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Flow as the Cross-Domain Manipulation Interface

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arxiv 2407.15208 v2 pith:7QOFHK7V submitted 2024-07-21 cs.RO cs.AI

Flow as the Cross-Domain Manipulation Interface

classification cs.RO cs.AI
keywords flowreal-worldrobotim2flow2actmanipulationobjectdatahuman
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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We present Im2Flow2Act, a scalable learning framework that enables robots to acquire real-world manipulation skills without the need of real-world robot training data. The key idea behind Im2Flow2Act is to use object flow as the manipulation interface, bridging domain gaps between different embodiments (i.e., human and robot) and training environments (i.e., real-world and simulated). Im2Flow2Act comprises two components: a flow generation network and a flow-conditioned policy. The flow generation network, trained on human demonstration videos, generates object flow from the initial scene image, conditioned on the task description. The flow-conditioned policy, trained on simulated robot play data, maps the generated object flow to robot actions to realize the desired object movements. By using flow as input, this policy can be directly deployed in the real world with a minimal sim-to-real gap. By leveraging real-world human videos and simulated robot play data, we bypass the challenges of teleoperating physical robots in the real world, resulting in a scalable system for diverse tasks. We demonstrate Im2Flow2Act's capabilities in a variety of real-world tasks, including the manipulation of rigid, articulated, and deformable objects.

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Forward citations

Cited by 17 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

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

    cs.RO 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    FAFM performs flow matching in the frequency domain using DCT on action sequences to produce continuous temporally consistent robotic actions with a Sobolev-style smoothness regularizer.

  2. EgoWAM: World Action Models Beyond Pixels with In-the-Wild Egocentric Human Data

    cs.RO 2026-07 accept novelty 6.5

    World Action Model co-training with DINO or 3D-flow targets scales human-to-robot transfer on bimanual tasks far better than behavior cloning, while pixel prediction transfers weakly.

  3. TAP-VLA: Tactile Annotation Prompting for Vision Language Action Models

    cs.RO 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    TAP-VLA improves VLA performance in contact-rich manipulation by visually annotating tactile shear fields onto input images, reaching 78% success versus under 50% for vision-only and other tactile methods.

  4. Unified Motion-Action Modeling for Heterogeneous Robot Learning

    cs.RO 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    UMA treats object motion and robot actions as co-evolving variables under a masked generative objective with hindsight relabeling and contrastive disentanglement to support multi-task pretraining and deployment across...

  5. MaskWAM: Unifying Mask Prompting and Prediction for World-Action Models

    cs.CV 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    MaskWAM unifies mask prompting and prediction in world-action models via Mixture of Transformers to improve robotic policy generalization on language-ambiguous tasks.

  6. HARP-VLA: Human-Robot Aligned Representation Learning for Vision-Language-Action Model

    cs.RO 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    HARP aligns human-robot visual and latent action representations via paired bridges and unpaired dynamics supervision to boost VLA policy performance on manipulation tasks.

  7. BridgeACT: Bridging Human Demonstrations to Robot Actions via Unified Tool-Target Affordances

    cs.RO 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    BridgeACT learns robot manipulation from human videos alone by predicting task-relevant grasp regions and 3D motion affordances that map directly to robot controllers.

  8. AFFORD2ACT: Affordance-Guided Automatic Keypoint Selection for Generalizable and Lightweight Robotic Manipulation

    cs.RO 2025-10 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    AFFORD2ACT distills a minimal set of affordance-guided 2D keypoints from text and a single image to train a 38-dimensional gated transformer policy that achieves 82% success on unseen objects and scenes.

  9. Embodied-R1: Reinforced Embodied Reasoning for General Robotic Manipulation

    cs.RO 2025-08 conditional novelty 6.0

    Embodied-R1 uses a pointing-centric representation and reinforced fine-tuning on a 200K dataset to achieve state-of-the-art results on embodied benchmarks plus 56.2% success in SIMPLEREnv and 87.5% on real XArm tasks ...

  10. Robotic Manipulation by Imitating Generated Videos Without Physical Demonstrations

    cs.RO 2025-07 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    RIGVid shows that filtered AI-generated videos can serve as effective supervision for complex robotic manipulation tasks without any real demonstrations.

  11. KITE: Decoupling Kinematics and Interaction for Zero-Shot Cross-Embodiment Manipulation

    cs.RO 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    KITE decouples task reasoning from embodiment-specific control via learned latent interaction intents to enable zero-shot transfer across structurally different robots.

  12. Kairos: A Regret-Aware Native World-Action Model Stack for Physical AI

    cs.AI 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Kairos is a native world model stack using cross-embodiment pretraining, hybrid linear temporal attention with theoretical error bounds, and deployment-aware co-design, reporting top performance on embodied benchmarks.

  13. X-Imitator: Spatial-Aware Imitation Learning via Bidirectional Action-Pose Interaction

    cs.RO 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    X-Imitator is a bidirectional action-pose interaction framework for spatial-aware imitation learning that outperforms vanilla policies and explicit pose guidance on 24 simulated and 3 real-world robotic tasks.

  14. Geometry-aware 4D Video Generation for Robot Manipulation

    cs.CV 2025-07 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    A geometry-aware 4D video generation model trained with cross-view pointmap alignment to produce spatio-temporally consistent future videos from novel viewpoints for robot manipulation.

  15. Human2Any: Human-to-Robot Transfer via Constraint-Aware Compositional Planning

    cs.RO 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    Human2Any transfers human video demonstrations to robots by representing tasks as object-object interactions and composing learned priors with robot-side planning.

  16. World Action Models: The Next Frontier in Embodied AI

    cs.RO 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 4.0

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  17. World Action Models: A Survey

    cs.RO 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 3.0

    A survey that clarifies boundaries and organizes World Action Models by generation requirements and predictive substrates, identifying a trend toward generating less of the future.