Multimodal Action Distributions

Momentum

8 papers in the last four weeks, against 2 the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

Jul 6Week of Sep 21

Latest papers 52

Oct 1, 2026cs.LG

Flowing Faster to Coordinate: One-Step Online Multi-Agent Flow Policies

Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) provides a powerful framework for learning coordinated behaviors through interactions with the environment. Developing MARL policies requires balancing expressive modeling of complex and multimodal action distributions with efficient training and execution. Generative policies, particularly diffusionbased policies, can faithfully capture complex and multimodal behaviors, but costly iterative sampling hinders their scalability in online multi-agent settings. We propose an Online MARL framework via one-step Flow model (OMAF) that combines expressive generative policies with efficient one-step action generation. OMAF employs a Transformer-based flow policy to capture complex coordination behaviors, while its approximate path score surrogate provides a principled route to synchronized flow policy optimization. To enable stable and sampleefficient learning, we further develop a joint optimization scheme coupling softmax Q-value estimation with a joint flow policy objective for coordinated policy learning. By eliminating iterative sampling, OMAF dramatically reduces training overhead without sacrificing policy expressiveness. Extensive experiments across 10 standard tasks from MPE and MAMuJoCo show that OMAF consistently achieves superior performance, with up to 3.4x higher returns and 10.5x sample efficiency improvement compared with baseline methods. These results validate the effectiveness of OMAF as an expressive and computationally efficient one-step flow policy paradigm for online MARL.
Oct 1, 2026cs.RO

Kinematic MeanFlow: One-Step Action Generation Policy for Robotic Foundation Models

In this paper, we study how to achieve one-step action generation in Robotic Foundation Models (RFMs), aiming to overcome the high inference latency of multi-step flow matching. MeanFlow provides a promising framework for this goal, yet its direct application leads to performance collapse. We discover that this stems from two distinctive dynamics exhibited in the RFM velocity field: (1) the ``local acceleration" exhibits stability early on, but surges sharply towards the end of the denoising process, and (2) the spread of its magnitudes across samples widens as denoising progresses. To address these issues, we introduce Kinematic MeanFlow (K-MF), a novel one-step action policy tailored for RFMs. Specifically, grounded in a kinematic identity, K-MF decouples the time derivative term in the MeanFlow formulation into two sub-interval terms separated by an intermediate point. This decoupled formulation enables the two terms to capture early-stage and late-stage denoising dynamics, respectively, while mitigating the error amplification across the process. As a result, our K-MF empowers RFMs to achieve one-step action generation in both training from scratch and fine-tuning paradigms across diverse tasks, while outperforming multi-step flow matching in most settings. In terms of inference efficiency, K-MF reduces action-head latency of GR00T-N1.6 by 67.5%~74.4% across L40 and Jetson Orin in eager and compiled modes, yielding end-to-end latency reductions of 30.3%~54.9%. Code will be available at https://github.com/IntelChina-AI/K-MF.
Sep 29, 2026cs.RO

Diffusion-2BC: Hybrid Diffusion and Regression Training for Offline Behavior Cloning in Autonomous Driving

Behavior cloning provides an offline route to autonomous-driving policy learning, but mean-squared-error regression is poorly matched to demonstrations in which one observation admits several valid actions. Diffusion policies can represent conditional multimodal action distributions, yet their closed-loop performance may be unstable when visual features and control are learned from limited data. This paper presents Diffusion-2BC, which combines a diffusion denoising objective with an auxiliary deterministic behavior-cloning loss over a shared visual encoder. The auxiliary branch is used only during training; inference remains diffusion-based. The proposed method is evaluated in the controlled Claw environment and in bird's-eye-view CARLA navigation, including route-conditioned driving, route-free navigation through multiple intersections, and cross-map evaluation from Town01 to Town02. In the Claw task, Diffusion-2BC reduced the mean mask-distance error by approximately 10% relative to a diffusion-based behavior-cloning baseline and by 85% relative to standard deterministic behavior cloning. In route-free CARLA, Diffusion-2BC traveled substantially farther before termination under the evaluation protocol than both baselines in Town01 and Town02. Additional qualitative rollouts revealed distinct route choices, showing the multimodal behavior of the proposed diffusion-based agent. The results indicate that an auxiliary regression signal can improve the closed-loop reliability of diffusion behavior cloning while preserving multimodal prediction in the controlled benchmark.
Sep 28, 2026cs.LG

QAMM: Adjoint MeanFlow Matching for Few-Step Offline Reinforcement Learning

Flow policies can model rich action distributions, but their iterative sampling limits decision speed. Adjoint matching uses the critic's action gradient to improve a flow policy without backpropagating through its sampling trajectory, yet its supervision is defined for instantaneous velocities. We propose QAMM, a method that turns the critic-derived adjoint signal into supervision for MeanFlow's average velocity. The resulting policy learns finite-interval transport directly and generates actions with few network evaluations. We derive the adjoint MeanFlow target, specify its gradient boundaries, and train it with an offline actor-critic. On ten HumanoidMaze tasks, QAMM produces effective two-call policies and achieves competitive performance against strong flow-policy baselines. These results show that adjoint-based Q optimization can be combined with average-velocity learning to obtain expressive offline policies with few-step action generation.
Sep 24, 2026cs.RO

Faster Visuomotor Policy Learning on Action Manifolds via Riemannian MeanFlow

Visuomotor policies learn a direct map from raw sensory observations to robot action sequences. Policies based on Diffusion and Flow Matching capture the multimodal distribution over action sequences in an end-to-end manner. This expressivity comes at the cost of multi-step numerical integration of the learned vector field for action generation, which can be expensive and time-consuming, impeding fast control rates required in robotics applications. Furthermore, robot action sequences are usually defined on a smooth, differentiable manifold, requiring that the learned policy respects the intrinsic geometry of the robot's action space. Here, we present Riemannian MeanFlow Policy (RMFP), which learns the conditioned flow map of the probability path on the robot action manifold. Our formulation employs a flow map consistency objective grounded in the data by a Riemannian Conditional Flow Matching anchor. The flow map consistency condition is stable to train and constrains the learned model to finite-time transport, which yields on-manifold action sequence generation with as few as one network function evaluation. We present results on the spherical LASA and Push-T benchmarks, on the Tool Hang and Transport tasks of the Robomimic suite, and on the Franka Kitchen task with manifold-constrained action generation, and demonstrate that RMFP attains performance competitive with prior work at a lower sampling cost. We also employ RMFP on a real-world robotic manipulation task to demonstrate fast action generation under imperfect sensor measurements in the physical world.
Sep 21, 2026cs.RO

JAMB: Joint Action-Motion Diffusion for Bimanual Manipulation

Coordinated bimanual manipulation is challenging because the motion of either arm can alter the shared 3D scene and thereby affect the other arm. Yet most diffusion policies generate actions without explicitly modeling these future geometric consequences, while predictive variants typically use future state only as auxiliary supervision or fixed conditioning. We address this limitation by proposing JAMB, a diffusion policy that jointly denoises bimanual actions and future 3D point tracks. By allowing action and track hypotheses to evolve together within a shared Transformer, each can inform and refine the other throughout denoising. We further ground multimodal representations in a shared spatiotemporal coordinate system to facilitate geometry-aware interaction during joint denoising. We evaluate JAMB on diverse bimanual manipulation tasks in RoboTwin 2.0 and on a real-world robot, comparing it with action-only policies and alternative future-prediction approaches spanning different state representations and learning objectives. Across 16 simulation tasks, JAMB achieves an average success rate of 83.4%, outperforming the strongest baseline by 23.9 percentage points. On three real-world tasks, it outperforms the action-only and auxiliary geometry prediction methods by 50.0 and 21.2 percentage points, respectively. Beyond these performance gains, JAMB shows stronger generalization to cluttered scenes and out-of-distribution backgrounds than the evaluated baselines. Together, these results demonstrate the effectiveness of our joint action-motion modeling framework for coordinated bimanual manipulation. Our project website is available at https://jam-bimanual.github.io/
Sep 21, 2026cs.RO

Learning to Plan in Human-Robot Collaboration: Multimodal Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive Interaction

Robot assistants for older adults and people with disabilities need to perform collaborative tasks with users effectively. The core component of these systems is an interaction manager whose job is to observe and assess the task and infer the state of the human and their intent for the robot to choose the best course of action. Due to the sparseness of the data in this domain, the policy for such multimodal systems is often crafted by hand; as the complexity of interactions grows, this process is not scalable. This paper proposes a reinforcement learning (RL) approach to automatically generate the multimodal policy of the robot. Our system focuses on a realistic scenario where a robot assists a user in locating objects within a home environment, managing multimodal signals, including language and physical actions, to select the best action. In contrast to traditional dialog systems, our agent is trained with a simulator that uses human data and can deal with multiple modalities. We use a simple high-level reward function that needs no fine-tuning and enforce some preconditions to speed up the training process. A human study evaluating the system in a real-world setting demonstrates promising results, indicating high usability and effective task completion. This RL-based approach offers a scalable and interpretable alternative for designing interaction managers in multimodal human-robot collaborations.
Sep 16, 2026cs.RO

M3^3P-R1: Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Model Guided Multi-Modal Motion Planning via MIP Code Generation

Multi-Modal Motion Planning (M3^3P) requires joint reasoning over continuous motions and discrete mode transitions, making it difficult to solve efficiently. For instance, a bipedal robot may walk to a target location and then use its arms to grasp an object. This scenario captures both mode transitions and continuous dynamics, yielding feasible paths that neither purely discrete nor continuous planners can handle. While Mixed-Integer Programming (MIP) offers a principled framework, constructing tractable formulations for non-convex problems is typically manual and domain-specific, especially in the approximate, discretization-based MIP regime needed for non-convex robotic tasks. We propose M3^3P-R1, a reinforcement learning method that fine-tunes large language models (LLMs) to decompose M3^3P tasks into MIP variables, constraints, and objectives. Instead of directly outputting answers, which are often prone to hallucination, the model generates executable Python code using MIP optimization libraries and constraint interfaces. This enables solver-backed execution for robust and verifiable solutions. Trained with an outcome-driven reward against the solver, M3^3P-R1 learns to compose modality-level discretization primitives and synthesize cross-modal coupling constraints, producing executable MIP programs for complex M3^3P tasks.
Sep 14, 2026cs.LG

Learning Multimodal One-step Flow Policy via Value-weighted Optimal Transport

Offline reinforcement learning aims to learn a policy solely from fixed datasets, which often contain multimodal action distributions. Flow policies can naturally represent such multimodal behaviors, but learning an efficient one-step flow policy remains challenging: standard value guidance often leads to mode collapse or exploits overestimation bias in out-of-distribution regions. To address this, we introduce One-step Flow policy via Optimal Transport (OptiFlow), a framework for one-step flow policy learning as a structured sample-allocation problem. OptiFlow jointly trains a value-aware reference flow policy and an efficient one-step policy, coupling their action samples through state-wise entropic optimal transport. For each state, critic-estimated values define the priority of distillation target actions, while the action-distance cost ensures geometrically compatible pairings. By avoiding direct critic maximization, our transport-guided approach enables in-distribution exploitation by anchoring the one-step policy to high-value, dataset-supported modes without the risk of out-of-distribution divergence. Experimental results demonstrate that OptiFlow effectively captures optimal multimodal behaviors and achieves strong performance across diverse offline RL benchmarks. Our code is available at https://github.com/Yonsei-DILLab/OptiFlow.
Sep 14, 2026cs.LG

Refinement-based Flow Policy Optimization

Flow-based policies offer an expressive representation for online reinforcement learning, but conventional flow matching requires samples drawn from the distribution to be modeled. This poses a challenge when the desired action distribution is defined only implicitly by a Q-function, since directly sampling actions from the resulting distribution is generally intractable. We propose Refinement-Based Flow Policy Optimization (RFPO), a novel framework for training a flow policy in online reinforcement learning by alternating between Q-guided sample refinement and self-target flow matching. RFPO first generates actions from Gaussian noise using the current flow policy and then uses a finite-step stochastic refinement procedure to move them toward an energy-based distribution induced by the Q-function. Each refined action is then paired with its corresponding initial noise sample and used as a fixed target for flow-matching training. By repeatedly refining its own outputs and learning from the resulting targets, RFPO incorporates Q-guidance into the policy without requiring direct samples from the target distribution, while retaining the capacity to represent multiple action modes. We further provide a theoretical analysis of the distributional dynamics induced by RFPO. Across six continuous-control tasks, RFPO matches or outperforms a standard Gaussian-policy baseline on almost every task. Experiments on six synthetic two-dimensional target distributions with diverse geometries demonstrate that RFPO captures complex multimodal structure without mode collapse.
Sep 11, 2026cs.RO

IMLE-VLA: Fast Single-Step Action Generation for Vision-Language-Action Policies

Vision-language-action (VLA) policies leverage pretrained vision-language backbones to achieve strong cross-task generalization. A leading design couples this backbone with a dedicated continuous action head trained via diffusion or flow matching. However, such heads rely on iterative multi-step sampling, for example 10 Euler steps in π0.5\pi_{0.5}. This creates an inference bottleneck that produces stop-and-go movement in the robot and slower task completion. We introduce IMLE-VLA, which replaces the iterative action head with a single-step conditional generator trained via conditional Implicit Maximum Likelihood Estimation (cIMLE). The cIMLE objective promotes multimodal action coverage, avoiding the mode collapse of naive regression heads while eliminating multi-step sampling entirely. When IMLE-VLA is applied to π0.5\pi_{0.5}, it increases inference frequency 3.67x (55 Hz vs. 15 Hz), enabling up to 11x higher action throughput. On the 40-task LIBERO benchmark, IMLE-VLA achieves the highest average success rate (98.0%) among all baselines while leading in inference frequency. Under the test-time perturbations of LIBERO-plus, IMLE-VLA retains π0.5\pi_{0.5}'s robustness while other baselines degrade sharply, confirming that the cIMLE head preserves generalization. Real-world experiments on a Franka Emika Panda across four tasks demonstrate smoother motion (2.2x to 3.0x lower jerk) and faster task completion, with IMLE-VLA outperforming π0.5\pi_{0.5} on every task and reducing average VLA inference time per episode by 3.9x to 6.6x. Videos and code are available at https://kianhk6.github.io/IMLE-VLA/
Sep 10, 2026cs.RO

MoPA: Coordinated Mobile Manipulation via Subsystem-Specific Perception Alignment

Mobile manipulation requires perceptual evidence at different spatial scales for base motion and arm control, while the two action modalities remain kinematically coupled. Existing policies often employ specialized action generation for different subsystems but condition heterogeneous action branches on a shared perceptual representation, leaving subsystem-specific perception-action correspondence implicit. We present MoPA, a framework that aligns perceptual conditioning with mobility and manipulation while preserving coordination at the action level. Dual Perceptual Streams employ two mutually masked query banks to extract separate perceptual representations from a shared vision-language context. Perception2Action Adaptation jointly updates each query bank and its corresponding action stream at every layer of a structured Mixture-of-Transformers decoder, while enabling information exchange between the two action streams. Coupled conditional flow matching learns a joint vector field for coordinated generation of both action chunks. On the ManiSkill-HAB benchmark, MoPA achieves state-of-the-art performance across all three task suites. Across four real-world tasks, MoPA achieves a mean full-task success rate of 76.3%, outperforming the best baseline by 12.5 percentage points. Ablation studies and further analyses validate the effectiveness of the proposed design. Website is available at: https://mopa-policy.github.io/.
Aug 30, 2026cs.RO

DriftingVLA: Native One-Step Vision-Language-Action Generation via Per-Dimension Temporal Drifting

Conventional flow-based vision-language-action (VLA) models support expressive continuous action generation but rely on multi-step refinement to produce each action chunk, increasing latency in online robot control. To address this issue, we introduce DriftingVLA, a native one-step VLA that generates a complete action chunk with a single action-expert forward pass. Rather than learning a flow field that requires iterative integration at inference, DriftingVLA uses a distribution-drifting objective to learn a direct noise-to-action-chunk mapping for one-step deployment. Since robot action dimensions carry distinct control semantics and distributional characteristics, we further introduce Per-Dimension Temporal Drifting (PDTD). PDTD treats the complete temporal trajectory of each action dimension as a separate drifting unit, enabling finer-grained modeling and shaping of dimension-specific action distributions. This per-dimension decomposition applies only to the training objective; the shared VLA model still generates the complete action chunk jointly, thereby preserving cross-dimensional dependencies. DriftingVLA achieves 98.32% success on LIBERO, 81.09% on RoboTwin 2.0, and 77.67% across six real-world single- and dual-arm tasks, outperforming the evaluated multi-step flow policy and one-step VLA baselines. Native one-step deployment also delivers a 3.36-fold speedup in action-chunk generation, eliminating iterative refinement without sacrificing control performance.
Aug 9, 2026cs.AI

Discovering Diverse Planning Policies for Multimodal Embodied Agents with Quality-Diversity Optimization

Multimodal embodied agents are increasingly required to solve long-horizon tasks by integrating visual observations, textual goals, and interaction history into closed-loop decision making. However, state-of-the-art large-model-based planners often rely on a single dominant planning style during execution. Once this execution mode becomes ineffective, the agent may remain stalled for many steps, repeatedly interacting with the environment without making meaningful progress. We address this limitation by proposing a Quality-Diversity (QD) framework for discovering diverse planning policies for multimodal embodied agents. The proposed method treats planning-policy templates as evolvable individuals and organizes them into a behavior-indexed archive rather than collapsing search to a single prompt style. In the offline stage, rollout trajectories are summarized into structured success and failure experiences, which guide policy variation through recombination and experience-guided mutation. The resulting policies are mapped into a behavior space defined by interaction intensity and goal-directedness, and the highest-quality policy in each niche is retained in the archive. In the online stage, the agent executes one policy at a time while monitoring task progress. When persistent stall is detected, the system rolls back to the latest checkpoint and switches to a behaviorally distinct archive policy to resume execution. Experiments on the ThreeDWorld transport benchmark show that the proposed framework improves both task success and interaction efficiency over representative baseline planners. These results suggest that discovering diverse policy repertoires is an effective way to support adaptive multimodal planning and online failure recovery.
Jul 20, 2026cs.RO

HCPG-Flow:Hierarchical Contact-Progress Guidance for Flow-Policy Robot Manipulation

Flow policies can represent multimodal action distributions for robot manipulation, yet a robot must execute one action at each control step. When several proposals are sampled, critic-based ranking makes data collection depend on value estimates over candidate actions that may be weakly represented in replay. We introduce HCPG-Flow, an analytic rollout-time selector that augments SAC-Flow with hierarchical, object-centric contact-progress guidance while preserving its actor and critic objectives. HCPG switches from end-effector approach to task progress after contact, scores each proposal by the first-order reduction of a task-relevant distance, standardizes scores within the candidate set, and executes a temperature-controlled action embedding. Across ten simulated tasks, HCPG improves mean success over SAC-Flow on both benchmarks, including a 9.5 percentage-point gain on Maniskill. Four physical tasks further show high success with a 17.4% reduction in successful completion steps.Project page: https://hitxraz.github.io/HCPG-Flow/
Jul 13, 2026cs.RO

SegDiff: Segmented Trajectory Diffusion for Consistent and Adaptive Robot Manipulation

Imitation learning enables robots to acquire manipulation skills from demonstrations by mapping observations to actions. Existing approaches predict either short-horizon continuous action sequences or discrete keyposes. However, continuous prediction methods suffer from compounding errors due to short prediction horizons and struggle with multi-modal action distributions, whereas keypose-based methods necessitate an external planner, constraining real-time applicability. To address these challenges, we introduce SegDiff, a closed-loop visuomotor policy that integrates the strengths of both paradigms. SegDiff decomposes demonstrations into motion segments between keyposes and learns to predict the continuous trajectory from the current state to the next keypose, enabling long-horizon prediction with real-time refinement. Furthermore, we leverage the capability of diffusion models and DDIM inversion to propose a Dynamic Temporal Ensembling mechanism, which allows the policy to efficiently respond to dynamic environments and mitigate discontinuities caused by inconsistent multi-modal sampling. SegDiff demonstrates significant performance gains over existing approaches across various simulated and real-world scenarios, indicating its strong ability to reason over extended temporal dependencies while maintaining real-time adaptability and control stability.
Jul 11, 2026cs.RO

VINE: Taming Generative Control Policies for Reinforcement Learning

Flow-matching policies have emerged as an effective policy parameterization for robot learning. They iteratively generate actions from noise, enabling highly expressive modeling of complex and multimodal action distributions. However, prior works observed that scaling these policies with value-gradient reinforcement learning (RL) often leads to training instability. Existing methods attribute this instability to iterative generation and therefore avoid end-to-end value-gradient optimization by sacrificing iterative generation, high expressiveness, or value-gradient optimization. Contrary to prior belief, we show the instability does not stem from iterative generation itself, but from the vanilla sampling strategy originally designed for behavior cloning, which becomes brittle under value-gradient RL. Motivated by this insight, we propose VINE, an RL-oriented sampling method that enables stable end-to-end value-gradient optimization for flow-matching policies. Instead of following a single flow trajectory, VINE reconstructs a new interpolation state at every denoising step, creating a stable differentiable path for value-gradient propagation while remaining compatible with the original flow-matching denoising process. As a result, VINE preserves the expressiveness and iterative generation of flow-matching without sacrificing end-to-end value-gradient optimization. Despite performing end-to-end backpropagation through all ten denoising steps, VINE achieves stable policy improvement and consistently outperforms state-of-the-art RL methods on the OGBench offline RL benchmark and real-world robotic manipulation task. Videos are available on our website: https://agibottech.github.io/vine.
Jul 11, 2026cs.RO

Source-Lifted Flow Matching for Intervenable Multimodal Imitation

Flow-matching policies are promising for imitation learning because they model complex multimodal action distributions. However, their stochasticity is largely passive: repeated sampling may yield diverse behaviors, but users cannot directly choose among valid continuations from the same state. We propose Source-Lifted Flow Matching (SL-FM), a source-intervenable flow-matching policy that exposes such a handle while keeping the velocity field shared and latent-free (without a separate discrete-handle input). The handle selects only the source endpoint of the conditional flow, not a mode-specific field, preserving the standard formulation while avoiding decomposition into separate mode-conditioned dynamics. The core mechanism is Orthogonal Source Lifting, designed to prevent path-crossing ambiguity. Instead of partitioning target actions by mode, SL-FM lifts handle-specific sources into auxiliary orthogonal coordinates and keeps targets in the original action subspace. This preserves the demonstrated action distribution while allowing one shared field to carry different branches without merging at crossings. To keep handles usable across states, we learn a state-dependent source mixture end to end and use a responsibility floor, giving each handle weak supervision and mitigating dead modes. Experiments on crossing-flow diagnostics and robot-control benchmarks show that SL-FM converts passive source randomness into an actionable intervention variable. It removes crossing-induced composite trajectories, changes future routes in 91.1% of matched-prefix interventions, and achieves strong free-deployment performance, with improvements in several benchmark settings. Overall, source geometry provides actionable multimodal control without conditioning the velocity field on the selected mode.
Jul 11, 2026cs.AI

MAG: A Web-Agent Benchmark and Harness for Multimodal Action and Guide Generation

Digital Adoption Platforms (DAPs) are embedded overlays widely used on web systems to guide users through operations inside a page, helping them get started with unfamiliar interfaces quickly. Completing a real task, however, rarely means clicking a few buttons on a single page: it takes a sequence of actions that unfolds across changing page states. Prior studies have also treated automated web agent actions and guide text generation as two separate problems, and most of them feed models textual page representations such as the DOM or accessibility trees rather than the rendered screens that humans actually operate on. In this work we introduce MAG, the first benchmark that unifies task execution and guide writing into a single Multimodal Action and Guide task, with two grounding schemes over screenshots: Set-of-Mark element selection and raw pixel coordinates. We further build a complete harness for this compound task, covering annotation with LLM assistance and human verification, training, evaluation in live environments, and joint metrics for actions and guides. With this harness we evaluate frontier API models and open multimodal models, and report detailed analyses. Finally, we design a GRPO training method augmented with expert trajectories, which nearly doubles the success rate of a supervised 9B agent (from 6.9% to 13.2%) and improves guide quality at the same time. Even the strongest model completes fewer than 40% of the tasks, leaving ample room for future research.
Jul 5, 2026cs.CL

UI-MOPD: Multi-Platform On-Policy Distillation for Continual GUI Agent Learning

Recent advances in multimodal foundation models and agent systems have driven GUI agents from single-platform task execution toward cross-platform interaction. However, building multi-platform GUI agents remains challenging. On one hand, high-quality and executable cross-platform interaction trajectories are still scarce, and existing data often suffer from limited platform coverage. On the other hand, different platforms exhibit distinct interaction conventions, making joint or continual training prone to behavioral pattern mixing, platform-specific capability degradation, and catastrophic forgetting. To address these challenges, we construct Uni-GUI, a high-quality cross-platform GUI interaction dataset, and propose UI-MOPD, the first method that incorporates multi-teacher on-policy distillation into continual learning for GUI agents. UI-MOPD dynamically selects a platform-specific teacher according to the current environment and transfers platform-specific behavioral priors to a shared policy through platform-conditioned distillation, enabling adaptation to new platforms while preserving capabilities on existing ones. Experiments on OSWorld and MobileWorld show that UI-MOPD achieves task success rates of 38.2% and 12.0%, respectively, demonstrating its effectiveness in balancing cross-platform capability retention and new-platform adaptation. Project page: https://elispectre.github.io/UI-MOPD/.
Jul 5, 2026cs.RO

XS-VLA: Teaching Tiny Vision-Language-Action Models with Spatial Supervision and Demonstration Conditioning

How can richer training supervision improve robot control while keeping the deployed policy compact? We present XS-VLA, a staged training framework using teacher-derived spatial labels and demonstration-conditioned action learning. Coarse-Grained Spatial Distillation (CSD) initializes the backbone through an auxiliary region-label task. Latent Flow Matching (LFM) then conditions an action-space velocity field on a demonstration latent, using KL regularization while jointly optimizing the backbone and action modules. The deployed policy contains 243.99M parameters and operates without the teacher or posterior encoder. XS-VLA achieves 90.25% average LIBERO success in each of two training seeds, compared with 86.00% for a SmolVLA-256M base trained under our settings. Ablations examine both training stages through matched image pretraining and Huber/MSE controls. On three Mobile ALOHA tasks, average strict success increases from 21.7% to 65.0%. These results demonstrate the control utility of auxiliary representation initialization and regularized demonstration-conditioned flow learning for compact VLA~policies.
Jul 4, 2026cs.RO

Worldscape-MoE: A Unified Mixture-of-Experts World Model for Scalable Heterogeneous Action Control

World models are rapidly becoming a core infrastructure for embodied intelligence and interactive agents: they provide controllable simulators in which agents can perceive, act, forecast, and acquire scalable experience. Yet current video generation world models are still organized around isolated control interfaces, such as camera trajectories, robot actions, or hand-joint signals. This fragmentation is increasingly a scaling bottleneck. The central challenge is not the absence of controllable generators, but the lack of a unified and extensible learning framework that can absorb heterogeneous action supervision while preserving a shared model of world dynamics. In this work, we introduce Worldscape-MoE, a Mixture-of-Experts world model built on Diffusion Transformers for scalable heterogeneous action control. Our key observation is that different controls specify different interfaces to the same underlying world: although their representations differ, they constrain shared physical regularities, scene dynamics, and interaction semantics. Worldscape-MoE operationalizes this observation through modality-aware control injection, shared and control-specific experts, and a progressive MoE tuning strategy that supports continual extension to new action modalities. Experiments across locomotion, robotic manipulation, and egocentric hand control show that heterogeneous supervision improves rather than interferes with individual control capabilities. Worldscape-MoE achieves strong results on WorldArena, improves locomotion and hand-control metrics, exhibits robust out-of-distribution generalization, and demonstrates scaling behavior as additional control data and experts are integrated.
Jul 4, 2026cs.RO

High-Fidelity One-Step Generative Visuomotor Policy via Recursive Correction, Frequency Consistency, and Contrastive Flow Matching

Generative models such as diffusion and flow matching have advanced robotic visuomotor policies by modeling multimodal action distributions, but their multi-step sampling or ODE solving introduces inference latency. Existing one-step acceleration methods often compress the whole generation process into a single large update, leading to spatial deviation, frequency distortion, and mode averaging. This paper proposes a high-fidelity one-step generative visuomotor policy framework that addresses these issues with three complementary mechanisms. Recursive Consistent Action Flow (RCAF) uses recursive correction to compensate for spatial truncation errors and align one-step predictions with refined flow trajectories. Dual-Timestep Frequency Consistency (DTFC) preserves high-frequency manipulation details through adaptive spectral consistency across flow timesteps. Contrastive Flow Matching (CFM) separates entangled action flows with a margin-based repulsive objective, reducing ambiguous actions in multimodal manipulation. Experiments on RoboTwin, RoboTwin 2.0, Adroit, DexArt, and real-world robot platforms show that the proposed method achieves competitive or superior performance compared with strong 10-step generative policy baselines while requiring only one forward pass (1 NFE), enabling low-latency visuomotor control.
Jun 29, 2026cs.LG

Dual-Flow Reinforcement Learning with State-Aware Exploration

In complex continuous-control reinforcement learning tasks, multimodal optimal actions often coincide with uncertain, multimodal return distributions, making reliable value estimation and multimodal exploration challenging. Existing value estimation methods using unimodal Gaussians restrict expressiveness and yield biased estimates. Recent generative policies can represent multimodal actions but often collapse to a few modes and under-explore high-value areas of the action space. Motivated by these challenges, we propose Dual-Flow RL, a unified actor-critic framework that jointly models a continuous return distribution and a multimodal policy distribution using conditional flow matching (CFM). This design supports reliable value estimation and sustained multimodal exploration. To further enhance exploration, we introduce an Entropy-Covariance Exploration Regulator (ECER) that enables state-aware exploration regulation leveraging policy entropy and action-uncertainty covariance. Experiments on DeepMind Control Suite and Humanoid-Bench show that Dual-Flow RL achieves state-of-the-art performance on most tasks, significantly outperforming prior diffusion-based and flow-based methods.
Jun 23, 2026cs.AI

FlowR2A: Learning Reward-to-Action Distribution for Multimodal Driving Planning

Multimodal driving planning faces a long-standing tension between two paradigms: scoring-based methods benefit from dense reward supervision but are confined to a fixed action vocabulary, while anchor-based methods generate proposals dynamically yet suffer from sparse supervision constrained to a single ground-truth trajectory. In this work, we propose FlowR2A, which resolves this tension by reframing simulation-based rewards from discriminative targets into generative conditions. By learning the reward-conditioned action distribution from dense trajectory-reward pairs with a flow-matching decoder, FlowR2A unifies the dense supervision of scoring-based methods with the proposal generation of anchor-based methods in a single generative model, forcing the model to internalize the correlation between an action and its outcomes in safety, progress, comfort, and rule compliance. To balance hard safety constraints against soft progress objectives, we introduce fine-grained per-timestep reward conditioning and reward noise augmentation. The generative formulation naturally supports controllable test-time sampling via reward guidance and anchored sampling, producing high-quality proposals. FlowR2A achieves state-of-the-art results on the NAVSIM v1 and v2 benchmarks, with multimodal proposals of substantially higher quality than prior methods.
Jun 22, 2026cs.RO

Flowing With Purpose: Latent Action Guided Flow Matching Policies For Robotic Manipulation

Flow matching has recently become a new standard for behavior cloning in robotic manipulation. However, state-of-the-art flow matching policies suffer from a systematic structural mismatch: they rely on a globally fixed isotropic source distribution despite the strongly fragmented and heteroscedastic structure of robotic action spaces. This agnostic initialization forces the model to learn highly entangled vector fields, bottlenecking training efficiency and limiting overall policy performance. To address this limitation, we introduce Latent Action Guided Flow Matching (LAFM), a novel framework that replaces the monolithic Gaussian with an adaptive library of learned prior distributions. By grounding these distributions using a latent action model, LAFM maps current observations to discrete motion primitives, selecting a specialized base distribution that provides an informed, structurally aligned initialization for the denoising process. This dynamic adaptivity naturally accommodates heteroscedasticity in human demonstrations and makes transport trajectories shorter and less entangled. Empirically, LAFM substantially outperforms standard flow matching formulations, increasing task success rates by 23.4% in real-world robotic deployments and by 10.4% on the LIBERO-90 benchmark. Furthermore, we demonstrate that LAFM achieves state-of-the-art results, surpassing massively pre-trained vision-language-action models while utilizing significantly smaller architectures.
Jun 20, 2026cs.RO

CoRDE: Concept-Prior Routed Diffusion Experts for Structural Generalization in Robot Manipulation

Diffusion models excel at capturing multi-modal action distributions in robot imitation learning. However, in multi-task and long-horizon scenarios, monolithic architectures lack structural generalization capabilities, suffering from gradient conflicts between distinct semantic sub-stages. While pure data-driven Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) methods introduce labor division, they frequently trigger routing collapse, and instantiating full-scale experts causes parameter explosion and high expansion costs. To address these issues, we propose Concept-prior Routed Diffusion Experts (CoRDE), a structure-guided variational distillation framework. CoRDE extracts semantic distributions from a frozen concept encoder to guide the variational posterior responsibility via a learnable soft mapping matrix. This mechanism introduces an entropy-controlled responsibility inference process that encourages confident routing under reliable semantic predictions while preserving the stochastic diffusion term for behavioral diversity. To overcome parameter inflation, CoRDE employs a parameter-efficient expert pool using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) on a shared frozen backbone. Theoretical analysis shows that the mixture score discrepancy is bounded by responsibility-weighted local expert errors, supporting high-fidelity generation under low-rank expert adaptation. Empirical evaluations confirm that, compared to existing baselines, CoRDE systematically reduces routing collapse, forming robust, semantically aligned expert allocations while achieving superior action quality and incremental learning efficiency.
Jun 19, 2026cs.RO

VQActFlow: Vector-Quantized Action Mode Steering for Multi-Task Robot Manipulation

Multi-task robot manipulation policies are challenging to learn from demonstration because traditionally a single network must select among qualitatively different action modes from a multimodal demonstration distribution, conditioned on language and visual context. A wrong mode selection means executing the wrong task or an action infeasible in the scene. Tokenizing continuous actions into a learned discrete codebook separates these modes at the representation level, offering structural advantages for multi-task learning. We propose VQActFlow, a multi-task manipulation policy that tokenizes action chunks and generates code sequences via Variational Flow Matching. VQActFlow maintains an explicit preference over action modes throughout generation. Inference-time guidance acts on this preference to steer mode commitment. We instantiate this with classifier-free guidance over language conditioning, which steers the policy toward the instructed action mode, and a learned codebook critic that supplies a complementary feasibility signal. We evaluate VQActFlow on three platforms: the LIBERO simulation benchmarks, a Unitree G1 humanoid performing whole-body pick-and-place, and an ALOHA-style bimanual platform performing contact-rich tasks. Across these benchmarks, VQActFlow outperforms both continuous and discrete baselines.
Jun 18, 2026cs.RO

FlowMaps: Modeling Long-Term Multimodal Object Dynamics with Flow Matching

Joint spatial and temporal understanding of 3D scenes is a crucial requirement for robots deployed in everyday household environments. Such agents must not only comprehend and navigate spatial layouts, but also reason about how these spaces evolve over time. In particular, humans interact with objects daily, causing them to change position throughout the environment and making it difficult for robots to reliably associate current observations with previously seen objects. However, these interactions are not random: human habits and routines induce spatio-temporally consistent patterns in object locations, which robotic agents can potentially learn and then exploit for downstream tasks such as navigation. To this end, we introduce FlowMaps, a latent flow matching model for estimating multimodal distributions over the future locations of dynamic objects in a continuous 3D space. By learning the implicit dependencies among objects and their temporal evolution, FlowMaps predicts likely changes in object locations conditioned on past human interactions, while supporting generalization across previously unseen environments that share similar object routines. To demonstrate the utility of this method, we deploy FlowMaps in a downstream dynamic Object Navigation task in both simulated and real-world environments. Across more than 600 episodes, FlowMaps outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, showing that modeling object dynamics through continuous, multimodal spatio-temporal distributions improves robotic search and navigation in changing household environments. Code and additional material is available at https://fra-tsuna.github.io/flowmaps/.
Jun 18, 2026cs.RO

Frequency-Aware Flow Matching for Continuous and Consistent Robotic Action Generation

Flow matching has emerged as a standard paradigm for robotic manipulation owing to its strong expressive power for modelling complex, multimodal action distributions, alongside similar approaches like diffusion policy. However, existing methods rely on discretized action chunks, making them brittle to demonstrations collected at heterogeneous control frequencies and prone to temporally inconsistent actions that degrade control stability. In this paper, we propose Frequency-Aware Flow Matching (FAFM), which outputs continuous, temporally consistent actions. To handle heterogeneous frequency input, we transform discrete action sequences into the frequency domain with the discrete cosine transform (DCT), perform flow matching over the resulting coefficients, and reconstruct continuous actions via cosine basis expansion. To generate temporally consistent actions, we regularize the first-order temporal derivative to promote smooth actions. This corresponds to a Sobolev-type constraint that suppresses high-frequency errors and discourages abrupt action changes. Our FAFM is simple, introduces no additional network parameters and applies to standalone flow-matching policies and vision-language action models. Across synthetic toy benchmark, obstacle avoidance, LapGym, and LIBERO, FAFM improves success rates, multimodal expressivity, motion smoothness, convergence speed, robustness to mechanical bias and mixed-frequency input. These gains are consistent when deployed on a real-world Franka robot. Code available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/FAFM.
Jun 18, 2026cs.RO

One-to-Two Acting: A Novel Framework for Single-arm Agent Action Expansion to Dual Arms

Dual-arm manipulation can improve throughput via parallel execution, but collecting bimanual demonstrations for training is costly and difficult. We present ExS2D, a hierarchical action expansion framework that enables dual-arm manipulation from single-arm supervision. ExS2D first generates structured subtasks from textual instructions while explicitly capturing temporal precedence. It then grounds each subtask into executable actions through subtask-guided action mapping in observation. Finally, precedence-aware action allocation and synchronized planning are performed by a multimodal large language model driven coordinator to select collision-free dual-arm executions. Simulation experiments demonstrate that ExS2D reduces the average execution steps by 54.4% while maintaining a comparable success rate to a single-arm baseline. Real-robot experiments on four tasks further demonstrate the reliability of ExS2D for dual-arm execution under few-shot single-arm samples, while using zero bimanual demonstrations.
Jun 15, 2026cs.LG

FlowMPC: Improving Flow Matching policies with World Models

Flow Matching (FM) is a powerful approach for behavior cloning in multimodal action spaces [Jiang et al., 2025], but because it is not trained to directly maximize expected return, there is still room to improve how FM policies act at test time. This work investigates whether a learned world model can improve FM policies by enabling Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) planning over candidate action sequences proposed by the policy. Building on TD-MPC2 [Hansen et al., 2024], I introduce FlowMPC, a framework that combines an imitation-learned FM policy with a learned world model for test-time planning in ManiSkill manipulation tasks [Tao et al., 2025]. Across PickCube and PickSingleYCB, adding the world model improved performance over the FM policy alone, with especially clear gains in end-of-episode success. These results suggest that world-model-based planning can effectively complement flow-based imitation policies without modifying the FM training objective.
Jun 12, 2026cs.LG

DRIVE: Distributional and Retrieval-Augmented Bidding with Value Evaluation

Auto-bidding is a core component of real-time advertising systems, where decisions must optimize long-term performance under budget and cost constraints, while online exploration is prohibitively risky. Offline reinforcement learning and, more recently, Transformer-based sequence modeling have shown promise for learning bidding policies from logged data, but their unimodal and purely parametric formulations often collapse multiple effective bidding strategies into suboptimal averaged actions and perform unreliably under sparse or long-tail traffic. To mitigate these limitations, we propose DRIVE (Distributional and Retrieval-Augmented Bidding with Value Evaluation), a unified Transformer-based framework that decouples candidate action generation from decision making for offline auto-bidding. DRIVE combines distributional action modeling, retrieval-augmented candidate generation from high-quality historical decisions, and value-based evaluation to select the most promising bid at inference time. Extensive experiments on AuctionNet and additional offline reinforcement learning benchmarks demonstrate that DRIVE consistently improves bidding performance and generalizes well across multiple Transformer-based methods.
Jun 7, 2026cs.RO

Guided Discovery of New Behaviors using Diffusion Policies

Diffusion models have become a powerful tool for generative modeling in robotics, with diffusion policies excelling at modeling multimodal action-trajectory distributions. However, when demonstrations are limited, standard sampling often reproduces dominant behaviors while neglecting valid but rare modes, limiting the discovery of novel solutions. Existing approaches, such as guidance methods or combining reinforcement learning with diffusion, either push samples into infeasible regions or struggle to escape local minima, failing to systematically uncover diverse behaviors. To address these challenges, we propose a framework that combines Feynman-Kac correctors with a novel guiding potential that systematically guides diffusion policy samples towards promising yet underrepresented samples. These trajectories are refined using sampling-based trajectory optimization and reincorporated into the training set to retrain the diffusion policy. Our method effectively mines and repairs novel trajectories, enabling the systematic discovery of diverse and executable behaviors. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework across a range of manipulation environments, consistently discovering new behaviors.
Jun 3, 2026cs.LG

Flash-WAM: Modality-Aware Distillation for World Action Models

World-action models (WAMs) jointly generate future video and robot actions through iterative diffusion, achieving strong performance on manipulation benchmarks but requiring tens of denoising steps, a cost that precludes real-time control. Step distillation has emerged as the natural remedy, but off-the-shelf methods break down in the joint video-action setting because video and action streams use different SNR-shifted noise schedules and reach training with substantially different marginal noise distributions, an asymmetry that single-modality distillation methods cannot accommodate. We introduce \textbf{Flash-WAM}, a modality-aware step-distillation framework inspired by consistency distillation that selects the consistency function for each modality to match its noise regime: a linear-gradient-scaling parametrization for the action stream's low-noise regime, paired with a variance-preserving parametrization for the video stream's high-noise regime, grounded in a structural analysis of the consistency-function family that characterizes the achievable gradient scaling under the consistency boundary condition. Instantiated on LingBot-VA, Flash-WAM compresses inference to a single step in each modality. On RoboTwin 2.0, this reduces per-chunk latency from 8.18.1 seconds to 348348 ms on NVIDIA L40S, a 23×23{\times} speedup that enables real-time inference. Flash-WAM preserves task success on simulation benchmarks (85.5%85.5\% RoboTwin 2.0, 95.7%95.7\% LIBERO) and substantially recovers real-world performance (60%60\% average on a Unitree G1 humanoid robot), while naive consistency distillation drops to 24%24\% at the same step budget.
Jun 2, 2026cs.RO

Denoising Tells When to Replan: Denoising-Variance Adaptive Chunking for Flow-Based Robot Policies

Action chunking has become a common inference strategy for flow-based robot policies, improving action coherence by modeling multi-step temporal dependencies in demonstrations. However, the execution horizon is still typically set as an empirical fixed value, overlooking that predictable free-space motions and precision-critical interaction phases often require different replanning frequencies. In this work, we first show that the denoising process of flow-based policies contains an intrinsic signal of task phases: clean-action estimates remain stable during predictable motion phases, but fluctuate more strongly around contact-rich or precision-sensitive operations. Motivated by this observation, we propose DVAC (Denoising-Variance Adaptive Chunking), a test-time method that adaptively determines how many actions to execute from each predicted chunk. DVAC measures the variance of clean-action estimates over the final denoising steps, executes the stable low-variance prefix, and replans before high-variance future actions are committed. To transfer across tasks and rollouts, DVAC further calibrates the threshold with a rolling estimate of the local variance scale. Experiments on LIBERO, RoboTwin, CALVIN, and real-world manipulation show that DVAC improves task success while reducing replanning frequency. With a π0.5π_{0.5}-based policy, DVAC improves LIBERO success from 94.75% to 98.00% and reduces replanning by 43.0%, while also yielding aggregate gains on RoboTwin and CALVIN and improving real-world execution efficiency.
Jun 2, 2026cs.RO

Let the Dynamics Flow: Stable Flow Matching Dynamical Systems

Flow matching has recently emerged as a powerful approach for imitation learning, enabling scalable, expressive, and multimodal motion policies. However, when modeling these policies as dynamical systems, incorporating formal stability guarantees into these generative models is a prerequisite to ensure safe and generalizable robot behaviors, which remains a significant challenge. This paper introduces Stable Flow Matching Dynamical Systems (SFMDS), a novel framework that bridges the gap between highly expressive generative modeling and formal stability guarantees. SFMDS parametrizes dynamical systems via flow matching while constraining the model to satisfy positive invariance and/or Lyapunov stability conditions. We propose two variants: a soft constraint based on a penalty term, and a hard structural constraint embedded directly into the model architecture. We further extend both formulations to Lie groups to robustly handle orientation trajectories. Experiments on benchmark datasets, in simulation, and on a humanoid robot show that SFMDS learns stable, scalable, and multimodal dynamical systems in low- and high-dimensional state spaces, enabling safe and expressive robot motion generation. SFMDS matches or outperforms state-of-the-art methods on unimodal datasets, while substantially improving performance on multimodal datasets, where competing approaches fail to capture multi-modal behaviors. Accompanying source code and video are available at: https://let-the-dynamics-flow.github.io/SFMDS/.
Jun 1, 2026cs.CV

Multimodal Action Diffusion for Robust End-to-End Autonomous Driving

End-to-End Autonomous Driving (E2E-AD) systems have largely converged on predicting intermediate trajectory waypoints, delegating final control to hand-crafted controllers with GPS access. Direct control-signal prediction (outputting throttle, steer and brake in an end-to-end fashion) remains underexplored, and critically, the role of action multimodality in such systems is not well understood. We argue that moving beyond deterministic, single-action outputs is not merely a modelling choice, but a key driver of driving performance, representational quality, and training stability. To validate this, we introduce the Action Diffusion Transformer (ADT), an anchor-free diffusion transformer trained with a MSE objective that natively models the multimodal distribution of plausible driving actions. Rather than committing to a single deterministic command, ADT generates K action candidates and selects the most suitable one at inference via Nearest Neighbour Matching (NNM). Beyond strong benchmark numbers, we show that action multimodality yields measurable benefits in learned representations and behavioral consistency, effects that deterministic architectures cannot replicate. ADT surpasses previous state-of-the-art on the challenging closed-loop Bench2Drive benchmark while achieving ten times lower latency, demonstrating that expressive, multimodal action modelling is both practically efficient and conceptually essential for robust end-to-end driving.
May 31, 2026cs.RO

Learning Multi-Modal Trajectory Policies for Data-Efficient Robotic Manipulation

Robotic manipulation requires the effective integration of heterogeneous inputs, including visual observations, language instructions, and trajectory representations, to generate accurate actions. Existing transformer-based policies typically process these heterogeneous modalities within a shared parameter space, which often leads to modality interference and inefficient representation learning, especially in data-scarce scenarios. While Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) offers a scalable solution through expert specialization, conventional routing mechanisms are often sensitive to such cross-modal representation discrepancies, resulting in unstable expert assignment and expert collapse. In this work, we propose MATE (Multi-ModAl TrajEctory Policies), a novel trajectory prediction framework built upon MoE. Specifically, we introduce a Multi-Modal MoE architecture to achieve fine-grained sub-token feature decoupling, and design a cross-modal cosine router for stable and scale-invariant expert assignment across heterogeneous modalities. We further employ temperature-controlled routing and stochastic noise injection to improve expert balance and prevent premature routing collapse under scarce demonstrations. Experiments on the LIBERO benchmark show that our MATE consistently outperforms prior work under data scarcity. It achieves a 4.75% improvement in average success rate over the trajectory-guided counterpart. Real-world experiments on robotic ping-pong also suggest that the predicted trajectories can provide useful guidance for downstream robotic execution, further indicating the practical feasibility of our algorithm.
May 29, 2026cs.CV

Polyphony: Diffusion-based Dual-Hand Action Segmentation with Alternating Vision Transformer and Semantic Conditioning

Dual-hand action segmentation, densely predicting actions for both hands from untrimmed videos, is essential for understanding complex bimanual activities. However, it poses several unique challenges: complex inter-hand dependencies, visual asymmetry between hands, representation conflicts where the dominant hand monopolizes gradients, and semantic ambiguity in fine-grained actions. We propose Polyphony, a three-stage method to address these challenges through: (1) an Alternating Dual-Hand Vision Transformer that alternates training between left- and right-hand mini-batches to ensure balanced gradient contributions from both hands while sharing a spatio-temporal encoder; (2) Semantic Feature Conditioning that aligns visual features with structured, compositional action descriptions to enhance discrimination of semantically similar actions; and (3) Diffusion-Based Segmentation with cross-hand feature fusion for inter-hand coordination and adaptive loss weighting for balancing performance. Polyphony achieves state-of-the-art on both dual-hand datasets (HA-ViD, ATTACH) with improvements up to 16.8 points, and on the single-stream Breakfast dataset (82.5%), outperforming the prior best method that uses a 12x larger backbone. Notably, our unified model with a single shared backbone surpasses baselines requiring separate per-hand models. Code is at https://github.com/x-labs-xyz/Polyphony-Dual-hand-Action-Segmentation.
May 28, 2026cs.RO

MARS Policy: Multimodality Only When It Matters

Imitation learning has become a cornerstone for solving complex robotic manipulation tasks. In particular, multimodality, which enables robots to capture diverse yet valid behavioral patterns, has driven the rapid emergence of generative policies as a dominant paradigm in robot learning. However, achieving such multimodality typically relies on stochastic noise initialization and iterative denoising procedures, resulting in substantial training complexity and low inference efficiency. Meanwhile, not all phases of a robotic task inherently require behavioral diversity. Motivated by this insight, we propose the Modality-Adaptive Robot Sampling (MARS) policy, which adaptively invokes tailored stochasticity only when it is truly beneficial, while reverting to an efficient deterministic learning during single-modal phases. In other words, the proper amount of noise is injected only at the proper time. By selectively activating multimodal generation, MARS policy bridges the gap between the multimodal capability of generative policies and the superior training and inference efficiency of deterministic models. Empirical studies across 8 simulated and 4 real-world tasks demonstrate that MARS exhibits robust multimodal expressivity and high efficiency, with a 16.67% success rate improvement and an 83.20% inference latency reduction in real-world tests. Counterintuitively, MARS also outpaces deterministic policies in training efficiency on near-deterministic tasks by more effectively modeling nuanced action diversity.
May 26, 2026cs.LG

Adversarial Dual On-Policy Distillation from Expressive Teacher

Learning from demonstrations in embodied control is often cast as behavioral cloning, and recent diffusion or flow-matching policies improve this paradigm by modeling multi-modal expert actions. Yet these methods remain offline supervised learners: the policy is trained only on expert states and receives no corrective signal on the states it actually visits. On-policy distillation (OPD) offers a natural remedy, but standard OPD assumes a strong fixed teacher, which is unavailable in demonstration-only control. We propose \textbf{FA-OPD}, an \emph{adversarial dual on-policy distillation} method in which a Flow Matching (FM) teacher is learned from demonstrations and co-trained with a lightweight MLP student. The teacher provides two complementary signals on student rollouts. The reward channel learns an expert-likeness objective over state-action pairs and drives online exploration through long-horizon policy optimization. The action channel supplies dense local targets at student-visited states, stabilizing exploitation. FA-OPD couples them so that reward distillation enables generalization beyond point-wise demonstrations, while action distillation keeps exploration anchored near expert-like behavior. Across six robot navigation, manipulation, and locomotion benchmarks, FA-OPD beats strong baselines and shows much stronger robustness under noisy or limited demonstrations. Source code: https://github.com/vanzll/FA-OPD.
May 23, 2026cs.RO

Smoother Action Chunking Flow Policy via Prior-Corrected Orthogonal Trust-Region Guidance

Flow-matching robot policies commonly use action-chunking inference for efficient closed-loop control, but chunk boundaries can introduce discontinuous action transitions. Existing RTC guidance improves continuity by injecting correction signals during denoising, yet its weight schedule is weak at intermediate timesteps and its unconstrained correction direction may introduce transverse perturbations. We propose POTR, a prior-corrected orthogonal trust-region guidance method. First, we incorporate a data-prior scale σdσ_d into the RTC guidance weight, yielding stronger intermediate-time correction. Second, we decompose the guidance vector into components parallel and perpendicular to the denoising velocity, and constrain the perpendicular component within a trust region. On LIBERO with π0.5π_{0.5}, POTR improves success rate and consistently reduces chunk-boundary discontinuity, acceleration, and jerk compared with RTC. Ablations show that the prior-corrected weight provides the main correction gain, while the orthogonal trust region further improves stability.
May 21, 2026cs.LG

Understanding Multimodality in Generative Behavioral Cloning

Behavioral cloning becomes challenging when the same observation admits several valid actions. We study how generative behavioral-cloning policies represent such multimodal expert behavior and identify different bottlenecks across model parameterizations. For latent-variable policies, preserving demonstrated modes requires action-conditioned information in the latent representation. Excessive posterior-prior regularization can suppress this information and prevent the policy from distinguishing demonstrated modes. Weaker or aggregate regularization can preserve mode information, but shifts the challenge to ensuring that the deployment-time prior covers the relevant latent regions. For action-space generative policies, multimodality is constrained by the smoothness of the base-to-action transport: a map with a small Lipschitz constant cannot assign substantial probability to many well-separated modes. Covering many modes therefore requires either sharp transitions in base space or off-support bridge regions in action space. Experiments on synthetic multimodal navigation and a physical-robot bimodal manipulation task support these mechanisms. In contrast, our analysis reveals limited conditional multimodality in standard robotic simulation benchmarks, where deterministic regression remains competitive.
May 17, 2026cs.RO

RoboFlow4D: A Lightweight Flow World Model Toward Real-Time Flow-Guided Robotic Manipulation

Planning and acting in 3D environments is a fundamental capability for robotic manipulation in the real world. Although prior work has explored predictive flow planners to guide 3D manipulation, existing approaches often rely on modular pipelines stacking multiple submodels, resulting in high computational overhead and limited real-time performance. To address these challenges, we introduce RoboFlow4D, a lightweight flow world model that unifies perception and planning by estimating temporal motion in physical 3D space. As an end-to-end framework, RoboFlow4D directly predicts multi-frame 3D flows from visual observations and textual instructions, providing explicit flow-based planning to guide action generation. This design allows seamless integration with general action policies, forming an efficient observation-planning-execution closed loop. Through slow-fast collaboration between flow prediction and action control, RoboFlow4D enables real-time and resource-efficient manipulation. Extensive experiments in both simulation and real-world settings demonstrate that RoboFlow4D consistently improves manipulation success rates and computational efficiency, advancing flow-guided planning for embodied intelligence.
May 12, 2026cs.RO

Learning Action Manifold with Multi-view Latent Priors for Robotic Manipulation

This paper tackles spatial perception and manipulation challenges in Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models. To address depth ambiguity from monocular input, we leverage a pre-trained multi-view diffusion model to synthesize latent novel views and propose a Geometry-Guided Gated Transformer (G3T) that aligns multi-view features under 3D geometric guidance while adaptively filtering occlusion noise. To improve action learning efficiency, we introduce Action Manifold Learning (AML), which directly predicts actions on the valid action manifold, bypassing inefficient regression of unstructured targets like noise or velocity. Experiments on LIBERO, RoboTwin 2.0, and real-robot tasks show our method achieves superior success rate and robustness over SOTA baselines. Project page: https://junjxiao.github.io/Multi-view-VLA.github.io/.
May 12, 2026cs.LG

Behavioral Mode Discovery for Fine-tuning Multimodal Generative Policies

We address the problem of fine-tuning pre-trained generative policies with reinforcement learning (RL) while preserving the multimodality of their action distributions. Existing methods for RL fine-tuning of generative policies (e.g., diffusion policies) improve task performance but often collapse diverse behaviors into a single reward-maximizing mode. To mitigate this issue, we propose an unsupervised mode discovery framework that uncovers latent behavioral modes within generative policies. The discovered modes enable the use of mutual information as an intrinsic reward, regularizing RL fine-tuning to enhance task success while maintaining behavioral diversity. Experiments on robotic manipulation tasks demonstrate that our method consistently outperforms conventional fine-tuning approaches, achieving higher success rates and preserving richer multimodal action distributions.
May 11, 2026cs.RO

ForceFlow: Learning to Feel and Act via Contact-Driven Flow Matching

Existing imitation learning methods enable robots to interact autonomously with the physical environment. However, contact-rich manipulation tasks remain a significant challenge due to complex contact dynamics that demand high-precision force feedback and control. Although recent efforts have attempted to integrate force/torque sensing into policies, how to build a simple yet effective framework that achieves robust generalization under multimodal observations remains an open question. In this paper, we propose ForceFlow, a force-aware reactive framework built upon flow matching. For contact-stage policy design, we investigate force signal fusion mechanisms and adopt an asymmetric multimodal fusion architecture that treats force as a global regulatory signal, combined with a joint prediction paradigm that enhances the policy's understanding of instantaneous force and historical information, thereby achieving deep coupling between force and motion. For task-level hierarchical decomposition, we divide manipulation into a vision-dominant approach stage (VLM-based pointing for target localization) and a touch-dominant interaction stage (force-driven contact execution), with a Vision-to-Force (V2F) handover mechanism that explicitly decouples spatial generalization from contact regulation. Experimental results across six real-world contact-rich tasks demonstrate that ForceFlow achieves a 37% success rate improvement over the strong baseline ForceVLA while maintaining significantly lower cost. Moreover, ForceFlow exhibits accurate force signal prediction and demonstrates superior performance in contact force self-regulation and zero-shot out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization.
May 5, 2026cs.CV

Parameter-Efficient Multi-View Proficiency Estimation: From Discriminative Classification to Generative Feedback

Estimating how well a person performs an action, rather than which action is performed, is central to coaching, rehabilitation, and talent identification. This task is challenging because proficiency is encoded in subtle differences in timing, balance, body mechanics, and execution, often distributed across multiple views and short temporal events. We discuss three recent contributions to multi-view proficiency estimation on Ego-Exo4D. SkillFormer introduces a parameter-efficient discriminative architecture for selective multi-view fusion; PATS improves temporal sampling by preserving locally dense excerpts of fundamental movements; and ProfVLM reformulates proficiency estimation as conditional language generation, producing both a proficiency label and expert-style feedback through a gated cross-view projector and a compact language backbone. Together, these methods achieve state-of-the-art accuracy on Ego-Exo4D with up to 20x fewer trainable parameters and up to 3x fewer training epochs than video-transformer baselines, while moving from closed-set classification toward interpretable feedback generation. These results highlight a shift toward efficient, multi-view systems that combine selective fusion, proficiency-aware sampling, and actionable generative feedback.
Mar 16, 2026cs.RO

MoE-ACT: Scaling Multi-Task Bimanual Manipulation with Sparse Task-Conditioned Mixture-of-Experts Transformers

Developing a unified policy for multi-task robotic manipulation remains challenging due to policy degradation from task interference and negative transfer. In this work, we propose Mixture-of-Experts-Enhanced Action Chunking Transformer (MoE-ACT), a parameter-efficient multi-task visuomotor framework tailored for bimanual manipulation. MoE-ACT incorporates sparse MoE layers into the ACT encoder, dynamically routing image tokens to selected experts based on task context, visual observations, and proprioceptive states. Furthermore, the framework incorporates task-conditioned Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM) in the action decoder alongside multi-scale cross-attention, ensuring precise task grounding and capturing fine-grained spatial cues. Extensive evaluations on the RoboTwin 2.0 benchmark across 16 challenging bimanual tasks demonstrate that MoE-ACT achieves an average success rate of 62.0%, outperforming standard ACT by 17.4 percentage points. Crucially, with only 195M activated parameters, MoE-ACT surpasses the 16-fold larger foundation model ππ0 (3.24B) by 5.1 percentage points, exhibiting substantial gains in parameter efficiency and deployment feasibility. Real-robot dual-arm experiments consistently confirm its superior multi-task execution capabilities. Our open-source project page can be found at https://j3k7.github.io/MoE-ACT/.
Jan 30, 2026cs.RO

CoLA-Flow Policy: Temporally Coherent Imitation Learning via Continuous Latent Action Flow Matching for Robotic Manipulation

Learning long-horizon robotic manipulation requires jointly achieving expressive behavior modeling, real-time inference, and stable execution, which remains challenging for existing generative policies. Diffusion-based approaches offer strong modeling capacity but incur high inference latency, while flow matching enables fast, near-single-step generation yet often suffers from unstable execution when operating directly in the raw action space. We propose Continuous Latent Action Flow Policy (CoLA-Flow Policy), a trajectory-level imitation learning framework that performs flow matching in a continuous latent action space. By encoding action sequences into temporally coherent latent trajectories and learning an explicit latent-space flow, CoLA-Flow Policy decouples global motion structure from low-level control noise, enabling smooth and reliable long-horizon execution. The framework further integrates geometry-aware point cloud conditioning and execution-time multimodal modulation, using visual cues as a representative modality to enhance real-world robustness. Experiments in simulation and on real robots show that CoLA-Flow Policy achieves near-single-step inference, improves trajectory smoothness by up to 93.7% and task success by up to 25 percentage points over raw action-space flow baselines, while remaining significantly faster than diffusion-based policies.
Dec 1, 2025cs.CV

Generative Action Tell-Tales: Assessing Human Motion in Synthesized Videos

Despite rapid advances in video generative models, robust metrics for evaluating visual and temporal correctness of complex human actions remain elusive. Critically, existing pure-vision encoders and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are strongly appearance-biased, lack temporal understanding, and thus struggle to discern intricate motion dynamics and anatomical implausibilities in generated videos. We tackle this gap by introducing a novel evaluation metric derived from a learned latent space of real-world human actions. Our method first captures the nuances, constraints, and temporal smoothness of real-world motion by fusing appearance-agnostic human skeletal geometry features with appearance-based features. We posit that this combined feature space provides a robust representation of action plausibility. Given a generated video, our metric quantifies its action quality by measuring the distance between its underlying representations and this learned real-world action distribution. For rigorous validation, we develop a new multi-faceted benchmark specifically designed to probe temporally challenging aspects of human action fidelity. Through extensive experiments, we show that our metric achieves substantial improvement of more than 68% compared to existing state-of-the-art methods on our benchmark, performs competitively on established external benchmarks, and has a stronger correlation with human perception. Our in-depth analysis reveals critical limitations in current video generative models and establishes a new standard for advanced research in video generation.