GraspLDP: Towards Generalizable Grasping Policy via Latent Diffusion
Authors: Enda Xiang, Haoxiang Ma, Xinzhu Ma, Zicheng Liu, Di Huang
Organizations: State Key Laboratory of Complex and Critical Software Environment, Beihang University, Beijing, 100191, China · School of Computer Science and Engineering, Beihang University, Beijing, 100191, China
This paper focuses on enhancing the grasping precision and generalization of manipulation policies learned via imitation learning. Diffusion-based policy learning methods have recently become the mainstream approach for robotic manipulation tasks. As grasping is a critical subtask in manipulation, the ability of imitation-learned policies to execute precise and generalizable grasps merits particular attention. Existing imitation learning techniques for grasping often suffer from imprecise grasp executions, limited spatial generalization, and poor object generalization. To address these challenges, we incorporate grasp prior knowledge into the diffusion policy framework. In particular, we employ a latent diffusion policy to guide action chunk decoding with grasp pose prior, ensuring that generated motion trajectories adhere closely to feasible grasp configurations. Furthermore, we introduce a self-supervised reconstruction objective during diffusion to embed the graspness prior: at each reverse diffusion step, we reconstruct wrist-camera images back-projected the graspness from the intermediate representations. Both simulation and real robot experiments demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms baseline methods and exhibits strong dynamic grasping capabilities.
Figures & tables
Figure 2: Framework of proposed GraspLDP. In Action Latent Learning stage action chunks are refined under the guidance of a grasp pose in latent space encoded by a VAE. In Diffusion on Latent Action Space stage the graspness cue is used to condition the diffusion model’s denoising process and to reconstruct for enhancement.
Table 1: Results of evaluation in simulator. In Domain denotes cases where both the objects and their poses were present in the training data; Spatial Generalization measures how well the model handles those training objects placed in unseen poses; Object Generalization assesses performance on entirely novel objects; and Visual Generalization tests robustness under visual disturbances like lighting changes. The † refers to the model that has been fine-tuned on our dataset for fair comparison.
Method
ID
SG
OG
VG
SR ↑
GFE ↓
SR ↑
GFE ↓
SR ↑
GFE ↓
SR ↑
GFE ↓
GraspLDP
80.3
1.33
71.1
1.61
58.2
2.10
64.6
1.92
w/o GC
77.4 (-2.9)
1.49 (+0.16)
67.3 (-3.8)
1.81 (+0.20)
54.2 (-4.0)
2.33 (+0.23)
57.5 (-7.1)
2.30 (+0.38)
w/o LG w/ CG
73.5 (-6.8)
1.58 (+0.25)
62.2 (-8.9)
2.07 (+0.46)
52.3 (-5.9)
2.42 (+0.32)
54.5 (-10.1)
2.35 (+0.43)
w/o LG
60.6 (-19.7)
-
49.8 (-21.3)
-
21.2 (-37.0)
-
19.4 (-45.2)
-
w/o GC & LG
55.1 (-25.2)
-
46.2 (-24.9)
-
16.0 (-42.2)
-
15.7 (-48.9)
-
Table 2: Results of ablation study. ID, SG, OG, and VG denote In Domain, Spatial, Object and Visual Generalization, respectively. GC and LG denotes Graspness Cue and Latent Guidance. CG denotes Condition Guidance used in Ours Baseline.
Figure 4: Inference latency of three methods on an RTX 4090 GPU, with the policy action horizon aligned to 8 for each inference. Results of GraspVLA are after acceleration with torch.compile() .
Figure 5: Qualitative experimental analysis. (a) Grasping trials using objects ”mug”, ”mustard bottle”, and ”thera med” in simulator. (b) Real world grasping trials corresponding to in domain, object generation, and visual generation performance. In particular, we use colored LED strips in low-light conditions to simulate visual interference.
Method
ID
SG
OG
VG
w/ random
66.8 (-13.5)
60.6 (-10.5)
51.7 (-6.5)
54.5 (-10.1)
w/ highest
72.0 (-8.3)
63.1 (-8.0)
55.4 (-2.8)
58.2 (-6.4)
w/ nearest
69.5 (-10.8)
61.8 (-9.3)
53.8 (-4.4)
56.0 (-8.6)
w/ HPS
80.3
71.1
58.2
64.6
Table 3: Ablation study on selection strategy of grasp pose.
Figure 6: Settings of real world evaluation and daily objects used for training and evaluation.
Method
ID&SG
OG
VG
Avg
Diffusion Policy [ 7 ]
65.0
43.0
21.0
43.0
GraspVLA [ 9 ]
29.0
27.0
22.0
26.0
Anygrasp [ 11 ]
82.0
78.0
79.0
79.7
GraspLDP
84.0
75.0
77.0
78.7
Table 4: Results of real world evaluation. Because it’s difficult to ensure identical object poses in the real world, we merge the ID and SG splits into a single evaluation set.
Method
Scene1
Scene2
Scene3
Scene4
Avg
SR ↑
SCR ↑
SR ↑
SCR ↑
SR ↑
SCR ↑
SR ↑
SCR ↑
SR ↑
SCR ↑
Diffusion Policy [ 7 ]
10.0
20.0
0.0
0.0
20.0
28.6
10.0
12.5
10.0
15.4
GraspVLA [ 9 ]
20.0
40.0
0.0
0.0
30.0
42.9
10.0
12.5
15.0
23.1
Anygrasp [ 11 ]
83.3
100.0
66.7
100.0
77.8
100.0
60.0
75.0
70.1
92.3
GraspLDP
83.3
100.0
100.0
100.0
100.0
100.0
60.0
75.0
82.8
92.3
Table 5: Results of cluttered scenarios evaluation in real world.
Figure 7: Detailed results of in domain&spatial generalization and object generalization in the real world.
Method
banana moving
watermelon moving
mug handover
Diffusion Policy [ 7 ]
✗ / ✗ / ✗
✗ / ✗ / ✗
✓ / ✗ / ✗
GraspVLA [ 9 ]
✓ / ✓ / ✗
✓ / ✗ / ✗
✗ / ✗ / ✗
Anygrasp [ 11 ]
✓ / ✓ / ✗
✓ / ✗ / ✗
✓ / ✗ / ✗
GraspLDP
✓ / ✓ / ✗
✓ / ✓ / ✓
✓ / ✓ / ✗
Table 6: Results of dynamic grasp task.
Method
12K
1.2K
120
Avg
Diffusion Policy
62.8
41.5
13.8
39.4
GraspLDP
80.3 (+17.5)
64.6 (+23.1)
43.1 (+29.3)
62.7 (+23.3)
Table 7: Results of In-domain evaluation with few demonstrations.
Method
GSNet
SBG
GraspNet
Grasp Detection
78.5
73.8
70.8
GraspLDP
80.3 (+1.8)
76.9 (+3.1)
75.4 (+4.6)
Table 8: Results of In-domain setting with different grasp detector.
Figure 8: Illustration of the data collection pipeline in simulator.
Figure 9: Language label for each object.
Figure 10: Initial object placements in cluttered scenerios evaluation from scene 1 to scene 4.
Parameter
Value
horizon
16
n_obs_steps
2
n_latent_dims
16
use_conv_encoder
True
conv_latent_dims
64
conv_layer_num
1
Table 9: Training and inference hyperparameters of Action Latent Learning.
Parameter
Value
observation_horizon
2
prediction_horizon
16
action_horizon
8
unet.diffusion_step_embed_dim
256
unet.down_dims
[256,512,1024]
unet.kernel_size
5
Table 10: Training and inference hyperparameters of Diffusion on Latent Action Space.
Diffusion-based visuomotor policies operating directly in raw action spaces conflate scene comprehension with trajectory generation within a single denoising process. The resulting velocity field must simultaneously encode scene information and generate precise trajectories, increasing learning complexity and limiting performance on tasks demanding precise temporal coordination across multiple arms. To simplify this joint learning problem, we introduce Latent Diffusion Policy (LDP), a two-stage framework performing flow matching in a deliberately shaped latent space. By absorbing scene understanding into an observation-conditioned CVAE encoder, LDP concentrates the conditional distribution of each observation. Consequently, the flow model avoids implicitly resolving scene-dependent structures; instead, it generates within a pre-concentrated distribution featuring a smoother velocity field, simplifying learning from limited demonstrations. Furthermore, to capture temporal dependencies among latent tokens, LDP trains with per-token diffusion forcing and employs staircase inference sampling to resolve the resulting distributional mismatch. We also propose reconstruction FID (rFID) as a lightweight proxy predicting downstream task success solely from latent space statistics. On coordination-intensive tasks from RoboTwin 2.0, LDP outperforms DP3 by a substantial margin and transfers effectively to real-world bimanual deployments.
This work addresses sequentially grasping multiple objects with a single dexterous hand without releasing those already held. Most dexterous grasping methods commit all of the hand's degrees of freedom to a single object, underutilizing its dexterity and leaving no redundancy for subsequent grasps. The proposed solution, MoDex, is a diffusion policy that predicts the next gripper pose directly from observations, conditioned on an opposition space and point cloud. The opposition space condition specifies which fingers participate in the current grasp, enabling the gripper to use only a subset of its available degrees of freedom while reserving the remaining degrees of freedom for subsequent grasps. To facilitate sim-to-real transfer, MoDex is trained in two stages: first through imitation learning on expert demonstrations, and subsequently through reinforcement learning fine-tuning, which consistently improves success rates over the pre-trained policy. We evaluate MoDex in simulation on a MuJoCo-based Franka Emika Panda robot equipped with an Allegro Hand and on the corresponding real-world hardware platform. Across both simulation and real-world experiments, MoDex achieves higher success rates than the evaluated learning-based baselines, improving performance by 2.92-17.92% and 6.67-17.78%, respectively. Project page: https://modex2026.github.io/.
Haofei Lu, Hongjia Liu, Yifei Dong +3
Department of Robotics, Perception and Learning, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden. · Robotics and Autonomous Systems at University of Turku, Finland.
Current grasp diffusion models provide rich priors for generation, yet their object-centric approach can violate the kinematic and collision constraints imposed by the embodiment and the environment. Existing embodiment-aware methods primarily perform local corrections around generated grasps through gradient guidance or optimization, making it difficult to recover from fundamentally infeasible modes. We present Steer2Grasp, a training-free, embodiment-agnostic framework for inference-time grasp steering that adapts a frozen Cartesian grasp diffusion model using deployment-specific rewards. Through Feynman-Kac (FK) inspired particle reweighting and resampling, the method reallocates population mass from infeasible to high-reward grasp modes, enabling population-level mode transitions without modifying the pretrained diffusion model or requiring differentiable constraints. The framework enables a unified treatment for single and dual arm grasping through reachability and collision aware rewards, followed by gradient free gripper level local refinement. Across diverse objects, robot embodiments, and constrained environments, our method substantially improves feasible grasp generation while maintaining proximity to the underlying grasp prior.
Vignesh Vembar, Ayush Kaura, A Padmaprabhan +5
Robotics Research Center, IIIT Hyderabad · Johns Hopkins University