. Experiments on the ManiSkill benchmark show that PAR achieves a 100\% success rate on the PushCube task, matches the performance of action-pretrained baselines on other tasks, and accurately predicts future videos with tightly aligned action trajectories. These findings underscore a promising direction for robotic manipulation by transferring world knowledge from autoregressive video pretraining. The project page is here: https://hcplab-sysu.github.io/PhysicalAutoregressiveModel/

Controlling human motion based on text presents an important challenge in computer vision. Traditional approaches often rely on holistic action descriptions for motion synthesis, which struggle to capture subtle movements of local body parts. This limitation restricts the ability to isolate and manipulate specific movements. To address this, we propose a novel motion representation that decomposes motion into distinct body joint group movements and interactions from a kinematic perspective. We design an automatic dataset collection pipeline that enhances the existing text-motion benchmark by incorporating fine-grained local joint-group motion and interaction descriptions. To bridge the gap between text and motion domains, we introduce a hierarchical motion semantics approach that progressively fuses joint-level interaction information into the global action-level semantics for modality alignment. With this hierarchy, we introduce a coarse-to-fine motion synthesis procedure for various generation and editing downstream applications. Our quantitative and qualitative experiments demonstrate that the proposed formulation enhances text-motion retrieval by improving joint-spatial understanding, and enables more precise joint-motion generation and control. Project Page: {\smallhttps://andypinxinliu.github.io/KinMo/}

Lattice-based planning techniques simplify the motion planning problem for autonomous vehicles by limiting available motions to a pre-computed set of primitives. These primitives are then combined online to generate more complex maneuvers. A set of motion primitives t-span a lattice if, given a real number t at least 1, any configuration in the lattice can be reached via a sequence of motion primitives whose cost is no more than a factor of t from optimal. Computing a minimal t-spanning set balances a trade-off between computed motion quality and motion planning performance. In this work, we formulate this problem for an arbitrary lattice as a mixed integer linear program. We also propose an A*-based algorithm to solve the motion planning problem using these primitives. Finally, we present an algorithm that removes the excessive oscillations from planned motions -- a common problem in lattice-based planning. Our method is validated for autonomous driving in both parking lot and highway scenarios.

In open-ended continuous environments, robots need to learn multiple parameterised control tasks in hierarchical reinforcement learning. We hypothesise that the most complex tasks can be learned more easily by transferring knowledge from simpler tasks, and faster by adapting the complexity of the actions to the task. We propose a task-oriented representation of complex actions, called procedures, to learn online task relationships and unbounded sequences of action primitives to control the different observables of the environment. Combining both goal-babbling with imitation learning, and active learning with transfer of knowledge based on intrinsic motivation, our algorithm self-organises its learning process. It chooses at any given time a task to focus on; and what, how, when and from whom to transfer knowledge. We show with a simulation and a real industrial robot arm, in cross-task and cross-learner transfer settings, that task composition is key to tackle highly complex tasks. Task decomposition is also efficiently transferred across different embodied learners and by active imitation, where the robot requests just a small amount of demonstrations and the adequate type of information. The robot learns and exploits task dependencies so as to learn tasks of every complexity.

Generating human videos with realistic and controllable motions is a challenging task. While existing methods can generate visually compelling videos, they lack separate control over four key video elements: foreground subject, background video, human trajectory and action patterns. In this paper, we propose a decomposed human motion control and video generation framework that explicitly decouples motion from appearance, subject from background, and action from trajectory, enabling flexible mix-and-match composition of these elements. Concretely, we first build a ground-aware 3D world coordinate system and perform motion editing directly in the 3D space. Trajectory control is implemented by unprojecting edited 2D trajectories into 3D with focal-length calibration and coordinate transformation, followed by speed alignment and orientation adjustment; actions are supplied by a motion bank or generated via text-to-motion methods. Then, based on modern text-to-video diffusion transformer models, we inject the subject as tokens for full attention, concatenate the background along the channel dimension, and add motion (trajectory and action) control signals by addition. Such a design opens up the possibility for us to generate realistic videos of anyone doing anything anywhere. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets and real-world cases demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance on both element-wise controllability and overall video quality.

We seek to extract a temporally consistent 6D pose trajectory of a manipulated object from an Internet instructional video. This is a challenging set-up for current 6D pose estimation methods due to uncontrolled capturing conditions, subtle but dynamic object motions, and the fact that the exact mesh of the manipulated object is not known. To address these challenges, we present the following contributions. First, we develop a new method that estimates the 6D pose of any object in the input image without prior knowledge of the object itself. The method proceeds by (i) retrieving a CAD model similar to the depicted object from a large-scale model database, (ii) 6D aligning the retrieved CAD model with the input image, and (iii) grounding the absolute scale of the object with respect to the scene. Second, we extract smooth 6D object trajectories from Internet videos by carefully tracking the detected objects across video frames. The extracted object trajectories are then retargeted via trajectory optimization into the configuration space of a robotic manipulator. Third, we thoroughly evaluate and ablate our 6D pose estimation method on YCB-V and HOPE-Video datasets as well as a new dataset of instructional videos manually annotated with approximate 6D object trajectories. We demonstrate significant improvements over existing state-of-the-art RGB 6D pose estimation methods. Finally, we show that the 6D object motion estimated from Internet videos can be transferred to a 7-axis robotic manipulator both in a virtual simulator as well as in a real world set-up. We also successfully apply our method to egocentric videos taken from the EPIC-KITCHENS dataset, demonstrating potential for Embodied AI applications.

Large language models (LLMs) pre-trained on vast internet-scale data have showcased remarkable capabilities across diverse domains. Recently, there has been escalating interest in deploying LLMs for robotics, aiming to harness the power of foundation models in real-world settings. However, this approach faces significant challenges, particularly in grounding these models in the physical world and in generating dynamic robot motions. To address these issues, we introduce a novel paradigm in which we use few-shot prompts collected from the physical environment, enabling the LLM to autoregressively generate low-level control commands for robots without task-specific fine-tuning. Experiments across various robots and environments validate that our method can effectively prompt a robot to walk. We thus illustrate how LLMs can proficiently function as low-level feedback controllers for dynamic motion control even in high-dimensional robotic systems. The project website and source code can be found at: https://prompt2walk.github.io/ .

Diffusion models have shown strong competitiveness in offline reinforcement learning tasks by formulating decision-making as sequential generation. However, the practicality of these methods is limited due to the lengthy inference processes they require. In this paper, we address this problem by decomposing the sampling process of diffusion models into two decoupled subprocesses: 1) generating a feasible trajectory, which is a time-consuming process, and 2) optimizing the trajectory. With this decomposition approach, we are able to partially separate efficiency and quality factors, enabling us to simultaneously gain efficiency advantages and ensure quality assurance. We propose the Trajectory Diffuser, which utilizes a faster autoregressive model to handle the generation of feasible trajectories while retaining the trajectory optimization process of diffusion models. This allows us to achieve more efficient planning without sacrificing capability. To evaluate the effectiveness and efficiency of the Trajectory Diffuser, we conduct experiments on the D4RL benchmarks. The results demonstrate that our method achieves it 3-it 10 times faster inference speed compared to previous sequence modeling methods, while also outperforming them in terms of overall performance. https://github.com/RenMing-Huang/TrajectoryDiffuser Keywords: Reinforcement Learning and Efficient Planning and Diffusion Model

Observing that the key for robotic action planning is to understand the target-object motion when its associated part is manipulated by the end effector, we propose to generate the 3D object-part scene flow and extract its transformations to solve the action trajectories for diverse embodiments. The advantage of our approach is that it derives the robot action explicitly from object motion prediction, yielding a more robust policy by understanding the object motions. Also, beyond policies trained on embodiment-centric data, our method is embodiment-agnostic, generalizable across diverse embodiments, and being able to learn from human demonstrations. Our method comprises three components: an object-part predictor to locate the part for the end effector to manipulate, an RGBD video generator to predict future RGBD videos, and a trajectory planner to extract embodiment-agnostic transformation sequences and solve the trajectory for diverse embodiments. Trained on videos even without trajectory data, our method still outperforms existing works significantly by 27.7% and 26.2% on the prevailing virtual environments MetaWorld and Franka-Kitchen, respectively. Furthermore, we conducted real-world experiments, showing that our policy, trained only with human demonstration, can be deployed to various embodiments.

Synthesizing realistic human-object interaction motions is a critical problem in VR/AR and human animation. Unlike the commonly studied scenarios involving a single human or hand interacting with one object, we address a more generic multi-body setting with arbitrary numbers of humans, hands, and objects. This complexity introduces significant challenges in synchronizing motions due to the high correlations and mutual influences among bodies. To address these challenges, we introduce SyncDiff, a novel method for multi-body interaction synthesis using a synchronized motion diffusion strategy. SyncDiff employs a single diffusion model to capture the joint distribution of multi-body motions. To enhance motion fidelity, we propose a frequency-domain motion decomposition scheme. Additionally, we introduce a new set of alignment scores to emphasize the synchronization of different body motions. SyncDiff jointly optimizes both data sample likelihood and alignment likelihood through an explicit synchronization strategy. Extensive experiments across four datasets with various multi-body configurations demonstrate the superiority of SyncDiff over existing state-of-the-art motion synthesis methods.

Representation learning and exploration are among the key challenges for any deep reinforcement learning agent. In this work, we provide a singular value decomposition based method that can be used to obtain representations that preserve the underlying transition structure in the domain. Perhaps interestingly, we show that these representations also capture the relative frequency of state visitations, thereby providing an estimate for pseudo-counts for free. To scale this decomposition method to large-scale domains, we provide an algorithm that never requires building the transition matrix, can make use of deep networks, and also permits mini-batch training. Further, we draw inspiration from predictive state representations and extend our decomposition method to partially observable environments. With experiments on multi-task settings with partially observable domains, we show that the proposed method can not only learn useful representation on DM-Lab-30 environments (that have inputs involving language instructions, pixel images, and rewards, among others) but it can also be effective at hard exploration tasks in DM-Hard-8 environments.

Humans can learn to manipulate new objects by simply watching others; providing robots with the ability to learn from such demonstrations would enable a natural interface specifying new behaviors. This work develops Robot See Robot Do (RSRD), a method for imitating articulated object manipulation from a single monocular RGB human demonstration given a single static multi-view object scan. We first propose 4D Differentiable Part Models (4D-DPM), a method for recovering 3D part motion from a monocular video with differentiable rendering. This analysis-by-synthesis approach uses part-centric feature fields in an iterative optimization which enables the use of geometric regularizers to recover 3D motions from only a single video. Given this 4D reconstruction, the robot replicates object trajectories by planning bimanual arm motions that induce the demonstrated object part motion. By representing demonstrations as part-centric trajectories, RSRD focuses on replicating the demonstration's intended behavior while considering the robot's own morphological limits, rather than attempting to reproduce the hand's motion. We evaluate 4D-DPM's 3D tracking accuracy on ground truth annotated 3D part trajectories and RSRD's physical execution performance on 9 objects across 10 trials each on a bimanual YuMi robot. Each phase of RSRD achieves an average of 87% success rate, for a total end-to-end success rate of 60% across 90 trials. Notably, this is accomplished using only feature fields distilled from large pretrained vision models -- without any task-specific training, fine-tuning, dataset collection, or annotation. Project page: https://robot-see-robot-do.github.io

Due to the complex and highly dynamic motions in the real world, synthesizing dynamic videos from multi-view inputs for arbitrary viewpoints is challenging. Previous works based on neural radiance field or 3D Gaussian splatting are limited to modeling fine-scale motion, greatly restricting their application. In this paper, we introduce LocalDyGS, which consists of two parts to adapt our method to both large-scale and fine-scale motion scenes: 1) We decompose a complex dynamic scene into streamlined local spaces defined by seeds, enabling global modeling by capturing motion within each local space. 2) We decouple static and dynamic features for local space motion modeling. A static feature shared across time steps captures static information, while a dynamic residual field provides time-specific features. These are combined and decoded to generate Temporal Gaussians, modeling motion within each local space. As a result, we propose a novel dynamic scene reconstruction framework to model highly dynamic real-world scenes more realistically. Our method not only demonstrates competitive performance on various fine-scale datasets compared to state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, but also represents the first attempt to model larger and more complex highly dynamic scenes. Project page: https://wujh2001.github.io/LocalDyGS/.

We introduce a new method for learning a generative model of articulated 3D animal motions from raw, unlabeled online videos. Unlike existing approaches for 3D motion synthesis, our model requires no pose annotations or parametric shape models for training; it learns purely from a collection of unlabeled web video clips, leveraging semantic correspondences distilled from self-supervised image features. At the core of our method is a video Photo-Geometric Auto-Encoding framework that decomposes each training video clip into a set of explicit geometric and photometric representations, including a rest-pose 3D shape, an articulated pose sequence, and texture, with the objective of re-rendering the input video via a differentiable renderer. This decomposition allows us to learn a generative model over the underlying articulated pose sequences akin to a Variational Auto-Encoding (VAE) formulation, but without requiring any external pose annotations. At inference time, we can generate new motion sequences by sampling from the learned motion VAE, and create plausible 4D animations of an animal automatically within seconds given a single input image.

Learning an accurate model of the environment is essential for model-based control tasks. Existing methods in robotic visuomotor control usually learn from data with heavily labelled actions, object entities or locations, which can be demanding in many cases. To cope with this limitation, we propose a method, dubbed DMotion, that trains a forward model from video data only, via disentangling the motion of controllable agent to model the transition dynamics. An object extractor and an interaction learner are trained in an end-to-end manner without supervision. The agent's motions are explicitly represented using spatial transformation matrices containing physical meanings. In the experiments, DMotion achieves superior performance on learning an accurate forward model in a Grid World environment, as well as a more realistic robot control environment in simulation. With the accurate learned forward models, we further demonstrate their usage in model predictive control as an effective approach for robotic manipulations.

View-predictive generative models provide strong priors for lifting object-centric images and videos into 3D and 4D through rendering and score distillation objectives. A question then remains: what about lifting complete multi-object dynamic scenes? There are two challenges in this direction: First, rendering error gradients are often insufficient to recover fast object motion, and second, view predictive generative models work much better for objects than whole scenes, so, score distillation objectives cannot currently be applied at the scene level directly. We present DreamScene4D, the first approach to generate 3D dynamic scenes of multiple objects from monocular videos via 360-degree novel view synthesis. Our key insight is a "decompose-recompose" approach that factorizes the video scene into the background and object tracks, while also factorizing object motion into 3 components: object-centric deformation, object-to-world-frame transformation, and camera motion. Such decomposition permits rendering error gradients and object view-predictive models to recover object 3D completions and deformations while bounding box tracks guide the large object movements in the scene. We show extensive results on challenging DAVIS, Kubric, and self-captured videos with quantitative comparisons and a user preference study. Besides 4D scene generation, DreamScene4D obtains accurate 2D persistent point track by projecting the inferred 3D trajectories to 2D. We will release our code and hope our work will stimulate more research on fine-grained 4D understanding from videos.

Character video synthesis aims to produce realistic videos of animatable characters within lifelike scenes. As a fundamental problem in the computer vision and graphics community, 3D works typically require multi-view captures for per-case training, which severely limits their applicability of modeling arbitrary characters in a short time. Recent 2D methods break this limitation via pre-trained diffusion models, but they struggle for pose generality and scene interaction. To this end, we propose MIMO, a novel framework which can not only synthesize character videos with controllable attributes (i.e., character, motion and scene) provided by simple user inputs, but also simultaneously achieve advanced scalability to arbitrary characters, generality to novel 3D motions, and applicability to interactive real-world scenes in a unified framework. The core idea is to encode the 2D video to compact spatial codes, considering the inherent 3D nature of video occurrence. Concretely, we lift the 2D frame pixels into 3D using monocular depth estimators, and decompose the video clip to three spatial components (i.e., main human, underlying scene, and floating occlusion) in hierarchical layers based on the 3D depth. These components are further encoded to canonical identity code, structured motion code and full scene code, which are utilized as control signals of synthesis process. The design of spatial decomposed modeling enables flexible user control, complex motion expression, as well as 3D-aware synthesis for scene interactions. Experimental results demonstrate effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method.

Gaussian splatting has emerged as a powerful tool for high-fidelity reconstruction of dynamic scenes. However, existing methods primarily rely on implicit motion representations, such as encoding motions into neural networks or per-Gaussian parameters, which makes it difficult to further manipulate the reconstructed motions. This lack of explicit controllability limits existing methods to replaying recorded motions only, which hinders a wider application in robotics. To address this, we propose Motion Blender Gaussian Splatting (MBGS), a novel framework that uses motion graphs as an explicit and sparse motion representation. The motion of a graph's links is propagated to individual Gaussians via dual quaternion skinning, with learnable weight painting functions that determine the influence of each link. The motion graphs and 3D Gaussians are jointly optimized from input videos via differentiable rendering. Experiments show that MBGS achieves state-of-the-art performance on the highly challenging iPhone dataset while being competitive on HyperNeRF. We demonstrate the application potential of our method in animating novel object poses, synthesizing real robot demonstrations, and predicting robot actions through visual planning. The source code, models, video demonstrations can be found at http://mlzxy.github.io/motion-blender-gs.

We introduce the task of human motion unlearning to prevent the synthesis of toxic animations while preserving the general text-to-motion generative performance. Unlearning toxic motions is challenging as those can be generated from explicit text prompts and from implicit toxic combinations of safe motions (e.g., ``kicking" is ``loading and swinging a leg"). We propose the first motion unlearning benchmark by filtering toxic motions from the large and recent text-to-motion datasets of HumanML3D and Motion-X. We propose baselines, by adapting state-of-the-art image unlearning techniques to process spatio-temporal signals. Finally, we propose a novel motion unlearning model based on Latent Code Replacement, which we dub LCR. LCR is training-free and suitable to the discrete latent spaces of state-of-the-art text-to-motion diffusion models. LCR is simple and consistently outperforms baselines qualitatively and quantitatively. Project page: https://www.pinlab.org/hmu{https://www.pinlab.org/hmu}.

We propose DemoDiffusion, a simple and scalable method for enabling robots to perform manipulation tasks in natural environments by imitating a single human demonstration. Our approach is based on two key insights. First, the hand motion in a human demonstration provides a useful prior for the robot's end-effector trajectory, which we can convert into a rough open-loop robot motion trajectory via kinematic retargeting. Second, while this retargeted motion captures the overall structure of the task, it may not align well with plausible robot actions in-context. To address this, we leverage a pre-trained generalist diffusion policy to modify the trajectory, ensuring it both follows the human motion and remains within the distribution of plausible robot actions. Our approach avoids the need for online reinforcement learning or paired human-robot data, enabling robust adaptation to new tasks and scenes with minimal manual effort. Experiments in both simulation and real-world settings show that DemoDiffusion outperforms both the base policy and the retargeted trajectory, enabling the robot to succeed even on tasks where the pre-trained generalist policy fails entirely. Project page: https://demodiffusion.github.io/

Monocular dynamic reconstruction is a challenging and long-standing vision problem due to the highly ill-posed nature of the task. Existing approaches are limited in that they either depend on templates, are effective only in quasi-static scenes, or fail to model 3D motion explicitly. In this work, we introduce a method capable of reconstructing generic dynamic scenes, featuring explicit, full-sequence-long 3D motion, from casually captured monocular videos. We tackle the under-constrained nature of the problem with two key insights: First, we exploit the low-dimensional structure of 3D motion by representing scene motion with a compact set of SE3 motion bases. Each point's motion is expressed as a linear combination of these bases, facilitating soft decomposition of the scene into multiple rigidly-moving groups. Second, we utilize a comprehensive set of data-driven priors, including monocular depth maps and long-range 2D tracks, and devise a method to effectively consolidate these noisy supervisory signals, resulting in a globally consistent representation of the dynamic scene. Experiments show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance for both long-range 3D/2D motion estimation and novel view synthesis on dynamic scenes. Project Page: https://shape-of-motion.github.io/

We consider the problem of forecasting motion from a single image, i.e., predicting how objects in the world are likely to move, without the ability to observe other parameters such as the object velocities or the forces applied to them. We formulate this task as conditional generation of dense trajectory grids with a model that closely follows the architecture of modern video generators but outputs motion trajectories instead of pixels. This approach captures scene-wide dynamics and uncertainty, yielding more accurate and diverse predictions than prior regressors and generators. We extensively evaluate our method on simulated data, demonstrate its effectiveness on downstream applications such as robotics, and show promising accuracy on real-world intuitive physics datasets. Although recent state-of-the-art video generators are often regarded as world models, we show that they struggle with forecasting motion from a single image, even in simple physical scenarios such as falling blocks or mechanical object interactions, despite fine-tuning on such data. We show that this limitation arises from the overhead of generating pixels rather than directly modeling motion.

Language instructions and demonstrations are two natural ways for users to teach robots personalized tasks. Recent progress in Large Language Models (LLMs) has shown impressive performance in translating language instructions into code for robotic tasks. However, translating demonstrations into task code continues to be a challenge due to the length and complexity of both demonstrations and code, making learning a direct mapping intractable. This paper presents Demo2Code, a novel framework that generates robot task code from demonstrations via an extended chain-of-thought and defines a common latent specification to connect the two. Our framework employs a robust two-stage process: (1) a recursive summarization technique that condenses demonstrations into concise specifications, and (2) a code synthesis approach that expands each function recursively from the generated specifications. We conduct extensive evaluation on various robot task benchmarks, including a novel game benchmark Robotouille, designed to simulate diverse cooking tasks in a kitchen environment. The project's website is available at https://portal-cornell.github.io/demo2code/

This paper explores the problem of collision-free motion generation for manipulators by formulating it as a global motion optimization problem. We develop a parallel optimization technique to solve this problem and demonstrate its effectiveness on massively parallel GPUs. We show that combining simple optimization techniques with many parallel seeds leads to solving difficult motion generation problems within 50ms on average, 60x faster than state-of-the-art (SOTA) trajectory optimization methods. We achieve SOTA performance by combining L-BFGS step direction estimation with a novel parallel noisy line search scheme and a particle-based optimization solver. To further aid trajectory optimization, we develop a parallel geometric planner that plans within 20ms and also introduce a collision-free IK solver that can solve over 7000 queries/s. We package our contributions into a state of the art GPU accelerated motion generation library, cuRobo and release it to enrich the robotics community. Additional details are available at https://curobo.org

We study a challenging task: text-to-motion synthesis, aiming to generate motions that align with textual descriptions and exhibit coordinated movements. Currently, the part-based methods introduce part partition into the motion synthesis process to achieve finer-grained generation. However, these methods encounter challenges such as the lack of coordination between different part motions and difficulties for networks to understand part concepts. Moreover, introducing finer-grained part concepts poses computational complexity challenges. In this paper, we propose Part-Coordinating Text-to-Motion Synthesis (ParCo), endowed with enhanced capabilities for understanding part motions and communication among different part motion generators, ensuring a coordinated and fined-grained motion synthesis. Specifically, we discretize whole-body motion into multiple part motions to establish the prior concept of different parts. Afterward, we employ multiple lightweight generators designed to synthesize different part motions and coordinate them through our part coordination module. Our approach demonstrates superior performance on common benchmarks with economic computations, including HumanML3D and KIT-ML, providing substantial evidence of its effectiveness. Code is available at https://github.com/qrzou/ParCo .

Bimanual manipulation is essential in robotics, yet developing foundation models is extremely challenging due to the inherent complexity of coordinating two robot arms (leading to multi-modal action distributions) and the scarcity of training data. In this paper, we present the Robotics Diffusion Transformer (RDT), a pioneering diffusion foundation model for bimanual manipulation. RDT builds on diffusion models to effectively represent multi-modality, with innovative designs of a scalable Transformer to deal with the heterogeneity of multi-modal inputs and to capture the nonlinearity and high frequency of robotic data. To address data scarcity, we further introduce a Physically Interpretable Unified Action Space, which can unify the action representations of various robots while preserving the physical meanings of original actions, facilitating learning transferrable physical knowledge. With these designs, we managed to pre-train RDT on the largest collection of multi-robot datasets to date and scaled it up to 1.2B parameters, which is the largest diffusion-based foundation model for robotic manipulation. We finally fine-tuned RDT on a self-created multi-task bimanual dataset with over 6K+ episodes to refine its manipulation capabilities. Experiments on real robots demonstrate that RDT significantly outperforms existing methods. It exhibits zero-shot generalization to unseen objects and scenes, understands and follows language instructions, learns new skills with just 1~5 demonstrations, and effectively handles complex, dexterous tasks. We refer to https://rdt-robotics.github.io/rdt-robotics/ for the code and videos.

Given a factorization of an image into a sum of linear components, we present a zero-shot method to control each individual component through diffusion model sampling. For example, we can decompose an image into low and high spatial frequencies and condition these components on different text prompts. This produces hybrid images, which change appearance depending on viewing distance. By decomposing an image into three frequency subbands, we can generate hybrid images with three prompts. We also use a decomposition into grayscale and color components to produce images whose appearance changes when they are viewed in grayscale, a phenomena that naturally occurs under dim lighting. And we explore a decomposition by a motion blur kernel, which produces images that change appearance under motion blurring. Our method works by denoising with a composite noise estimate, built from the components of noise estimates conditioned on different prompts. We also show that for certain decompositions, our method recovers prior approaches to compositional generation and spatial control. Finally, we show that we can extend our approach to generate hybrid images from real images. We do this by holding one component fixed and generating the remaining components, effectively solving an inverse problem.

Manipulation has long been a challenging task for robots, while humans can effortlessly perform complex interactions with objects, such as hanging a cup on the mug rack. A key reason is the lack of a large and uniform dataset for teaching robots manipulation skills. Current robot datasets often record robot action in different action spaces within a simple scene. This hinders the robot to learn a unified and robust action representation for different robots within diverse scenes. Observing how humans understand a manipulation task, we find that understanding how the objects should move in the 3D space is a critical clue for guiding actions. This clue is embodiment-agnostic and suitable for both humans and different robots. Motivated by this, we aim to learn a 3D flow world model from both human and robot manipulation data. This model predicts the future movement of the interacting objects in 3D space, guiding action planning for manipulation. Specifically, we synthesize a large-scale 3D optical flow dataset, named ManiFlow-110k, through a moving object auto-detect pipeline. A video diffusion-based world model then learns manipulation physics from these data, generating 3D optical flow trajectories conditioned on language instructions. With the generated 3D object optical flow, we propose a flow-guided rendering mechanism, which renders the predicted final state and leverages GPT-4o to assess whether the predicted flow aligns with the task description. This equips the robot with a closed-loop planning ability. Finally, we consider the predicted 3D optical flow as constraints for an optimization policy to determine a chunk of robot actions for manipulation. Extensive experiments demonstrate strong generalization across diverse robotic manipulation tasks and reliable cross-embodiment adaptation without hardware-specific training.

We present a universal motion representation that encompasses a comprehensive range of motor skills for physics-based humanoid control. Due to the high-dimensionality of humanoid control as well as the inherent difficulties in reinforcement learning, prior methods have focused on learning skill embeddings for a narrow range of movement styles (e.g. locomotion, game characters) from specialized motion datasets. This limited scope hampers its applicability in complex tasks. Our work closes this gap, significantly increasing the coverage of motion representation space. To achieve this, we first learn a motion imitator that can imitate all of human motion from a large, unstructured motion dataset. We then create our motion representation by distilling skills directly from the imitator. This is achieved using an encoder-decoder structure with a variational information bottleneck. Additionally, we jointly learn a prior conditioned on proprioception (humanoid's own pose and velocities) to improve model expressiveness and sampling efficiency for downstream tasks. Sampling from the prior, we can generate long, stable, and diverse human motions. Using this latent space for hierarchical RL, we show that our policies solve tasks using natural and realistic human behavior. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our motion representation by solving generative tasks (e.g. strike, terrain traversal) and motion tracking using VR controllers.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated promising reasoning capabilities in robotics; however, their application in multi-robot systems remains limited, particularly in handling task dependencies. This paper introduces DART-LLM, a novel framework that employs Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) to model task dependencies, enabling the decomposition of natural language instructions into well-coordinated subtasks for multi-robot execution. DART-LLM comprises four key components: a Question-Answering (QA) LLM module for dependency-aware task decomposition, a Breakdown Function module for robot assignment, an Actuation module for execution, and a Vision-Language Model (VLM)-based object detector for environmental perception, achieving end-to-end task execution. Experimental results across three task complexity levels demonstrate that DART-LLM achieves state-of-the-art performance, significantly outperforming the baseline across all evaluation metrics. Among the tested models, DeepSeek-r1-671B achieves the highest success rate, whereas Llama-3.1-8B exhibits superior response time reliability. Ablation studies further confirm that explicit dependency modeling notably enhances the performance of smaller models, facilitating efficient deployment on resource-constrained platforms. Please refer to the project website https://wyd0817.github.io/project-dart-llm/ for videos and code.

We propose RoHM, an approach for robust 3D human motion reconstruction from monocular RGB(-D) videos in the presence of noise and occlusions. Most previous approaches either train neural networks to directly regress motion in 3D or learn data-driven motion priors and combine them with optimization at test time. The former do not recover globally coherent motion and fail under occlusions; the latter are time-consuming, prone to local minima, and require manual tuning. To overcome these shortcomings, we exploit the iterative, denoising nature of diffusion models. RoHM is a novel diffusion-based motion model that, conditioned on noisy and occluded input data, reconstructs complete, plausible motions in consistent global coordinates. Given the complexity of the problem -- requiring one to address different tasks (denoising and infilling) in different solution spaces (local and global motion) -- we decompose it into two sub-tasks and learn two models, one for global trajectory and one for local motion. To capture the correlations between the two, we then introduce a novel conditioning module, combining it with an iterative inference scheme. We apply RoHM to a variety of tasks -- from motion reconstruction and denoising to spatial and temporal infilling. Extensive experiments on three popular datasets show that our method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches qualitatively and quantitatively, while being faster at test time. The code will be available at https://sanweiliti.github.io/ROHM/ROHM.html.

Recent models for video generation have achieved remarkable progress and are now deployed in film, social media production, and advertising. Beyond their creative potential, such models also hold promise as world simulators for robotics and embodied decision making. Despite strong advances, however, current approaches still struggle to generate physically plausible object interactions and lack physics-grounded control mechanisms. To address this limitation, we introduce KineMask, an approach for physics-guided video generation that enables realistic rigid body control, interactions, and effects. Given a single image and a specified object velocity, our method generates videos with inferred motions and future object interactions. We propose a two-stage training strategy that gradually removes future motion supervision via object masks. Using this strategy we train video diffusion models (VDMs) on synthetic scenes of simple interactions and demonstrate significant improvements of object interactions in real scenes. Furthermore, KineMask integrates low-level motion control with high-level textual conditioning via predictive scene descriptions, leading to effective support for synthesis of complex dynamical phenomena. Extensive experiments show that KineMask achieves strong improvements over recent models of comparable size. Ablation studies further highlight the complementary roles of low- and high-level conditioning in VDMs. Our code, model, and data will be made publicly available.

Data scarcity continues to be a major challenge in the field of robotic manipulation. Although diffusion models provide a promising solution for generating robotic manipulation videos, existing methods largely depend on 2D trajectories, which inherently face issues with 3D spatial ambiguity. In this work, we present a novel framework named ManipDreamer3D for generating plausible 3D-aware robotic manipulation videos from the input image and the text instruction. Our method combines 3D trajectory planning with a reconstructed 3D occupancy map created from a third-person perspective, along with a novel trajectory-to-video diffusion model. Specifically, ManipDreamer3D first reconstructs the 3D occupancy representation from the input image and then computes an optimized 3D end-effector trajectory, minimizing path length while avoiding collisions. Next, we employ a latent editing technique to create video sequences from the initial image latent and the optimized 3D trajectory. This process conditions our specially trained trajectory-to-video diffusion model to produce robotic pick-and-place videos. Our method generates robotic videos with autonomously planned plausible 3D trajectories, significantly reducing human intervention requirements. Experimental results demonstrate superior visual quality compared to existing methods.

For effective human-robot interaction, robots need to understand, plan, and execute complex, long-horizon tasks described by natural language. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have shown promise for translating natural language into robot action sequences for complex tasks. However, existing approaches either translate the natural language directly into robot trajectories or factor the inference process by decomposing language into task sub-goals and relying on a motion planner to execute each sub-goal. When complex environmental and temporal constraints are involved, inference over planning tasks must be performed jointly with motion plans using traditional task-and-motion planning (TAMP) algorithms, making factorization into subgoals untenable. Rather than using LLMs to directly plan task sub-goals, we instead perform few-shot translation from natural language task descriptions to an intermediate task representation that can then be consumed by a TAMP algorithm to jointly solve the task and motion plan. To improve translation, we automatically detect and correct both syntactic and semantic errors via autoregressive re-prompting, resulting in significant improvements in task completion. We show that our approach outperforms several methods using LLMs as planners in complex task domains. See our project website https://yongchao98.github.io/MIT-REALM-AutoTAMP/ for prompts, videos, and code.

A deep understanding of kinematic structures and movable components is essential for enabling robots to manipulate objects and model their own articulated forms. Such understanding is captured through articulated objects, which are essential for tasks such as physical simulation, motion planning, and policy learning. However, creating these models, particularly for objects with high degrees of freedom (DoF), remains a significant challenge. Existing methods typically rely on motion sequences or strong assumptions from hand-curated datasets, which hinders scalability. In this paper, we introduce Kinematify, an automated framework that synthesizes articulated objects directly from arbitrary RGB images or textual descriptions. Our method addresses two core challenges: (i) inferring kinematic topologies for high-DoF objects and (ii) estimating joint parameters from static geometry. To achieve this, we combine MCTS search for structural inference with geometry-driven optimization for joint reasoning, producing physically consistent and functionally valid descriptions. We evaluate Kinematify on diverse inputs from both synthetic and real-world environments, demonstrating improvements in registration and kinematic topology accuracy over prior work.

Representing robotic manipulation tasks as constraints that associate the robot and the environment is a promising way to encode desired robot behaviors. However, it remains unclear how to formulate the constraints such that they are 1) versatile to diverse tasks, 2) free of manual labeling, and 3) optimizable by off-the-shelf solvers to produce robot actions in real-time. In this work, we introduce Relational Keypoint Constraints (ReKep), a visually-grounded representation for constraints in robotic manipulation. Specifically, ReKep is expressed as Python functions mapping a set of 3D keypoints in the environment to a numerical cost. We demonstrate that by representing a manipulation task as a sequence of Relational Keypoint Constraints, we can employ a hierarchical optimization procedure to solve for robot actions (represented by a sequence of end-effector poses in SE(3)) with a perception-action loop at a real-time frequency. Furthermore, in order to circumvent the need for manual specification of ReKep for each new task, we devise an automated procedure that leverages large vision models and vision-language models to produce ReKep from free-form language instructions and RGB-D observations. We present system implementations on a wheeled single-arm platform and a stationary dual-arm platform that can perform a large variety of manipulation tasks, featuring multi-stage, in-the-wild, bimanual, and reactive behaviors, all without task-specific data or environment models. Website at https://rekep-robot.github.io/.

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has opened new possibilities in Multi-Robot Systems (MRS), enabling enhanced communication, task planning, and human-robot interaction. Unlike traditional single-robot and multi-agent systems, MRS poses unique challenges, including coordination, scalability, and real-world adaptability. This survey provides the first comprehensive exploration of LLM integration into MRS. It systematically categorizes their applications across high-level task allocation, mid-level motion planning, low-level action generation, and human intervention. We highlight key applications in diverse domains, such as household robotics, construction, formation control, target tracking, and robot games, showcasing the versatility and transformative potential of LLMs in MRS. Furthermore, we examine the challenges that limit adapting LLMs in MRS, including mathematical reasoning limitations, hallucination, latency issues, and the need for robust benchmarking systems. Finally, we outline opportunities for future research, emphasizing advancements in fine-tuning, reasoning techniques, and task-specific models. This survey aims to guide researchers in the intelligence and real-world deployment of MRS powered by LLMs. Based on the fast-evolving nature of research in the field, we keep updating the papers in the open-source Github repository.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated proficiency in utilizing various tools by coding, yet they face limitations in handling intricate logic and precise control. In embodied tasks, high-level planning is amenable to direct coding, while low-level actions often necessitate task-specific refinement, such as Reinforcement Learning (RL). To seamlessly integrate both modalities, we introduce a two-level hierarchical framework, RL-GPT, comprising a slow agent and a fast agent. The slow agent analyzes actions suitable for coding, while the fast agent executes coding tasks. This decomposition effectively focuses each agent on specific tasks, proving highly efficient within our pipeline. Our approach outperforms traditional RL methods and existing GPT agents, demonstrating superior efficiency. In the Minecraft game, it rapidly obtains diamonds within a single day on an RTX3090. Additionally, it achieves SOTA performance across all designated MineDojo tasks.

Recent progress in vision language foundation models has shown their ability to understand multimodal data and resolve complicated vision language tasks, including robotics manipulation. We seek a straightforward way of making use of existing vision-language models (VLMs) with simple fine-tuning on robotics data. To this end, we derive a simple and novel vision-language manipulation framework, dubbed RoboFlamingo, built upon the open-source VLMs, OpenFlamingo. Unlike prior works, RoboFlamingo utilizes pre-trained VLMs for single-step vision-language comprehension, models sequential history information with an explicit policy head, and is slightly fine-tuned by imitation learning only on language-conditioned manipulation datasets. Such a decomposition provides RoboFlamingo the flexibility for open-loop control and deployment on low-performance platforms. By exceeding the state-of-the-art performance with a large margin on the tested benchmark, we show RoboFlamingo can be an effective and competitive alternative to adapt VLMs to robot control. Our extensive experimental results also reveal several interesting conclusions regarding the behavior of different pre-trained VLMs on manipulation tasks. We believe RoboFlamingo has the potential to be a cost-effective and easy-to-use solution for robotics manipulation, empowering everyone with the ability to fine-tune their own robotics policy.

Denoising diffusion models have shown great promise in human motion synthesis conditioned on natural language descriptions. However, integrating spatial constraints, such as pre-defined motion trajectories and obstacles, remains a challenge despite being essential for bridging the gap between isolated human motion and its surrounding environment. To address this issue, we propose Guided Motion Diffusion (GMD), a method that incorporates spatial constraints into the motion generation process. Specifically, we propose an effective feature projection scheme that manipulates motion representation to enhance the coherency between spatial information and local poses. Together with a new imputation formulation, the generated motion can reliably conform to spatial constraints such as global motion trajectories. Furthermore, given sparse spatial constraints (e.g. sparse keyframes), we introduce a new dense guidance approach to turn a sparse signal, which is susceptible to being ignored during the reverse steps, into denser signals to guide the generated motion to the given constraints. Our extensive experiments justify the development of GMD, which achieves a significant improvement over state-of-the-art methods in text-based motion generation while allowing control of the synthesized motions with spatial constraints.

Robotic manipulation can be formulated as inducing a sequence of spatial displacements: where the space being moved can encompass an object, part of an object, or end effector. In this work, we propose the Transporter Network, a simple model architecture that rearranges deep features to infer spatial displacements from visual input - which can parameterize robot actions. It makes no assumptions of objectness (e.g. canonical poses, models, or keypoints), it exploits spatial symmetries, and is orders of magnitude more sample efficient than our benchmarked alternatives in learning vision-based manipulation tasks: from stacking a pyramid of blocks, to assembling kits with unseen objects; from manipulating deformable ropes, to pushing piles of small objects with closed-loop feedback. Our method can represent complex multi-modal policy distributions and generalizes to multi-step sequential tasks, as well as 6DoF pick-and-place. Experiments on 10 simulated tasks show that it learns faster and generalizes better than a variety of end-to-end baselines, including policies that use ground-truth object poses. We validate our methods with hardware in the real world. Experiment videos and code are available at https://transporternets.github.io

We present DIMO, a generative approach capable of generating diverse 3D motions for arbitrary objects from a single image. The core idea of our work is to leverage the rich priors in well-trained video models to extract the common motion patterns and then embed them into a shared low-dimensional latent space. Specifically, we first generate multiple videos of the same object with diverse motions. We then embed each motion into a latent vector and train a shared motion decoder to learn the distribution of motions represented by a structured and compact motion representation, i.e., neural key point trajectories. The canonical 3D Gaussians are then driven by these key points and fused to model the geometry and appearance. During inference time with learned latent space, we can instantly sample diverse 3D motions in a single-forward pass and support several interesting applications including 3D motion interpolation and language-guided motion generation. Our project page is available at https://linzhanm.github.io/dimo.

Controllable human image animation aims to generate videos from reference images using driving videos. Due to the limited control signals provided by sparse guidance (e.g., skeleton pose), recent works have attempted to introduce additional dense conditions (e.g., depth map) to ensure motion alignment. However, such strict dense guidance impairs the quality of the generated video when the body shape of the reference character differs significantly from that of the driving video. In this paper, we present DisPose to mine more generalizable and effective control signals without additional dense input, which disentangles the sparse skeleton pose in human image animation into motion field guidance and keypoint correspondence. Specifically, we generate a dense motion field from a sparse motion field and the reference image, which provides region-level dense guidance while maintaining the generalization of the sparse pose control. We also extract diffusion features corresponding to pose keypoints from the reference image, and then these point features are transferred to the target pose to provide distinct identity information. To seamlessly integrate into existing models, we propose a plug-and-play hybrid ControlNet that improves the quality and consistency of generated videos while freezing the existing model parameters. Extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments demonstrate the superiority of DisPose compared to current methods. Code: https://github.com/lihxxx/DisPose{https://github.com/lihxxx/DisPose}.

Robust perception and dynamics modeling are fundamental to real-world robotic policy learning. Recent methods employ video diffusion models (VDMs) to enhance robotic policies, improving their understanding and modeling of the physical world. However, existing approaches overlook the coherent and physically consistent motion representations inherently encoded across frames in VDMs. To this end, we propose Video2Act, a framework that efficiently guides robotic action learning by explicitly integrating spatial and motion-aware representations. Building on the inherent representations of VDMs, we extract foreground boundaries and inter-frame motion variations while filtering out background noise and task-irrelevant biases. These refined representations are then used as additional conditioning inputs to a diffusion transformer (DiT) action head, enabling it to reason about what to manipulate and how to move. To mitigate inference inefficiency, we propose an asynchronous dual-system design, where the VDM functions as the slow System 2 and the DiT head as the fast System 1, working collaboratively to generate adaptive actions. By providing motion-aware conditions to System 1, Video2Act maintains stable manipulation even with low-frequency updates from the VDM. For evaluation, Video2Act surpasses previous state-of-the-art VLA methods by 7.7% in simulation and 21.7% in real-world tasks in terms of average success rate, further exhibiting strong generalization capabilities.

The growing adoption of Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models in embodied AI intensifies the demand for diverse manipulation demonstrations. However, high costs associated with data collection often result in insufficient data coverage across all scenarios, which limits the performance of the models. It is observed that the spatial reasoning phase (SRP) in large workspace dominates the failure cases. Fortunately, this data can be collected with low cost, underscoring the potential of leveraging inexpensive data to improve model performance. In this paper, we introduce the DataPlatter method, a framework that decouples training trajectories into distinct task stages and leverages abundant easily collectible SRP data to enhance VLA model's generalization. Through analysis we demonstrate that sub-task-specific training with additional SRP data with proper proportion can act as a performance catalyst for robot manipulation, maximizing the utilization of costly physical interaction phase (PIP) data. Experiments show that through introducing large proportion of cost-effective SRP trajectories into a limited set of PIP data, we can achieve a maximum improvement of 41\% on success rate in zero-shot scenes, while with the ability to transfer manipulation skill to novel targets.

A Lie group is an old mathematical abstract object dating back to the XIX century, when mathematician Sophus Lie laid the foundations of the theory of continuous transformation groups. As it often happens, its usage has spread over diverse areas of science and technology many years later. In robotics, we are recently experiencing an important trend in its usage, at least in the fields of estimation, and particularly in motion estimation for navigation. Yet for a vast majority of roboticians, Lie groups are highly abstract constructions and therefore difficult to understand and to use. This may be due to the fact that most of the literature on Lie theory is written by and for mathematicians and physicists, who might be more used than us to the deep abstractions this theory deals with. In estimation for robotics it is often not necessary to exploit the full capacity of the theory, and therefore an effort of selection of materials is required. In this paper, we will walk through the most basic principles of the Lie theory, with the aim of conveying clear and useful ideas, and leave a significant corpus of the Lie theory behind. Even with this mutilation, the material included here has proven to be extremely useful in modern estimation algorithms for robotics, especially in the fields of SLAM, visual odometry, and the like. Alongside this micro Lie theory, we provide a chapter with a few application examples, and a vast reference of formulas for the major Lie groups used in robotics, including most jacobian matrices and the way to easily manipulate them. We also present a new C++ template-only library implementing all the functionality described here.

Videos of robots interacting with objects encode rich information about the objects' dynamics. However, existing video prediction approaches typically do not explicitly account for the 3D information from videos, such as robot actions and objects' 3D states, limiting their use in real-world robotic applications. In this work, we introduce a framework to learn object dynamics directly from multi-view RGB videos by explicitly considering the robot's action trajectories and their effects on scene dynamics. We utilize the 3D Gaussian representation of 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) to train a particle-based dynamics model using Graph Neural Networks. This model operates on sparse control particles downsampled from the densely tracked 3D Gaussian reconstructions. By learning the neural dynamics model on offline robot interaction data, our method can predict object motions under varying initial configurations and unseen robot actions. The 3D transformations of Gaussians can be interpolated from the motions of control particles, enabling the rendering of predicted future object states and achieving action-conditioned video prediction. The dynamics model can also be applied to model-based planning frameworks for object manipulation tasks. We conduct experiments on various kinds of deformable materials, including ropes, clothes, and stuffed animals, demonstrating our framework's ability to model complex shapes and dynamics. Our project page is available at https://gs-dynamics.github.io.

Neural-based motion planning methods have achieved remarkable progress for robotic manipulators, yet a fundamental challenge lies in simultaneously accounting for both the robot's physical shape and the surrounding environment when generating safe and feasible motions. Moreover, existing approaches often rely on simplified robot models or focus primarily on obstacle representation, which can lead to incomplete collision detection and degraded performance in cluttered scenes. To address these limitations, we propose spatial anchor-based motion policy (SAMP), a unified framework that simultaneously encodes the environment and the manipulator using signed distance field (SDF) anchored on a shared spatial grid. SAMP incorporates a dedicated robot SDF network that captures the manipulator's precise geometry, enabling collision-aware reasoning beyond coarse link approximations. These representations are fused on spatial anchors and used to train a neural motion policy that generates smooth, collision-free trajectories in the proposed efficient feature alignment strategy. Experiments conducted in both simulated and real-world environments consistently show that SAMP outperforms existing methods, delivering an 11% increase in success rate and a 7% reduction in collision rate. These results highlight the benefits of jointly modelling robot and environment geometry, demonstrating its practical value in challenging real-world environments.

Reconstructing dynamic 3D scenes from monocular video remains fundamentally challenging due to the need to jointly infer motion, structure, and appearance from limited observations. Existing dynamic scene reconstruction methods based on Gaussian Splatting often entangle static and dynamic elements in a shared representation, leading to motion leakage, geometric distortions, and temporal flickering. We identify that the root cause lies in the coupled modeling of geometry and appearance across time, which hampers both stability and interpretability. To address this, we propose SplitGaussian, a novel framework that explicitly decomposes scene representations into static and dynamic components. By decoupling motion modeling from background geometry and allowing only the dynamic branch to deform over time, our method prevents motion artifacts in static regions while supporting view- and time-dependent appearance refinement. This disentangled design not only enhances temporal consistency and reconstruction fidelity but also accelerates convergence. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SplitGaussian outperforms prior state-of-the-art methods in rendering quality, geometric stability, and motion separation.

The ability to track general whole-body motions in the real world is a useful way to build general-purpose humanoid robots. However, achieving this can be challenging due to the temporal and kinematic diversity of the motions, the policy's capability, and the difficulty of coordination of the upper and lower bodies. To address these issues, we propose GMT, a general and scalable motion-tracking framework that trains a single unified policy to enable humanoid robots to track diverse motions in the real world. GMT is built upon two core components: an Adaptive Sampling strategy and a Motion Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture. The Adaptive Sampling automatically balances easy and difficult motions during training. The MoE ensures better specialization of different regions of the motion manifold. We show through extensive experiments in both simulation and the real world the effectiveness of GMT, achieving state-of-the-art performance across a broad spectrum of motions using a unified general policy. Videos and additional information can be found at https://gmt-humanoid.github.io.

Novel view synthesis for dynamic scenes is still a challenging problem in computer vision and graphics. Recently, Gaussian splatting has emerged as a robust technique to represent static scenes and enable high-quality and real-time novel view synthesis. Building upon this technique, we propose a new representation that explicitly decomposes the motion and appearance of dynamic scenes into sparse control points and dense Gaussians, respectively. Our key idea is to use sparse control points, significantly fewer in number than the Gaussians, to learn compact 6 DoF transformation bases, which can be locally interpolated through learned interpolation weights to yield the motion field of 3D Gaussians. We employ a deformation MLP to predict time-varying 6 DoF transformations for each control point, which reduces learning complexities, enhances learning abilities, and facilitates obtaining temporal and spatial coherent motion patterns. Then, we jointly learn the 3D Gaussians, the canonical space locations of control points, and the deformation MLP to reconstruct the appearance, geometry, and dynamics of 3D scenes. During learning, the location and number of control points are adaptively adjusted to accommodate varying motion complexities in different regions, and an ARAP loss following the principle of as rigid as possible is developed to enforce spatial continuity and local rigidity of learned motions. Finally, thanks to the explicit sparse motion representation and its decomposition from appearance, our method can enable user-controlled motion editing while retaining high-fidelity appearances. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms existing approaches on novel view synthesis with a high rendering speed and enables novel appearance-preserved motion editing applications. Project page: https://yihua7.github.io/SC-GS-web/

Robotic behavior synthesis, the problem of understanding multimodal inputs and generating precise physical control for robots, is an important part of Embodied AI. Despite successes in applying multimodal large language models for high-level understanding, it remains challenging to translate these conceptual understandings into detailed robotic actions while achieving generalization across various scenarios. In this paper, we propose a tree-structured multimodal code generation framework for generalized robotic behavior synthesis, termed RoboCodeX. RoboCodeX decomposes high-level human instructions into multiple object-centric manipulation units consisting of physical preferences such as affordance and safety constraints, and applies code generation to introduce generalization ability across various robotics platforms. To further enhance the capability to map conceptual and perceptual understanding into control commands, a specialized multimodal reasoning dataset is collected for pre-training and an iterative self-updating methodology is introduced for supervised fine-tuning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RoboCodeX achieves state-of-the-art performance in both simulators and real robots on four different kinds of manipulation tasks and one navigation task.

Dynamic scene reconstruction is a long-term challenge in the field of 3D vision. Recently, the emergence of 3D Gaussian Splatting has provided new insights into this problem. Although subsequent efforts rapidly extend static 3D Gaussian to dynamic scenes, they often lack explicit constraints on object motion, leading to optimization difficulties and performance degradation. To address the above issues, we propose a novel deformable 3D Gaussian splatting framework called MotionGS, which explores explicit motion priors to guide the deformation of 3D Gaussians. Specifically, we first introduce an optical flow decoupling module that decouples optical flow into camera flow and motion flow, corresponding to camera movement and object motion respectively. Then the motion flow can effectively constrain the deformation of 3D Gaussians, thus simulating the motion of dynamic objects. Additionally, a camera pose refinement module is proposed to alternately optimize 3D Gaussians and camera poses, mitigating the impact of inaccurate camera poses. Extensive experiments in the monocular dynamic scenes validate that MotionGS surpasses state-of-the-art methods and exhibits significant superiority in both qualitative and quantitative results. Project page: https://ruijiezhu94.github.io/MotionGS_page

Tool use is a hallmark of advanced intelligence, exemplified in both animal behavior and robotic capabilities. This paper investigates the feasibility of imbuing robots with the ability to creatively use tools in tasks that involve implicit physical constraints and long-term planning. Leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs), we develop RoboTool, a system that accepts natural language instructions and outputs executable code for controlling robots in both simulated and real-world environments. RoboTool incorporates four pivotal components: (i) an "Analyzer" that interprets natural language to discern key task-related concepts, (ii) a "Planner" that generates comprehensive strategies based on the language input and key concepts, (iii) a "Calculator" that computes parameters for each skill, and (iv) a "Coder" that translates these plans into executable Python code. Our results show that RoboTool can not only comprehend explicit or implicit physical constraints and environmental factors but also demonstrate creative tool use. Unlike traditional Task and Motion Planning (TAMP) methods that rely on explicit optimization, our LLM-based system offers a more flexible, efficient, and user-friendly solution for complex robotics tasks. Through extensive experiments, we validate that RoboTool is proficient in handling tasks that would otherwise be infeasible without the creative use of tools, thereby expanding the capabilities of robotic systems. Demos are available on our project page: https://creative-robotool.github.io/.

Motion trajectories offer reliable references for physics-based motion learning but suffer from sparsity, particularly in regions that lack sufficient data coverage. To address this challenge, we introduce a self-supervised, structured representation and generation method that extracts spatial-temporal relationships in periodic or quasi-periodic motions. The motion dynamics in a continuously parameterized latent space enable our method to enhance the interpolation and generalization capabilities of motion learning algorithms. The motion learning controller, informed by the motion parameterization, operates online tracking of a wide range of motions, including targets unseen during training. With a fallback mechanism, the controller dynamically adapts its tracking strategy and automatically resorts to safe action execution when a potentially risky target is proposed. By leveraging the identified spatial-temporal structure, our work opens new possibilities for future advancements in general motion representation and learning algorithms.

Scalable robot learning in the real world is limited by the cost and safety issues of real robots. In addition, rolling out robot trajectories in the real world can be time-consuming and labor-intensive. In this paper, we propose to learn an interactive real-robot action simulator as an alternative. We introduce a novel method, IRASim, which leverages the power of generative models to generate extremely realistic videos of a robot arm that executes a given action trajectory, starting from an initial given frame. To validate the effectiveness of our method, we create a new benchmark, IRASim Benchmark, based on three real-robot datasets and perform extensive experiments on the benchmark. Results show that IRASim outperforms all the baseline methods and is more preferable in human evaluations. We hope that IRASim can serve as an effective and scalable approach to enhance robot learning in the real world. To promote research for generative real-robot action simulators, we open-source code, benchmark, and checkpoints at https: //gen-irasim.github.io.

We introduce EnerVerse, a comprehensive framework for embodied future space generation specifically designed for robotic manipulation tasks. EnerVerse seamlessly integrates convolutional and bidirectional attention mechanisms for inner-chunk space modeling, ensuring low-level consistency and continuity. Recognizing the inherent redundancy in video data, we propose a sparse memory context combined with a chunkwise unidirectional generative paradigm to enable the generation of infinitely long sequences. To further augment robotic capabilities, we introduce the Free Anchor View (FAV) space, which provides flexible perspectives to enhance observation and analysis. The FAV space mitigates motion modeling ambiguity, removes physical constraints in confined environments, and significantly improves the robot's generalization and adaptability across various tasks and settings. To address the prohibitive costs and labor intensity of acquiring multi-camera observations, we present a data engine pipeline that integrates a generative model with 4D Gaussian Splatting (4DGS). This pipeline leverages the generative model's robust generalization capabilities and the spatial constraints provided by 4DGS, enabling an iterative enhancement of data quality and diversity, thus creating a data flywheel effect that effectively narrows the sim-to-real gap. Finally, our experiments demonstrate that the embodied future space generation prior substantially enhances policy predictive capabilities, resulting in improved overall performance, particularly in long-range robotic manipulation tasks.

We study the 3D object understanding task for manipulating everyday objects with different material properties (diffuse, specular, transparent and mixed). Existing monocular and RGB-D methods suffer from scale ambiguity due to missing or imprecise depth measurements. We present CODERS, a one-stage approach for Category-level Object Detection, pose Estimation and Reconstruction from Stereo images. The base of our pipeline is an implicit stereo matching module that combines stereo image features with 3D position information. Concatenating this presented module and the following transform-decoder architecture leads to end-to-end learning of multiple tasks required by robot manipulation. Our approach significantly outperforms all competing methods in the public TOD dataset. Furthermore, trained on simulated data, CODERS generalize well to unseen category-level object instances in real-world robot manipulation experiments. Our dataset, code, and demos will be available on our project page.

The task of separating dynamic objects from static environments using NeRFs has been widely studied in recent years. However, capturing large-scale scenes still poses a challenge due to their complex geometric structures and unconstrained dynamics. Without the help of 3D motion cues, previous methods often require simplified setups with slow camera motion and only a few/single dynamic actors, leading to suboptimal solutions in most urban setups. To overcome such limitations, we present RoDUS, a pipeline for decomposing static and dynamic elements in urban scenes, with thoughtfully separated NeRF models for moving and non-moving components. Our approach utilizes a robust kernel-based initialization coupled with 4D semantic information to selectively guide the learning process. This strategy enables accurate capturing of the dynamics in the scene, resulting in reduced artifacts caused by NeRF on background reconstruction, all by using self-supervision. Notably, experimental evaluations on KITTI-360 and Pandaset datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in decomposing challenging urban scenes into precise static and dynamic components.

We propose novel motion representations for animating articulated objects consisting of distinct parts. In a completely unsupervised manner, our method identifies object parts, tracks them in a driving video, and infers their motions by considering their principal axes. In contrast to the previous keypoint-based works, our method extracts meaningful and consistent regions, describing locations, shape, and pose. The regions correspond to semantically relevant and distinct object parts, that are more easily detected in frames of the driving video. To force decoupling of foreground from background, we model non-object related global motion with an additional affine transformation. To facilitate animation and prevent the leakage of the shape of the driving object, we disentangle shape and pose of objects in the region space. Our model can animate a variety of objects, surpassing previous methods by a large margin on existing benchmarks. We present a challenging new benchmark with high-resolution videos and show that the improvement is particularly pronounced when articulated objects are considered, reaching 96.6% user preference vs. the state of the art.

Discrete-action reinforcement learning algorithms often falter in tasks with high-dimensional discrete action spaces due to the vast number of possible actions. A recent advancement leverages value-decomposition, a concept from multi-agent reinforcement learning, to tackle this challenge. This study delves deep into the effects of this value-decomposition, revealing that whilst it curtails the over-estimation bias inherent to Q-learning algorithms, it amplifies target variance. To counteract this, we present an ensemble of critics to mitigate target variance. Moreover, we introduce a regularisation loss that helps to mitigate the effects that exploratory actions in one dimension can have on the value of optimal actions in other dimensions. Our novel algorithm, REValueD, tested on discretised versions of the DeepMind Control Suite tasks, showcases superior performance, especially in the challenging humanoid and dog tasks. We further dissect the factors influencing REValueD's performance, evaluating the significance of the regularisation loss and the scalability of REValueD with increasing sub-actions per dimension.

Embodied action planning is a core challenge in robotics, requiring models to generate precise actions from visual observations and language instructions. While video generation world models are promising, their reliance on pixel-level reconstruction often introduces visual redundancies that hinder action decoding and generalization. Latent world models offer a compact, motion-aware representation, but overlook the fine-grained details critical for precise manipulation. To overcome these limitations, we propose MoWM, a mixture-of-world-model framework that fuses representations from hybrid world models for embodied action planning. Our approach uses motion-aware representations from a latent model as a high-level prior, which guides the extraction of fine-grained visual features from the pixel space model. This design allows MoWM to highlight the informative visual details needed for action decoding. Extensive evaluations on the CALVIN benchmark demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art task success rates and superior generalization. We also provide a comprehensive analysis of the strengths of each feature space, offering valuable insights for future research in embodied planning. The code is available at: https://github.com/tsinghua-fib-lab/MoWM.

Generating realistic animated videos from static images is an important area of research in computer vision. Methods based on physical simulation and motion prediction have achieved notable advances, but they are often limited to specific object textures and motion trajectories, failing to exhibit highly complex environments and physical dynamics. In this paper, we introduce an open-domain controllable image animation method using motion priors with video diffusion models. Our method achieves precise control over the direction and speed of motion in the movable region by extracting the motion field information from videos and learning moving trajectories and strengths. Current pretrained video generation models are typically limited to producing very short videos, typically less than 30 frames. In contrast, we propose an efficient long-duration video generation method based on noise reschedule specifically tailored for image animation tasks, facilitating the creation of videos over 100 frames in length while maintaining consistency in content scenery and motion coordination. Specifically, we decompose the denoise process into two distinct phases: the shaping of scene contours and the refining of motion details. Then we reschedule the noise to control the generated frame sequences maintaining long-distance noise correlation. We conducted extensive experiments with 10 baselines, encompassing both commercial tools and academic methodologies, which demonstrate the superiority of our method. Our project page: https://wangqiang9.github.io/Controllable.github.io/

A fundamental challenge in embodied intelligence is developing expressive and compact state representations for efficient world modeling and decision making. However, existing methods often fail to achieve this balance, yielding representations that are either overly redundant or lacking in task-critical information. We propose an unsupervised approach that learns a highly compressed two-token state representation using a lightweight encoder and a pre-trained Diffusion Transformer (DiT) decoder, capitalizing on its strong generative prior. Our representation is efficient, interpretable, and integrates seamlessly into existing VLA-based models, improving performance by 14.3% on LIBERO and 30% in real-world task success with minimal inference overhead. More importantly, we find that the difference between these tokens, obtained via latent interpolation, naturally serves as a highly effective latent action, which can be further decoded into executable robot actions. This emergent capability reveals that our representation captures structured dynamics without explicit supervision. We name our method StaMo for its ability to learn generalizable robotic Motion from compact State representation, which is encoded from static images, challenging the prevalent dependence to learning latent action on complex architectures and video data. The resulting latent actions also enhance policy co-training, outperforming prior methods by 10.4% with improved interpretability. Moreover, our approach scales effectively across diverse data sources, including real-world robot data, simulation, and human egocentric video.

Teaching robots new skills quickly and conveniently is crucial for the broader adoption of robotic systems. In this work, we address the problem of one-shot imitation from a single human demonstration, given by an RGB-D video recording through a two-stage process. In the first stage which is offline, we extract the trajectory of the demonstration. This entails segmenting manipulated objects and determining their relative motion in relation to secondary objects such as containers. Subsequently, in the live online trajectory generation stage, we first re-detect all objects, then we warp the demonstration trajectory to the current scene, and finally, we trace the trajectory with the robot. To complete these steps, our method makes leverages several ancillary models, including those for segmentation, relative object pose estimation, and grasp prediction. We systematically evaluate different combinations of correspondence and re-detection methods to validate our design decision across a diverse range of tasks. Specifically, we collect demonstrations of ten different tasks including pick-and-place tasks as well as articulated object manipulation. Finally, we perform extensive evaluations on a real robot system to demonstrate the effectiveness and utility of our approach in real-world scenarios. We make the code publicly available at http://ditto.cs.uni-freiburg.de.

The rapid progress of navigation, manipulation, and vision models has made mobile manipulators capable in many specialized tasks. However, the open-world mobile manipulation (OWMM) task remains a challenge due to the need for generalization to open-ended instructions and environments, as well as the systematic complexity to integrate high-level decision making with low-level robot control based on both global scene understanding and current agent state. To address this complexity, we propose a novel multi-modal agent architecture that maintains multi-view scene frames and agent states for decision-making and controls the robot by function calling. A second challenge is the hallucination from domain shift. To enhance the agent performance, we further introduce an agentic data synthesis pipeline for the OWMM task to adapt the VLM model to our task domain with instruction fine-tuning. We highlight our fine-tuned OWMM-VLM as the first dedicated foundation model for mobile manipulators with global scene understanding, robot state tracking, and multi-modal action generation in a unified model. Through experiments, we demonstrate that our model achieves SOTA performance compared to other foundation models including GPT-4o and strong zero-shot generalization in real world. The project page is at https://github.com/HHYHRHY/OWMM-Agent

3D Gaussian Splatting (3D-GS) enables real-time rendering but struggles with fast motion due to low temporal resolution of RGB cameras. To address this, we introduce the first approach combining event cameras, which capture high-temporal-resolution, continuous motion data, with deformable 3D-GS for fast dynamic scene reconstruction. We observe that threshold modeling for events plays a crucial role in achieving high-quality reconstruction. Therefore, we propose a GS-Threshold Joint Modeling (GTJM) strategy, creating a mutually reinforcing process that greatly improves both 3D reconstruction and threshold modeling. Moreover, we introduce a Dynamic-Static Decomposition (DSD) strategy that first identifies dynamic areas by exploiting the inability of static Gaussians to represent motions, then applies a buffer-based soft decomposition to separate dynamic and static areas. This strategy accelerates rendering by avoiding unnecessary deformation in static areas, and focuses on dynamic areas to enhance fidelity. Our approach achieves high-fidelity dynamic reconstruction at 156 FPS with a 400times400 resolution on an RTX 3090 GPU.

We propose a novel framework for scene decomposition and static background reconstruction from everyday videos. By integrating the trained motion masks and modeling the static scene as Gaussian splats with dynamics-aware optimization, our method achieves more accurate background reconstruction results than previous works. Our proposed method is termed DAS3R, an abbreviation for Dynamics-Aware Gaussian Splatting for Static Scene Reconstruction. Compared to existing methods, DAS3R is more robust in complex motion scenarios, capable of handling videos where dynamic objects occupy a significant portion of the scene, and does not require camera pose inputs or point cloud data from SLAM-based methods. We compared DAS3R against recent distractor-free approaches on the DAVIS and Sintel datasets; DAS3R demonstrates enhanced performance and robustness with a margin of more than 2 dB in PSNR. The project's webpage can be accessed via https://kai422.github.io/DAS3R/

We present GenMM, a generative model that "mines" as many diverse motions as possible from a single or few example sequences. In stark contrast to existing data-driven methods, which typically require long offline training time, are prone to visual artifacts, and tend to fail on large and complex skeletons, GenMM inherits the training-free nature and the superior quality of the well-known Motion Matching method. GenMM can synthesize a high-quality motion within a fraction of a second, even with highly complex and large skeletal structures. At the heart of our generative framework lies the generative motion matching module, which utilizes the bidirectional visual similarity as a generative cost function to motion matching, and operates in a multi-stage framework to progressively refine a random guess using exemplar motion matches. In addition to diverse motion generation, we show the versatility of our generative framework by extending it to a number of scenarios that are not possible with motion matching alone, including motion completion, key frame-guided generation, infinite looping, and motion reassembly. Code and data for this paper are at https://wyysf-98.github.io/GenMM/

This paper contributes a novel and modularized learning-based method for aerial robots navigating cluttered environments containing hard-to-perceive thin obstacles without assuming access to a map or the full pose estimation of the robot. The proposed solution builds upon a semantically-enhanced Variational Autoencoder that is trained with both real-world and simulated depth images to compress the input data, while preserving semantically-labeled thin obstacles and handling invalid pixels in the depth sensor's output. This compressed representation, in addition to the robot's partial state involving its linear/angular velocities and its attitude are then utilized to train an uncertainty-aware 3D Collision Prediction Network in simulation to predict collision scores for candidate action sequences in a predefined motion primitives library. A set of simulation and experimental studies in cluttered environments with various sizes and types of obstacles, including multiple hard-to-perceive thin objects, were conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed method and compare against an end-to-end trained baseline. The results demonstrate the benefits of the proposed semantically-enhanced deep collision prediction for learning-based autonomous navigation.

For robots to be useful outside labs and specialized factories we need a way to teach them new useful behaviors quickly. Current approaches lack either the generality to onboard new tasks without task-specific engineering, or else lack the data-efficiency to do so in an amount of time that enables practical use. In this work we explore dense tracking as a representational vehicle to allow faster and more general learning from demonstration. Our approach utilizes Track-Any-Point (TAP) models to isolate the relevant motion in a demonstration, and parameterize a low-level controller to reproduce this motion across changes in the scene configuration. We show this results in robust robot policies that can solve complex object-arrangement tasks such as shape-matching, stacking, and even full path-following tasks such as applying glue and sticking objects together, all from demonstrations that can be collected in minutes.

In recent years roboticists have achieved remarkable progress in solving increasingly general tasks on dexterous robotic hardware by leveraging high capacity Transformer network architectures and generative diffusion models. Unfortunately, combining these two orthogonal improvements has proven surprisingly difficult, since there is no clear and well-understood process for making important design choices. In this paper, we identify, study and improve key architectural design decisions for high-capacity diffusion transformer policies. The resulting models can efficiently solve diverse tasks on multiple robot embodiments, without the excruciating pain of per-setup hyper-parameter tuning. By combining the results of our investigation with our improved model components, we are able to present a novel architecture, named \method, that significantly outperforms the state of the art in solving long-horizon (1500+ time-steps) dexterous tasks on a bi-manual ALOHA robot. In addition, we find that our policies show improved scaling performance when trained on 10 hours of highly multi-modal, language annotated ALOHA demonstration data. We hope this work will open the door for future robot learning techniques that leverage the efficiency of generative diffusion modeling with the scalability of large scale transformer architectures. Code, robot dataset, and videos are available at: https://dit-policy.github.io

Generalist robot manipulators need to learn a wide variety of manipulation skills across diverse environments. Current robot training pipelines rely on humans to provide kinesthetic demonstrations or to program simulation environments and to code up reward functions for reinforcement learning. Such human involvement is an important bottleneck towards scaling up robot learning across diverse tasks and environments. We propose Generation to Simulation (Gen2Sim), a method for scaling up robot skill learning in simulation by automating generation of 3D assets, task descriptions, task decompositions and reward functions using large pre-trained generative models of language and vision. We generate 3D assets for simulation by lifting open-world 2D object-centric images to 3D using image diffusion models and querying LLMs to determine plausible physics parameters. Given URDF files of generated and human-developed assets, we chain-of-thought prompt LLMs to map these to relevant task descriptions, temporal decompositions, and corresponding python reward functions for reinforcement learning. We show Gen2Sim succeeds in learning policies for diverse long horizon tasks, where reinforcement learning with non temporally decomposed reward functions fails. Gen2Sim provides a viable path for scaling up reinforcement learning for robot manipulators in simulation, both by diversifying and expanding task and environment development, and by facilitating the discovery of reinforcement-learned behaviors through temporal task decomposition in RL. Our work contributes hundreds of simulated assets, tasks and demonstrations, taking a step towards fully autonomous robotic manipulation skill acquisition in simulation.

Vision language models (VLMs) have shown impressive capabilities across a variety of tasks, from logical reasoning to visual understanding. This opens the door to richer interaction with the world, for example robotic control. However, VLMs produce only textual outputs, while robotic control and other spatial tasks require outputting continuous coordinates, actions, or trajectories. How can we enable VLMs to handle such settings without fine-tuning on task-specific data? In this paper, we propose a novel visual prompting approach for VLMs that we call Prompting with Iterative Visual Optimization (PIVOT), which casts tasks as iterative visual question answering. In each iteration, the image is annotated with a visual representation of proposals that the VLM can refer to (e.g., candidate robot actions, localizations, or trajectories). The VLM then selects the best ones for the task. These proposals are iteratively refined, allowing the VLM to eventually zero in on the best available answer. We investigate PIVOT on real-world robotic navigation, real-world manipulation from images, instruction following in simulation, and additional spatial inference tasks such as localization. We find, perhaps surprisingly, that our approach enables zero-shot control of robotic systems without any robot training data, navigation in a variety of environments, and other capabilities. Although current performance is far from perfect, our work highlights potentials and limitations of this new regime and shows a promising approach for Internet-Scale VLMs in robotic and spatial reasoning domains. Website: pivot-prompt.github.io and HuggingFace: https://huggingface.co/spaces/pivot-prompt/pivot-prompt-demo.

Character animation in real-world scenarios necessitates a variety of constraints, such as trajectories, key-frames, interactions, etc. Existing methodologies typically treat single or a finite set of these constraint(s) as separate control tasks. They are often specialized, and the tasks they address are rarely extendable or customizable. We categorize these as solutions to the close-set motion control problem. In response to the complexity of practical motion control, we propose and attempt to solve the open-set motion control problem. This problem is characterized by an open and fully customizable set of motion control tasks. To address this, we introduce a new paradigm, programmable motion generation. In this paradigm, any given motion control task is broken down into a combination of atomic constraints. These constraints are then programmed into an error function that quantifies the degree to which a motion sequence adheres to them. We utilize a pre-trained motion generation model and optimize its latent code to minimize the error function of the generated motion. Consequently, the generated motion not only inherits the prior of the generative model but also satisfies the required constraints. Experiments show that we can generate high-quality motions when addressing a wide range of unseen tasks. These tasks encompass motion control by motion dynamics, geometric constraints, physical laws, interactions with scenes, objects or the character own body parts, etc. All of these are achieved in a unified approach, without the need for ad-hoc paired training data collection or specialized network designs. During the programming of novel tasks, we observed the emergence of new skills beyond those of the prior model. With the assistance of large language models, we also achieved automatic programming. We hope that this work will pave the way for the motion control of general AI agents.

Imitation learning with visual observations is notoriously inefficient when addressed with end-to-end behavioural cloning methods. In this paper, we explore an alternative paradigm which decomposes reasoning into three phases. First, a retrieval phase, which informs the robot what it can do with an object. Second, an alignment phase, which informs the robot where to interact with the object. And third, a replay phase, which informs the robot how to interact with the object. Through a series of real-world experiments on everyday tasks, such as grasping, pouring, and inserting objects, we show that this decomposition brings unprecedented learning efficiency, and effective inter- and intra-class generalisation. Videos are available at https://www.robot-learning.uk/retrieval-alignment-replay.

In robot manipulation, robot learning has become a prevailing approach. However, generative models within this field face a fundamental trade-off between the slow, iterative sampling of diffusion models and the architectural constraints of faster Flow-based methods, which often rely on explicit consistency losses. To address these limitations, we introduce MP1, which pairs 3D point-cloud inputs with the MeanFlow paradigm to generate action trajectories in one network function evaluation (1-NFE). By directly learning the interval-averaged velocity via the "MeanFlow Identity", our policy avoids any additional consistency constraints. This formulation eliminates numerical ODE-solver errors during inference, yielding more precise trajectories. MP1 further incorporates CFG for improved trajectory controllability while retaining 1-NFE inference without reintroducing structural constraints. Because subtle scene-context variations are critical for robot learning, especially in few-shot learning, we introduce a lightweight Dispersive Loss that repels state embeddings during training, boosting generalization without slowing inference. We validate our method on the Adroit and Meta-World benchmarks, as well as in real-world scenarios. Experimental results show MP1 achieves superior average task success rates, outperforming DP3 by 10.2% and FlowPolicy by 7.3%. Its average inference time is only 6.8 ms-19x faster than DP3 and nearly 2x faster than FlowPolicy. Our code is available at https://github.com/LogSSim/MP1.git.

Joint space and task space control are the two dominant action modes for controlling robot arms within the robot learning literature. Actions in joint space provide precise control over the robot's pose, but tend to suffer from inefficient training; actions in task space boast data-efficient training but sacrifice the ability to perform tasks in confined spaces due to limited control over the full joint configuration. This work analyses the criteria for designing action spaces for robot manipulation and introduces ER (End-effector Redundancy), a novel action space formulation that, by addressing the redundancies present in the manipulator, aims to combine the advantages of both joint and task spaces, offering fine-grained comprehensive control with overactuated robot arms whilst achieving highly efficient robot learning. We present two implementations of ER, ERAngle (ERA) and ERJoint (ERJ), and we show that ERJ in particular demonstrates superior performance across multiple settings, especially when precise control over the robot configuration is required. We validate our results both in simulated and real robotic environments.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently shown promise as high-level planners for robots when given access to a selection of low-level skills. However, it is often assumed that LLMs do not possess sufficient knowledge to be used for the low-level trajectories themselves. In this work, we address this assumption thoroughly, and investigate if an LLM (GPT-4) can directly predict a dense sequence of end-effector poses for manipulation skills, when given access to only object detection and segmentation vision models. We study how well a single task-agnostic prompt, without any in-context examples, motion primitives, or external trajectory optimisers, can perform across 26 real-world language-based tasks, such as "open the bottle cap" and "wipe the plate with the sponge", and we investigate which design choices in this prompt are the most effective. Our conclusions raise the assumed limit of LLMs for robotics, and we reveal for the first time that LLMs do indeed possess an understanding of low-level robot control sufficient for a range of common tasks, and that they can additionally detect failures and then re-plan trajectories accordingly. Videos, code, and prompts are available at: https://www.robot-learning.uk/language-models-trajectory-generators.

Recent advances in generative modeling have led to promising progress on synthesizing 3D human motion from text, with methods that can generate character animations from short prompts and specified durations. However, using a single text prompt as input lacks the fine-grained control needed by animators, such as composing multiple actions and defining precise durations for parts of the motion. To address this, we introduce the new problem of timeline control for text-driven motion synthesis, which provides an intuitive, yet fine-grained, input interface for users. Instead of a single prompt, users can specify a multi-track timeline of multiple prompts organized in temporal intervals that may overlap. This enables specifying the exact timings of each action and composing multiple actions in sequence or at overlapping intervals. To generate composite animations from a multi-track timeline, we propose a new test-time denoising method. This method can be integrated with any pre-trained motion diffusion model to synthesize realistic motions that accurately reflect the timeline. At every step of denoising, our method processes each timeline interval (text prompt) individually, subsequently aggregating the predictions with consideration for the specific body parts engaged in each action. Experimental comparisons and ablations validate that our method produces realistic motions that respect the semantics and timing of given text prompts. Our code and models are publicly available at https://mathis.petrovich.fr/stmc.

Recent developments in Large Language Models pre-trained on extensive corpora have shown significant success in various natural language processing tasks with minimal fine-tuning. This success offers new promise for robotics, which has long been constrained by the high cost of action-labeled data. We ask: given the abundant video data containing interaction-related knowledge available as a rich "corpus", can a similar generative pre-training approach be effectively applied to enhance robot learning? The key challenge is to identify an effective representation for autoregressive pre-training that benefits robot manipulation tasks. Inspired by the way humans learn new skills through observing dynamic environments, we propose that effective robotic learning should emphasize motion-related knowledge, which is closely tied to low-level actions and is hardware-agnostic, facilitating the transfer of learned motions to actual robot actions. To this end, we introduce Moto, which converts video content into latent Motion Token sequences by a Latent Motion Tokenizer, learning a bridging "language" of motion from videos in an unsupervised manner. We pre-train Moto-GPT through motion token autoregression, enabling it to capture diverse visual motion knowledge. After pre-training, Moto-GPT demonstrates the promising ability to produce semantically interpretable motion tokens, predict plausible motion trajectories, and assess trajectory rationality through output likelihood. To transfer learned motion priors to real robot actions, we implement a co-fine-tuning strategy that seamlessly bridges latent motion token prediction and real robot control. Extensive experiments show that the fine-tuned Moto-GPT exhibits superior robustness and efficiency on robot manipulation benchmarks, underscoring its effectiveness in transferring knowledge from video data to downstream visual manipulation tasks.

We present MotionDiffuser, a diffusion based representation for the joint distribution of future trajectories over multiple agents. Such representation has several key advantages: first, our model learns a highly multimodal distribution that captures diverse future outcomes. Second, the simple predictor design requires only a single L2 loss training objective, and does not depend on trajectory anchors. Third, our model is capable of learning the joint distribution for the motion of multiple agents in a permutation-invariant manner. Furthermore, we utilize a compressed trajectory representation via PCA, which improves model performance and allows for efficient computation of the exact sample log probability. Subsequently, we propose a general constrained sampling framework that enables controlled trajectory sampling based on differentiable cost functions. This strategy enables a host of applications such as enforcing rules and physical priors, or creating tailored simulation scenarios. MotionDiffuser can be combined with existing backbone architectures to achieve top motion forecasting results. We obtain state-of-the-art results for multi-agent motion prediction on the Waymo Open Motion Dataset.

Recent video generation approaches increasingly rely on planning intermediate control signals such as object trajectories to improve temporal coherence and motion fidelity. However, these methods mostly employ single-shot plans that are typically limited to simple motions, or iterative refinement which requires multiple calls to the video generator, incuring high computational cost. To overcome these limitations, we propose SketchVerify, a training-free, sketch-verification-based planning framework that improves motion planning quality with more dynamically coherent trajectories (i.e., physically plausible and instruction-consistent motions) prior to full video generation by introducing a test-time sampling and verification loop. Given a prompt and a reference image, our method predicts multiple candidate motion plans and ranks them using a vision-language verifier that jointly evaluates semantic alignment with the instruction and physical plausibility. To efficiently score candidate motion plans, we render each trajectory as a lightweight video sketch by compositing objects over a static background, which bypasses the need for expensive, repeated diffusion-based synthesis while achieving comparable performance. We iteratively refine the motion plan until a satisfactory one is identified, which is then passed to the trajectory-conditioned generator for final synthesis. Experiments on WorldModelBench and PhyWorldBench demonstrate that our method significantly improves motion quality, physical realism, and long-term consistency compared to competitive baselines while being substantially more efficient. Our ablation study further shows that scaling up the number of trajectory candidates consistently enhances overall performance.

Estimating robot pose from RGB images is a crucial problem in computer vision and robotics. While previous methods have achieved promising performance, most of them presume full knowledge of robot internal states, e.g. ground-truth robot joint angles. However, this assumption is not always valid in practical situations. In real-world applications such as multi-robot collaboration or human-robot interaction, the robot joint states might not be shared or could be unreliable. On the other hand, existing approaches that estimate robot pose without joint state priors suffer from heavy computation burdens and thus cannot support real-time applications. This work introduces an efficient framework for real-time robot pose estimation from RGB images without requiring known robot states. Our method estimates camera-to-robot rotation, robot state parameters, keypoint locations, and root depth, employing a neural network module for each task to facilitate learning and sim-to-real transfer. Notably, it achieves inference in a single feed-forward pass without iterative optimization. Our approach offers a 12-time speed increase with state-of-the-art accuracy, enabling real-time holistic robot pose estimation for the first time. Code and models are available at https://github.com/Oliverbansk/Holistic-Robot-Pose-Estimation.

This paper does not propose any new algorithms but instead outlines various problems in the field of visual generation based on the author's personal understanding. The core of these problems lies in how to decompose visual signals, with all other issues being closely related to this central problem and stemming from unsuitable approaches to signal decomposition. This paper aims to draw researchers' attention to the significance of Visual Signal Decomposition.

We present Wan-Move, a simple and scalable framework that brings motion control to video generative models. Existing motion-controllable methods typically suffer from coarse control granularity and limited scalability, leaving their outputs insufficient for practical use. We narrow this gap by achieving precise and high-quality motion control. Our core idea is to directly make the original condition features motion-aware for guiding video synthesis. To this end, we first represent object motions with dense point trajectories, allowing fine-grained control over the scene. We then project these trajectories into latent space and propagate the first frame's features along each trajectory, producing an aligned spatiotemporal feature map that tells how each scene element should move. This feature map serves as the updated latent condition, which is naturally integrated into the off-the-shelf image-to-video model, e.g., Wan-I2V-14B, as motion guidance without any architecture change. It removes the need for auxiliary motion encoders and makes fine-tuning base models easily scalable. Through scaled training, Wan-Move generates 5-second, 480p videos whose motion controllability rivals Kling 1.5 Pro's commercial Motion Brush, as indicated by user studies. To support comprehensive evaluation, we further design MoveBench, a rigorously curated benchmark featuring diverse content categories and hybrid-verified annotations. It is distinguished by larger data volume, longer video durations, and high-quality motion annotations. Extensive experiments on MoveBench and the public dataset consistently show Wan-Move's superior motion quality. Code, models, and benchmark data are made publicly available.

Video diffusion models (VDMs) have advanced significantly in recent years, enabling the generation of highly realistic videos and drawing the attention of the community in their potential as world simulators. However, despite their capabilities, VDMs often fail to produce physically plausible videos due to an inherent lack of understanding of physics, resulting in incorrect dynamics and event sequences. To address this limitation, we propose a novel two-stage image-to-video generation framework that explicitly incorporates physics. In the first stage, we employ a Vision Language Model (VLM) as a coarse-grained motion planner, integrating chain-of-thought and physics-aware reasoning to predict a rough motion trajectories/changes that approximate real-world physical dynamics while ensuring the inter-frame consistency. In the second stage, we use the predicted motion trajectories/changes to guide the video generation of a VDM. As the predicted motion trajectories/changes are rough, noise is added during inference to provide freedom to the VDM in generating motion with more fine details. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our framework can produce physically plausible motion, and comparative evaluations highlight the notable superiority of our approach over existing methods. More video results are available on our Project Page: https://madaoer.github.io/projects/physically_plausible_video_generation.

The ability to learn multi-modal action distributions is indispensable for robotic manipulation policies to perform precise and robust control. Flow-based generative models have recently emerged as a promising solution to learning distributions of actions, offering one-step action generation and thus achieving much higher sampling efficiency compared to diffusion-based methods. However, existing flow-based policies suffer from representation collapse, the inability to distinguish similar visual representations, leading to failures in precise manipulation tasks. We propose DM1 (MeanFlow with Dispersive Regularization for One-Step Robotic Manipulation), a novel flow matching framework that integrates dispersive regularization into MeanFlow to prevent collapse while maintaining one-step efficiency. DM1 employs multiple dispersive regularization variants across different intermediate embedding layers, encouraging diverse representations across training batches without introducing additional network modules or specialized training procedures. Experiments on RoboMimic benchmarks show that DM1 achieves 20-40 times faster inference (0.07s vs. 2-3.5s) and improves success rates by 10-20 percentage points, with the Lift task reaching 99% success over 85% of the baseline. Real-robot deployment on a Franka Panda further validates that DM1 transfers effectively from simulation to the physical world. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to leverage representation regularization to enable flow-based policies to achieve strong performance in robotic manipulation, establishing a simple yet powerful approach for efficient and robust manipulation.

Diffusion model-based approaches have shown promise in data-driven planning, but there are no safety guarantees, thus making it hard to be applied for safety-critical applications. To address these challenges, we propose a new method, called SafeDiffuser, to ensure diffusion probabilistic models satisfy specifications by using a class of control barrier functions. The key idea of our approach is to embed the proposed finite-time diffusion invariance into the denoising diffusion procedure, which enables trustworthy diffusion data generation. Moreover, we demonstrate that our finite-time diffusion invariance method through generative models not only maintains generalization performance but also creates robustness in safe data generation. We test our method on a series of safe planning tasks, including maze path generation, legged robot locomotion, and 3D space manipulation, with results showing the advantages of robustness and guarantees over vanilla diffusion models.

Motion, scene and object are three primary visual components of a video. In particular, objects represent the foreground, scenes represent the background, and motion traces their dynamics. Based on this insight, we propose a two-stage MOtion, Scene and Object decomposition framework (MOSO) for video prediction, consisting of MOSO-VQVAE and MOSO-Transformer. In the first stage, MOSO-VQVAE decomposes a previous video clip into the motion, scene and object components, and represents them as distinct groups of discrete tokens. Then, in the second stage, MOSO-Transformer predicts the object and scene tokens of the subsequent video clip based on the previous tokens and adds dynamic motion at the token level to the generated object and scene tokens. Our framework can be easily extended to unconditional video generation and video frame interpolation tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves new state-of-the-art performance on five challenging benchmarks for video prediction and unconditional video generation: BAIR, RoboNet, KTH, KITTI and UCF101. In addition, MOSO can produce realistic videos by combining objects and scenes from different videos.

This paper presents M^3GPT, an advanced Multimodal, Multitask framework for Motion comprehension and generation. M^3GPT operates on three fundamental principles. The first focuses on creating a unified representation space for various motion-relevant modalities. We employ discrete vector quantization for multimodal control and generation signals, such as text, music and motion/dance, enabling seamless integration into a large language model (LLM) with a single vocabulary. The second involves modeling model generation directly in the raw motion space. This strategy circumvents the information loss associated with discrete tokenizer, resulting in more detailed and comprehensive model generation. Third, M^3GPT learns to model the connections and synergies among various motion-relevant tasks. Text, the most familiar and well-understood modality for LLMs, is utilized as a bridge to establish connections between different motion tasks, facilitating mutual reinforcement. To our knowledge, M^3GPT is the first model capable of comprehending and generating motions based on multiple signals. Extensive experiments highlight M^3GPT's superior performance across various motion-relevant tasks and its powerful zero-shot generalization capabilities for extremely challenging tasks.

We present a method for controlling a simulated humanoid to grasp an object and move it to follow an object trajectory. Due to the challenges in controlling a humanoid with dexterous hands, prior methods often use a disembodied hand and only consider vertical lifts or short trajectories. This limited scope hampers their applicability for object manipulation required for animation and simulation. To close this gap, we learn a controller that can pick up a large number (>1200) of objects and carry them to follow randomly generated trajectories. Our key insight is to leverage a humanoid motion representation that provides human-like motor skills and significantly speeds up training. Using only simplistic reward, state, and object representations, our method shows favorable scalability on diverse object and trajectories. For training, we do not need dataset of paired full-body motion and object trajectories. At test time, we only require the object mesh and desired trajectories for grasping and transporting. To demonstrate the capabilities of our method, we show state-of-the-art success rates in following object trajectories and generalizing to unseen objects. Code and models will be released.

Transforming complex actions into discrete skill abstractions has demonstrated strong potential for robotic manipulation. Existing approaches mainly leverage latent variable models, e.g., VQ-VAE, to learn skill abstractions through learned vectors (codebooks), while they suffer from codebook collapse and modeling the causal relationship between learned skills. To address these limitations, we present Skill Training with Augmented Rotation (STAR), a framework that advances both skill learning and composition to complete complex behaviors. Specifically, to prevent codebook collapse, we devise rotation-augmented residual skill quantization (RaRSQ). It encodes relative angles between encoder outputs into the gradient flow by rotation-based gradient mechanism. Points within the same skill code are forced to be either pushed apart or pulled closer together depending on gradient directions. Further, to capture the causal relationship between skills, we present causal skill transformer (CST) which explicitly models dependencies between skill representations through an autoregressive mechanism for coherent action generation. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of STAR on both LIBERO benchmark and realworld tasks, with around 12\% improvement over the baselines.

A unified video and action model holds significant promise for robotics, where videos provide rich scene information for action prediction, and actions provide dynamics information for video prediction. However, effectively combining video generation and action prediction remains challenging, and current video generation-based methods struggle to match the performance of direct policy learning in action accuracy and inference speed. To bridge this gap, we introduce the Unified Video Action model (UVA), which jointly optimizes video and action predictions to achieve both high accuracy and efficient action inference. The key lies in learning a joint video-action latent representation and decoupling video-action decoding. The joint latent representation bridges the visual and action domains, effectively modeling the relationship between video and action sequences. Meanwhile, the decoupled decoding, powered by two lightweight diffusion heads, enables high-speed action inference by bypassing video generation during inference. Such a unified framework further enables versatile functionality through masked input training. By selectively masking actions or videos, a single model can tackle diverse tasks beyond policy learning, such as forward and inverse dynamics modeling and video generation. Via an extensive set of experiments, we demonstrate that UVA can serve as a general-purpose solution for a wide range of robotics tasks, such as policy learning, forward/inverse dynamics and video observation prediction, without compromising performance compared to methods tailored for specific applications. Results are best viewed on https://unified-video-action-model.github.io/.

Animating images with interactive motion control has garnered popularity for image-to-video (I2V) generation. Modern approaches typically rely on large Gaussian kernels to extend motion trajectories as condition without explicitly defining movement region, leading to coarse motion control and failing to disentangle object and camera moving. To alleviate these, we present MotionPro, a precise motion controller that novelly leverages region-wise trajectory and motion mask to regulate fine-grained motion synthesis and identify target motion category (i.e., object or camera moving), respectively. Technically, MotionPro first estimates the flow maps on each training video via a tracking model, and then samples the region-wise trajectories to simulate inference scenario. Instead of extending flow through large Gaussian kernels, our region-wise trajectory approach enables more precise control by directly utilizing trajectories within local regions, thereby effectively characterizing fine-grained movements. A motion mask is simultaneously derived from the predicted flow maps to capture the holistic motion dynamics of the movement regions. To pursue natural motion control, MotionPro further strengthens video denoising by incorporating both region-wise trajectories and motion mask through feature modulation. More remarkably, we meticulously construct a benchmark, i.e., MC-Bench, with 1.1K user-annotated image-trajectory pairs, for the evaluation of both fine-grained and object-level I2V motion control. Extensive experiments conducted on WebVid-10M and MC-Bench demonstrate the effectiveness of MotionPro. Please refer to our project page for more results: https://zhw-zhang.github.io/MotionPro-page/.

The field of visual representation learning has seen explosive growth in the past years, but its benefits in robotics have been surprisingly limited so far. Prior work uses generic visual representations as a basis to learn (task-specific) robot action policies (e.g., via behavior cloning). While the visual representations do accelerate learning, they are primarily used to encode visual observations. Thus, action information has to be derived purely from robot data, which is expensive to collect! In this work, we present a scalable alternative where the visual representations can help directly infer robot actions. We observe that vision encoders express relationships between image observations as distances (e.g., via embedding dot product) that could be used to efficiently plan robot behavior. We operationalize this insight and develop a simple algorithm for acquiring a distance function and dynamics predictor, by fine-tuning a pre-trained representation on human collected video sequences. The final method is able to substantially outperform traditional robot learning baselines (e.g., 70% success v.s. 50% for behavior cloning on pick-place) on a suite of diverse real-world manipulation tasks. It can also generalize to novel objects, without using any robot demonstrations during train time. For visualizations of the learned policies please check: https://agi-labs.github.io/manipulate-by-seeing/.

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models demonstrate remarkable potential for generalizable robotic manipulation. The performance of VLA models can be improved by integrating with action chunking, a critical technique for effective control. However, action chunking linearly scales up action dimensions in VLA models with increased chunking sizes. This reduces the inference efficiency. To tackle this problem, we propose PD-VLA, the first parallel decoding framework for VLA models integrated with action chunking. Our framework reformulates autoregressive decoding as a nonlinear system solved by parallel fixed-point iterations. This approach preserves model performance with mathematical guarantees while significantly improving decoding speed. In addition, it enables training-free acceleration without architectural changes, as well as seamless synergy with existing acceleration techniques. Extensive simulations validate that our PD-VLA maintains competitive success rates while achieving 2.52 times execution frequency on manipulators (with 7 degrees of freedom) compared with the fundamental VLA model. Furthermore, we experimentally identify the most effective settings for acceleration. Finally, real-world experiments validate its high applicability across different tasks.

We present a unified representation for actionable spatial perception: 3D Dynamic Scene Graphs. Scene graphs are directed graphs where nodes represent entities in the scene (e.g. objects, walls, rooms), and edges represent relations (e.g. inclusion, adjacency) among nodes. Dynamic scene graphs (DSGs) extend this notion to represent dynamic scenes with moving agents (e.g. humans, robots), and to include actionable information that supports planning and decision-making (e.g. spatio-temporal relations, topology at different levels of abstraction). Our second contribution is to provide the first fully automatic Spatial PerceptIon eNgine(SPIN) to build a DSG from visual-inertial data. We integrate state-of-the-art techniques for object and human detection and pose estimation, and we describe how to robustly infer object, robot, and human nodes in crowded scenes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that reconciles visual-inertial SLAM and dense human mesh tracking. Moreover, we provide algorithms to obtain hierarchical representations of indoor environments (e.g. places, structures, rooms) and their relations. Our third contribution is to demonstrate the proposed spatial perception engine in a photo-realistic Unity-based simulator, where we assess its robustness and expressiveness. Finally, we discuss the implications of our proposal on modern robotics applications. 3D Dynamic Scene Graphs can have a profound impact on planning and decision-making, human-robot interaction, long-term autonomy, and scene prediction. A video abstract is available at https://youtu.be/SWbofjhyPzI

This work introduces MotionLCM, extending controllable motion generation to a real-time level. Existing methods for spatial control in text-conditioned motion generation suffer from significant runtime inefficiency. To address this issue, we first propose the motion latent consistency model (MotionLCM) for motion generation, building upon the latent diffusion model (MLD). By employing one-step (or few-step) inference, we further improve the runtime efficiency of the motion latent diffusion model for motion generation. To ensure effective controllability, we incorporate a motion ControlNet within the latent space of MotionLCM and enable explicit control signals (e.g., pelvis trajectory) in the vanilla motion space to control the generation process directly, similar to controlling other latent-free diffusion models for motion generation. By employing these techniques, our approach can generate human motions with text and control signals in real-time. Experimental results demonstrate the remarkable generation and controlling capabilities of MotionLCM while maintaining real-time runtime efficiency.

For robots to robustly understand and interact with the physical world, it is highly beneficial to have a comprehensive representation - modelling geometry, physics, and visual observations - that informs perception, planning, and control algorithms. We propose a novel dual Gaussian-Particle representation that models the physical world while (i) enabling predictive simulation of future states and (ii) allowing online correction from visual observations in a dynamic world. Our representation comprises particles that capture the geometrical aspect of objects in the world and can be used alongside a particle-based physics system to anticipate physically plausible future states. Attached to these particles are 3D Gaussians that render images from any viewpoint through a splatting process thus capturing the visual state. By comparing the predicted and observed images, our approach generates visual forces that correct the particle positions while respecting known physical constraints. By integrating predictive physical modelling with continuous visually-derived corrections, our unified representation reasons about the present and future while synchronizing with reality. Our system runs in realtime at 30Hz using only 3 cameras. We validate our approach on 2D and 3D tracking tasks as well as photometric reconstruction quality. Videos are found at https://embodied-gaussians.github.io/.

3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) has made significant strides in scene representation and neural rendering, with intense efforts focused on adapting it for dynamic scenes. Despite delivering remarkable rendering quality and speed, existing methods struggle with storage demands and representing complex real-world motions. To tackle these issues, we propose MoDecGS, a memory-efficient Gaussian splatting framework designed for reconstructing novel views in challenging scenarios with complex motions. We introduce GlobaltoLocal Motion Decomposition (GLMD) to effectively capture dynamic motions in a coarsetofine manner. This approach leverages Global Canonical Scaffolds (Global CS) and Local Canonical Scaffolds (Local CS), extending static Scaffold representation to dynamic video reconstruction. For Global CS, we propose Global Anchor Deformation (GAD) to efficiently represent global dynamics along complex motions, by directly deforming the implicit Scaffold attributes which are anchor position, offset, and local context features. Next, we finely adjust local motions via the Local Gaussian Deformation (LGD) of Local CS explicitly. Additionally, we introduce Temporal Interval Adjustment (TIA) to automatically control the temporal coverage of each Local CS during training, allowing MoDecGS to find optimal interval assignments based on the specified number of temporal segments. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that MoDecGS achieves an average 70% reduction in model size over stateoftheart methods for dynamic 3D Gaussians from realworld dynamic videos while maintaining or even improving rendering quality.

We present RoboGen, a generative robotic agent that automatically learns diverse robotic skills at scale via generative simulation. RoboGen leverages the latest advancements in foundation and generative models. Instead of directly using or adapting these models to produce policies or low-level actions, we advocate for a generative scheme, which uses these models to automatically generate diversified tasks, scenes, and training supervisions, thereby scaling up robotic skill learning with minimal human supervision. Our approach equips a robotic agent with a self-guided propose-generate-learn cycle: the agent first proposes interesting tasks and skills to develop, and then generates corresponding simulation environments by populating pertinent objects and assets with proper spatial configurations. Afterwards, the agent decomposes the proposed high-level task into sub-tasks, selects the optimal learning approach (reinforcement learning, motion planning, or trajectory optimization), generates required training supervision, and then learns policies to acquire the proposed skill. Our work attempts to extract the extensive and versatile knowledge embedded in large-scale models and transfer them to the field of robotics. Our fully generative pipeline can be queried repeatedly, producing an endless stream of skill demonstrations associated with diverse tasks and environments.

Bimanual robotic manipulation, which involves the coordinated control of two robotic arms, is foundational for solving challenging tasks. Despite recent progress in general-purpose manipulation, data scarcity and embodiment heterogeneity remain serious obstacles to further scaling up in bimanual settings. In this paper, we introduce Video Diffusion for Action Reasoning (Vidar), a two-stage framework that leverages large-scale, diffusion-based video pre-training and a novel masked inverse dynamics model for action prediction. We pre-train the video diffusion model on 750K multi-view videos from three real-world bimanual robot platforms, utilizing a unified observation space that encodes robot, camera, task, and scene contexts. Our masked inverse dynamics model learns masks to extract action-relevant information from generated trajectories without requiring pixel-level labels, and the masks can effectively generalize to unseen backgrounds. Our experiments demonstrate that with only 20 minutes of human demonstrations on an unseen robot platform (only 1% of typical data requirements), Vidar generalizes to unseen tasks and backgrounds with strong semantic understanding, surpassing state-of-the-art methods. Our findings highlight the potential of video foundation models, coupled with masked action prediction, to enable scalable and generalizable robotic manipulation in diverse real-world settings.

In this paper, we study the problem of 3D scene geometry decomposition and manipulation from 2D views. By leveraging the recent implicit neural representation techniques, particularly the appealing neural radiance fields, we introduce an object field component to learn unique codes for all individual objects in 3D space only from 2D supervision. The key to this component is a series of carefully designed loss functions to enable every 3D point, especially in non-occupied space, to be effectively optimized even without 3D labels. In addition, we introduce an inverse query algorithm to freely manipulate any specified 3D object shape in the learned scene representation. Notably, our manipulation algorithm can explicitly tackle key issues such as object collisions and visual occlusions. Our method, called DM-NeRF, is among the first to simultaneously reconstruct, decompose, manipulate and render complex 3D scenes in a single pipeline. Extensive experiments on three datasets clearly show that our method can accurately decompose all 3D objects from 2D views, allowing any interested object to be freely manipulated in 3D space such as translation, rotation, size adjustment, and deformation.

Data-driven modelling and synthesis of motion is an active research area with applications that include animation, games, and social robotics. This paper introduces a new class of probabilistic, generative, and controllable motion-data models based on normalising flows. Models of this kind can describe highly complex distributions, yet can be trained efficiently using exact maximum likelihood, unlike GANs or VAEs. Our proposed model is autoregressive and uses LSTMs to enable arbitrarily long time-dependencies. Importantly, is is also causal, meaning that each pose in the output sequence is generated without access to poses or control inputs from future time steps; this absence of algorithmic latency is important for interactive applications with real-time motion control. The approach can in principle be applied to any type of motion since it does not make restrictive, task-specific assumptions regarding the motion or the character morphology. We evaluate the models on motion-capture datasets of human and quadruped locomotion. Objective and subjective results show that randomly-sampled motion from the proposed method outperforms task-agnostic baselines and attains a motion quality close to recorded motion capture.

Autoregressive sequence models, such as Transformer-based vision-language action (VLA) policies, can be tremendously effective for capturing complex and generalizable robotic behaviors. However, such models require us to choose a tokenization of our continuous action signals, which determines how the discrete symbols predicted by the model map to continuous robot actions. We find that current approaches for robot action tokenization, based on simple per-dimension, per-timestep binning schemes, typically perform poorly when learning dexterous skills from high-frequency robot data. To address this challenge, we propose a new compression-based tokenization scheme for robot actions, based on the discrete cosine transform. Our tokenization approach, Frequency-space Action Sequence Tokenization (FAST), enables us to train autoregressive VLAs for highly dexterous and high-frequency tasks where standard discretization methods fail completely. Based on FAST, we release FAST+, a universal robot action tokenizer, trained on 1M real robot action trajectories. It can be used as a black-box tokenizer for a wide range of robot action sequences, with diverse action spaces and control frequencies. Finally, we show that, when combined with the pi0 VLA, our method can scale to training on 10k hours of robot data and match the performance of diffusion VLAs, while reducing training time by up to 5x.

Humans possess an extraordinary ability to understand and execute complex manipulation tasks by interpreting abstract instruction manuals. For robots, however, this capability remains a substantial challenge, as they cannot interpret abstract instructions and translate them into executable actions. In this paper, we present Manual2Skill, a novel framework that enables robots to perform complex assembly tasks guided by high-level manual instructions. Our approach leverages a Vision-Language Model (VLM) to extract structured information from instructional images and then uses this information to construct hierarchical assembly graphs. These graphs represent parts, subassemblies, and the relationships between them. To facilitate task execution, a pose estimation model predicts the relative 6D poses of components at each assembly step. At the same time, a motion planning module generates actionable sequences for real-world robotic implementation. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Manual2Skill by successfully assembling several real-world IKEA furniture items. This application highlights its ability to manage long-horizon manipulation tasks with both efficiency and precision, significantly enhancing the practicality of robot learning from instruction manuals. This work marks a step forward in advancing robotic systems capable of understanding and executing complex manipulation tasks in a manner akin to human capabilities.