Organizations: Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China · Shanghai Innovation Institute, China · Noematrix, China
Abstract
Visual signals play a crucial role in policy learning by enabling models to capture object motion and interaction dynamics. Just as humans reason about actions using both past experience and anticipated outcomes, effective policies should integrate past interactions with future predictions. However, existing visuomotor policies typically model either historical context or future dynamics in isolation, lacking a unified temporal representation of interaction dynamics. In this work, we introduce ChronoFlow, a temporally unified representation that captures past, current, and future interaction dynamics through sparse 3D keypoints of both objects and the gripper. Based on this representation, we propose ChronoFlow-Policy, a diffusion-based visuomotor policy that jointly learns ChronoFlow and action sequences through a co-training objective. Experiments on 14 simulated tasks and 5 real-world manipulation tasks demonstrate that ChronoFlow-Policy consistently outperforms strong diffusion-policy baselines and improves robustness in long-horizon and non-Markovian manipulation scenarios. Our project page is available at https://the-kamisato-sii.github.io/ChronoFlow-Policy-project-page/.
Visuomotor policies aim to learn complex manipulation tasks from expert demonstrations. However, generating smooth and coherent trajectories remains challenging, as it requires balancing proximal precision with distal foresight. Existing approaches typically focus on optimizing intra-chunk action distributions, often neglecting the inter-chunk coherence. Consequently, inter-chunk discontinuities significantly impede the learning of coherent long-horizon actions. To overcome this limitation and achieve a synergetic balance between precision and foresight, we propose FocalPolicy, a foresight-aware visuomotor policy that combines Frequency-Optimized Chunking with Locally Anchored flow matching. We introduce a foresight composite objective that supervises time-domain alignment within the proximal actions while regularizing frequency-domain structure over multiple future action chunks to improve cross-chunk coherence. To efficiently learn complex action distributions, we design locally anchored sampling to enhance target signal propagation efficiency during consistency flow matching training. Extensive experiments demonstrate that FocalPolicy outperforms existing approaches and confirm the generalizability of our modules to other baselines. Project website: https://focalpolicy.github.io/
Developing efficient and accurate visuomotor policies poses a central challenge in robotic imitation learning. While recent rectified flow approaches have advanced visuomotor policy learning, they suffer from a key limitation: After iterative distillation, generated actions may deviate from the ground-truth actions corresponding to the current visual observation, leading to accumulated error as the reflow process repeats and unstable task execution. We present Selective Flow Alignment (SeFA), an efficient and accurate visuomotor policy learning framework. SeFA resolves this challenge by a selective flow alignment strategy, which leverages expert demonstrations to selectively correct generated actions and restore consistency with observations, while preserving multimodality. This design introduces a consistency correction mechanism that ensures generated actions remain observation-aligned without sacrificing the efficiency of one-step flow inference. Extensive experiments across both simulated and real-world manipulation tasks show that SeFA Policy surpasses state-of-the-art diffusion-based and flow-based policies, achieving superior accuracy and robustness while reducing inference latency by over 98%. By unifying rectified flow efficiency with observation-consistent action generation, SeFA provides a scalable and dependable solution for real-time visuomotor policy learning. Code is available on https://github.com/RongXueZoe/SeFA.
Generative models such as diffusion and flow matching have become dominant paradigms for visuomotor policy learning, yet their reliance on iterative denoising incurs high inference latency incompatible with real-time robotic control. We present Fast Legendre-polynomial Action policy via Sparse History-anchored flow (FLASH Policy), which replaces discrete action-chunk generation with continuous Legendre polynomial trajectory representation. Specifically, by fitting expert demonstrations under sparse temporal sampling, FLASH enables a single inference to cover a significantly extended action horizon. To further accelerate generation, FLASH initiates the flow matching process from history polynomial coefficients rather than uninformative Gaussian noise, shortening the transport distance and enabling accurate single-step inference. Moreover, analytic polynomial differentiation directly provides desired velocity feed-forward signals to the torque controller without numerical approximation. Extensive experiments on five simulated and two real-world manipulation tasks demonstrate that FLASH achieves state-of-the-art success rates (≥92% across all tasks), a per-episode inference time of 31.40ms (up to 175× faster than diffusion policies and 18× faster than prior flow matching policies), up to 4× faster training convergence than ACT, and 5× to 7× reduction in controller tracking error compared to discrete-action baselines.