Overview

Diffusion policies learn to turn observations such as images, point clouds, and touch into action sequences, often representing several plausible ways to act rather than a single average behavior. Work commonly trains them through imitation of demonstrations, then adapts them with reinforcement learning, world models, or inference-time guidance; action chunking and multimodal sensing are widely used for manipulation, navigation, and whole-body control. Evaluations span simulated manipulation benchmarks and physical robots, including contact-rich and long-horizon tasks. A central challenge is retaining expressive, robust behavior while reducing denoising latency and improving feedback, safety, and generalization to new environments.

Latest papers

CardsList

207 papers26 papers in the last four weeks, down 13% on the four weeks before. 0.2% of all new papers.

  1. PPGuide: Steering Diffusion Policies with Performance Predictive Guidance

    Mar 11, 2026Zixing Wang, Devesh K. Jha, Ahmed H. Qureshi +1Diffusion GuidanceDiffusion Policy

  2. Update-Free On-Policy Steering via Verifiers

    Mar 10, 2026Maria Attarian, Ian Vyse, Jasper Gerigk +7Robot Policy AdaptationRobot Imitation Learning

  3. GeMPO: Generalized Measure Matching for Online Diffusion Reinforcement Learning

    Mar 10, 2026Haitong Ma, Chenxiao Gao, Tianyi Chen +2Reinforcement LearningRL for Diffusion Models

  4. SCDP: Learning Humanoid Locomotion from Partial Observations via Mixed-Observation Distillation

    Mar 10, 2026Milo Carroll, Tianhu Peng, Lingfan Bao +2Humanoid Robot LocomotionDiffusion Policy

  5. Contact-Grounded Policy: Dexterous Visuotactile Policy with Generative Contact Grounding

    Mar 5, 2026Zhengtong Xu, Yeping Wang, Ben Abbatematteo +4Robotic ManipulationContact-Rich Robotic Manipulation

  6. Online Self-Training for Co-Adaptation in Hierarchical Diffusion Policies

    Mar 5, 2026Clemence Grislain, Mathilde Kappel, Olivier Sigaud +1Robot Policy LearningRobot Policy Adaptation

  7. SeedPolicy: Horizon Scaling via Self-Evolving Diffusion Policy for Robot Manipulation

    Mar 5, 2026Youqiang Gui, Yuxuan Zhou, Shen Cheng +4Robot Imitation LearningLong-Horizon Robotic Manipulation

  8. VPWEM: Non-Markovian Visuomotor Policy with Working and Episodic Memory

    Mar 5, 2026Yuheng Lei, Zhixuan Liang, Hongyuan Zhang +1Robot Policy LearningVisuomotor Policy Learning

  9. Diffusion Policy through Conditional Proximal Policy Optimization

    Mar 5, 2026Ben Liu, Shunpeng Yang, Hua ChenDiffusion PolicyRL for Diffusion Models

  10. Closed-Loop Action Chunks with Dynamic Corrections for Training-Free Diffusion Policy

    Mar 2, 2026Pengyuan Wu, Pingrui Zhang, Zhigang Wang +3Diffusion PolicyRobot Policy Adaptation

  11. Compact Task-Aligned Imitation Learning for Laboratory Automation

    Mar 1, 2026Kanata Suzuki, Hanon Nakamura, Kana Miyamoto +1Robot Imitation LearningLaboratory Automation

  12. GraspLDP: Towards Generalizable Grasping Policy via Latent Diffusion

    Feb 26, 2026Enda Xiang, Haoxiang Ma, Xinzhu Ma +2Robotic GraspingGeneralization in Robotic Manipulation

  13. ADM-DP: Adaptive Dynamic Modality Diffusion Policy through Vision-Tactile-Graph Fusion for Multi-Agent Manipulation

    Feb 25, 2026Enyi Wang, Wen Fan, Dandan ZhangMulti-Robot CoordinationDiffusion Policy

  14. Towards Dexterous Embodied Manipulation via Deep Multi-Sensory Fusion and Sparse Expert Scaling

    Feb 23, 2026Yirui Sun, Guangyu Zhuge, Keliang Liu +5Robotic ManipulationMultimodal Sensor Fusion

  15. HeRO: Hierarchical 3D Semantic Representation for Pose-aware Object Manipulation

    Feb 21, 2026Chongyang Xu, Shen Cheng, Haipeng Li +3Robotic ManipulationRobot Imitation Learning

  16. Diffusing to Coordinate: Efficient Online Multi-Agent Diffusion Policies

    Feb 20, 2026Zhuoran Li, Hai Zhong, Xun Wang +3Multi-Agent Reinforcement LearningMulti-Agent Coordination

  17. TIDAL: Temporally Interleaved Diffusion and Action Loop for High-Frequency VLA Control

    Jan 21, 2026Yuteng Sun, Haoran Wang, Ruofei Bai +4Robotic ControlDiffusion Policy

  18. Symmetry-Aware Steering of Equivariant Diffusion Policies: Benefits and Limits

    Dec 12, 2025Minwoo Park, Junwoo Chang, Jongeun Choi +1Diffusion PolicyRL for Diffusion Models

  19. Diffusion-Augmented Markov Decision Processes for Maximum Entropy Reinforcement Learning

    Dec 1, 2025Sebastian Sanokowski, Kaustubh Patil, Majid KhadivRL ControlDiffusion Policy

  20. PADiff: Predictive and Adaptive Diffusion Policies for Ad Hoc Teamwork

    Nov 10, 2025Hohei Chan, Xinzhi Zhang, Antao Xiang +2Multi-Agent CoordinationMulti-Agent Collaboration

  21. MIMIC-D: Multi-modal Imitation for MultI-agent Coordination with Decentralized Diffusion Policies

    Sep 17, 2025Dayi Dong, Maulik Bhatt, Seoyeon Choi +1Multi-Agent CoordinationDiffusion Policy