REVIEW 4 major objections 5 minor 1 cited by
Pixel Motion as Universal Representation for Robot Control
T0 review · 4 major / 5 minor · reviewed 2026-08-15 · deepseek-v4-flash
Pith's one-line read Language-driven robot control can be built on predicted pixel motion rather than generated images.
desk verdict LangToMo is a solid, incremental-plus step in the flow-as-action representation line; the benchmarks and ablations are convincing, but 'universal' and 'unsupervised' overclaim what the hand-crafted mappings actually support. read the letter →
The pith
A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.
The reading
What carries the argument
The load-bearing object is the dense pixel-motion field $y_{i,i+k} \in \mathbb{R}^{h \times w \times 2}$, the apparent motion of every pixel between the current frame $x_i$ and a future frame $x_{i+k}$, normalized to $(0,1)$ per channel. It is generated by a 2D conditional U-Net diffusion model whose input is a 7-channel tensor (current RGB image, previous motion field, and noised target motion) with language injected via a Universal Sentence Encoder embedding, and whose output is the clean 2-channel motion field. The hierarchy carries the argument: System 2 runs at sparse intervals ($k$ frames) to set the motion direction, and System 1 runs at dense intervals ($j<k$ steps) to convert that motion into actions, either through hand-crafted mappings that exploit interpretability or through a learned vision transformer.
What would settle it
Run LangToMo's hand-crafted variant on a task that requires 3D reasoning or contact, such as stacking objects of different heights, using only the single-plane calibration; if the predicted 2D flow cannot be converted into successful actions, the claim that dense 2D pixel motion suffices as a universal action representation fails.
Extended reading notes
Core claim
The paper's central claim is that predicting pixel motion, rather than full RGB images, is the right way to connect language to action. Because pixel motion is defined in image space, it is independent of the robot's physical form; because it is dense, it captures both the manipulator and the object; and because it can be computed automatically with optical-flow algorithms such as RAFT, training data can be any video-caption collection. System 2 is a 2D conditional U-Net diffusion model that generates the next motion field from the current image, the previous motion field, and a sentence embedding, making the language-to-motion step a generative one-to-many mapping. System 1 then deterministically translates that motion into actions; the hand-crafted variant requires known geometry (segmentation and depth in simulation, or a calibrated plane in the real world), while the learned variant is a lightweight transformer trained on a few demonstrations. The authors claim this decomposition yields strong performance with less data, benefits from mixed human and robot demonstrations, and enables zero-shot control after pretraining on a large multi-embodiment video-caption dataset.
Load-bearing premise
The zero-shot and unsupervised claims rest on System 1 mappings that need privileged geometric information—ground-truth segmentation and depth in simulation, or a calibrated single-plane plus fixed-camera assumption in the real world—so if that geometry is unavailable, predicted 2D pixel motion cannot be converted into correct actions.
Editorial extensions
If this is right
- Training data for the motion generator can be any video-caption collection, without action labels or pixel annotations, since RAFT computes the supervision signal automatically.
- The same System 2 can be fine-tuned on both robot and human demonstrations, because pixel-motion distributions are more similar across embodiments than RGB appearance (symmetrized KL divergence 0.0199 vs 0.7881).
- A single pretrained System 2 transfers zero-shot to a new tabletop environment with a hand-crafted System 1 mapping (33.8% average over four real-world tasks, versus 22.5% for the LLaRA baseline).
- Decoupling the two systems at different frequencies reduces inference cost and allows independent training of each module, so the learned mapping needs only a modest number of demonstrations (e.g., 20 per task on MetaWorld).
- On MetaWorld, the learned mapping variant reaches 57.7% average success across 11 tasks, surpassing the closest dense-motion baseline AVDC (43.1%) and approaches that predict point tracks instead of dense flow.
Reading between the lines
- If dense flow from a single image and language proves as transferable as reported, neighboring problems—video captioning, human-robot imitation, and simulation-to-real transfer—could be reformulated as motion-forecasting tasks, reusing the same System 2 without retraining.
- The paper leaves depth out; a testable extension is to condition on or predict 3D scene flow or object-centric depth, which would likely be needed for tasks like stacking or grasping in cluttered scenes.
- The fixed-camera assumption limits the claim of universality; an explicit stress test is to add ego-motion videos to pretraining and measure whether zero-shot control degrades for navigation-like tasks, where the paper's iThor result (31.9% overall) suggests headroom.
- One could also treat System 1 itself as a learned, embodiment-agnostic module that maps flow to actions across multiple robots, which would remove the per-embodiment calibration cost the paper names as an open challenge.
Signed reviews
Editorial analysis
A structured set of objections, weighed in public.
Referee Report
Summary. The paper presents LangToMo, a dual-system vision-language-action framework in which a high-level diffusion model (System 2) forecasts dense optical flow ('pixel motion') from a single RGB frame, a language instruction, and previous flow, using RAFT pseudo-labels from video-caption data with no action labels. A low-level System 1 then converts the predicted flow into robot actions, either through a learned ViT trained on 20 demonstrations per task (LTM-S) or through hand-crafted mappings (LTM-H) that use segmentation/depth in simulation and a calibrated single-plane model in the real world. The authors evaluate on 11 MetaWorld tasks, four real-world xArm tasks, CALVIN, and iThor, reporting LTM-S at 57.7% MetaWorld average, LTM-H at 52.1%, and real-world zero-shot and finetuned success rates of 33.8% and 71.3% respectively, with ablations over conditioning inputs, pretraining, diffusion vs regression, and system frequency.
Significance. If the results hold, the paper makes a useful empirical contribution: an actionless, video-caption-driven training objective for a motion-based intermediate representation that is interpretable and can be reused across embodiments, including human demonstrations. The evaluation is unusually broad (sim, real, ego-motion, long-horizon), and the ablation of System 2 inputs (image, language, previous flow, pretraining) is careful. The paper is also honest about limitations such as the cost of System 1 per embodiment and lack of depth cues. The main weaknesses are that the headline claims of universality and 'unsupervised' control are broader than the experimental protocol actually establishes, and some central comparisons lack variance information.
major comments (4)
- [Abstract, §1, §4.1, Appendix F] The claims that pixel motion enables 'even unsupervised control' and is a 'universal representation for robot control' are stronger than the experiments support. In simulation, LTM-H follows Ko et al. (2023) and requires ground-truth segmentations of the robot controller and a depth map; in the real world it relies on a single-plane assumption and per-environment camera calibration (Appendix F). These are privileged geometric signals, not properties of the predicted flow itself, so the paper has not demonstrated that pixel motion alone can be converted into actions across embodiments and scenes. Please qualify the abstract and introduction (e.g., 'universal intermediate representation with embodiment-specific action mappings') and, ideally, add an ablation using estimated depth/segmentation or no calibration to show how much of the pipeline works without these priors.
- [§4.2, Table 4] The claim that dense pixel motion is more useful than point tracks is not supported by the main comparison with ATM: LTM-H obtains 52.1% vs ATM's 52.0%, a 0.1-point difference, while LTM-S's 57.7% is achieved with 20 expert demonstrations per task. The paper should report per-task standard errors or confidence intervals across the 75 trials per task and either demonstrate the dense-vs-sparse advantage statistically or soften the claim to a qualitative one.
- [§4.1, Table 3] The AVDC RD+HD entry of 0.0 is an extreme result that is used to argue that pixel motion is more embodiment-agnostic than RGB. A zero success rate on 80 trials is difficult to interpret without diagnostics; please provide rollout videos or action statistics (e.g., whether the model collapsed to static predictions) to confirm the failure mode. If this baseline result is not reproducible, the 'benefits from human demonstrations' conclusion loses its main comparison point.
- [Limitations vs Appendix B.3] The Limitations paragraph states that 'we limit our training to fixed camera videos (no ego motion),' but Appendix B.3 reports iThor results after training LTM-H and AVDC 'on the same data under common training settings' in an environment with robot ego-motion. This is an apparent contradiction. Please clarify whether the iThor training data includes ego-motion and, if so, revise the limitation; if not, specify exactly what the iThor models were trained on.
minor comments (5)
- [§3.2, Eq. (1) and Training] The notation for the previous-flow conditioning is inconsistent: Eq. (1) uses y_{i-k,i}, while the Training paragraph writes y_{i-1,i}. Please use a single interval notation throughout.
- [Appendix B.2, Table 7] The column header 'ith Task Success Rate' should read 'i-th Task Success Rate'.
- [Appendix J] The KL-divergence analysis compares aggregate pixel-value histograms of 40 human and 40 robot demonstrations, which supports the intuition but does not directly measure whether the learned System 2 converges more easily on the two data types; the claim 'pixel motion is a more embodiment-agnostic metric' would be strengthened by reporting training loss or sample efficiency on HD vs RD data.
- [Abstract] 'Checkout' should be 'Check out' before the project link.
- [Table 6] The appendix reports control frequencies and episode counts but not the total number of caption annotations or the exact OpenX split used; please add these details for reproducibility.
Circularity Check
No significant circularity: LangToMo's success rates are measured on external benchmarks, System 2 is trained on RAFT-derived flow targets, and System 1 mappings are either learned from expert actions or explicitly stated hand-crafted geometric transforms.
full rationale
The paper's derivation chain is self-contained and externally benchmarked. System 2 is trained to predict pixel motion (optical flow) between frames using RAFT pseudo-labels derived from video-caption pairs; the same flow is then mapped to actions by System 1. The learned System 1 (LTM-S) is trained on ground-truth action trajectories, while the hand-crafted System 1 (LTM-H) is a deterministic geometric transform imported from prior work (Ko et al., 2023; Li et al., 2024). Neither stage defines its output in terms of the quantity it is supposed to predict: the success rates in Tables 2-4 are measured against benchmark tasks, not against the training targets or the mapping functions themselves. The real-world hand-crafted mapping does require a single-plane assumption and camera calibration, and the simulated mapping requires segmentation and depth maps, but this is a stated limitation of the system's scope rather than a circular reduction: the pixel-motion prediction must still be correct for the mapping to produce successful actions. Self-citations to Li et al. (2024) appear for environment construction and evaluation protocol, but they do not supply the load-bearing argument; they provide a benchmark recipe. The Limitations section explicitly concedes the cost of per-embodiment System 1 mappings and the absence of depth and ego-motion handling, which further confirms that no hidden fitted input is being renamed as a prediction. No equation or fitted parameter in the paper is equivalent, by construction, to the claimed result; therefore no circular step is present.
Assumptions & free parameters
free parameters (3)
- Motion forecast horizon k =
10 (implied by '10 control steps' per System-2 invocation)
- DDIM inference steps =
25
- Previous-flow corruption probability =
0.5
assumptions (4)
- domain assumption RAFT optical flow is a reliable target for action-relevant pixel motion.
- domain assumption Dense 2D pixel motion is sufficient to encode robot actions relevant to the benchmark tasks.
- domain assumption Fixed-camera training videos without ego motion are sufficient for the motion generator.
- domain assumption Hand-crafted mappings can reliably convert 2D flow into executable actions given privileged or calibrated geometry.
Cite this review
Pith. "Pith review of Pixel Motion as Universal Representation for Robot Control." pith.science (2026). https://pith.science/paper/WIDBK3J3
@misc{pith2026250507817,
author = {Pith},
title = {Pith review of: Pixel Motion as Universal Representation for Robot Control},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://pith.science/paper/WIDBK3J3}},
note = {Machine review of arXiv:2505.07817}
}
read the original abstract
We present LangToMo, a vision-language-action framework structured as a dual-system architecture that uses pixel motion forecasts as intermediate representations. Our high-level System 2, an image diffusion model, generates text-conditioned pixel motion sequences from a single frame to guide robot control. Pixel motion-a universal, interpretable, and motion-centric representation-can be extracted from videos in a weakly-supervised manner, enabling diffusion model training on any video-caption data. Treating generated pixel motion as learned universal representations, our low level System 1 module translates these into robot actions via motion-to-action mapping functions, which can be either hand-crafted or learned with minimal supervision. System 2 operates as a high-level policy applied at sparse temporal intervals, while System 1 acts as a low-level policy at dense temporal intervals. This hierarchical decoupling enables flexible, scalable, and generalizable robot control under both unsupervised and supervised settings, bridging the gap between language, motion, and action. Checkout https://kahnchana.github.io/LangToMo
Figures
Figures from the paper (5 more)
Forward citations
Cited by 1 Pith paper
-
DynamicWAM: Dual-Path Motion Conditioning for World-Action Models in Dynamic Manipulation
A world-action model that conditions future prediction on optical-flow history and action generation on kinematic descriptors improves dynamic manipulation success rates in simulation and on a real robot.
Reference graph
Works this paper leans on
-
[1]
write newline
" write newline "" before.all 'output.state := FUNCTION n.dashify 't := "" t empty not t #1 #1 substring "-" = t #1 #2 substring "--" = not "--" * t #2 global.max substring 't := t #1 #1 substring "-" = "-" * t #2 global.max substring 't := while if t #1 #1 substring * t #2 global.max substring 't := if while FUNCTION format.date year duplicate empty "emp...
-
[2]
Learning optical flow from still images
Filippo Aleotti, Matteo Poggi, and Stefano Mattoccia. Learning optical flow from still images. In CVPR, pp.\ 15196--15206, 2021
2021
-
[3]
Flowcontrol: Optical flow based visual servoing
Max Argus, Luk \'a s Hermann, Jon Long, and Thomas Brox. Flowcontrol: Optical flow based visual servoing. 2020 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), pp.\ 7534--7541, 2020. URL https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:220280145
2020
-
[4]
Rheotropism in fishes
Geoff Arnold. Rheotropism in fishes. Biological Reviews, 49, 1974. URL https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:30755969
1974
-
[5]
Human-to-robot imitation in the wild
Shikhar Bahl, Abhinav Gupta, and Deepak Pathak. Human-to-robot imitation in the wild. In Robotics: Science and Systems, 2022
2022
-
[6]
Srinivasan
Emily Baird, Norbert Boeddeker, and Mandyam V. Srinivasan. The effect of optic flow cues on honeybee flight control in wind. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 288, 2021. URL https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:231643236
2021
-
[7]
Rt-h: Action hierarchies using language
Suneel Belkhale, Tianli Ding, Ted Xiao, Pierre Sermanet, Quon Vuong, Jonathan Tompson, Yevgen Chebotar, Debidatta Dwibedi, and Dorsa Sadigh. Rt-h: Action hierarchies using language. ArXiv, abs/2403.01823, 2024. URL https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:268249108
arXiv 2024
-
[8]
Gen2act: Human video generation in novel scenarios enables generalizable robot manipulation
Homanga Bharadhwaj, Debidatta Dwibedi, Abhinav Gupta, Shubham Tulsiani, Carl Doersch, Ted Xiao, Dhruv Shah, Fei Xia, Dorsa Sadigh, and Sean Kirmani. Gen2act: Human video generation in novel scenarios enables generalizable robot manipulation. ArXiv, 2024 a
2024
Show all 99 references
-
[9]
Track2act: Predicting point tracks from internet videos enables diverse zero-shot robot manipulation
Homanga Bharadhwaj, Roozbeh Mottaghi, Abhinav Gupta, and Shubham Tulsiani. Track2act: Predicting point tracks from internet videos enables diverse zero-shot robot manipulation. ECCV, 2024 b
2024
-
[10]
Zero-shot robotic manipulation with pretrained image-editing diffusion models
Kevin Black, Mitsuhiko Nakamoto, Pranav Atreya, Homer Rich Walke, Chelsea Finn, Aviral Kumar, and Sergey Levine. Zero-shot robotic manipulation with pretrained image-editing diffusion models. ArXiv, abs/2310.10639, 2023. URL https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:264172455
2023 arXiv
-
[11]
0: A vision-language-action flow model for general robot control
Kevin Black, Noah Brown, Danny Driess, Adnan Esmail, Michael Equi, Chelsea Finn, Niccolo Fusai, Lachy Groom, Karol Hausman, Brian Ichter, Szymon Jakubczak, Tim Jones, Liyiming Ke, Sergey Levine, Adrian Li-Bell, Mohith Mothukuri, Suraj Nair, Karl Pertsch, Lucy Xiaoyang Shi, Jam...
-
[12]
Rt-2: Vision-language-action models transfer web knowledge to robotic control
Anthony Brohan, Noah Brown, Justice Carbajal, Yevgen Chebotar, Xi Chen, Krzysztof Choromanski, Tianli Ding, Danny Driess, Avinava Dubey, Chelsea Finn, et al. Rt-2: Vision-language-action models transfer web knowledge to robotic control. arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.15818, 2023 a
2023 arXiv
-
[13]
Anthony Brohan, Noah Brown, Justice Carbajal, Yevgen Chebotar, Joseph Dabis, Chelsea Finn, Keerthana Gopalakrishnan, Karol Hausman, Alex Herzog, Jasmine Hsu, Julian Ibarz, Brian Ichter, Alex Irpan, Tomas Jackson, Sally Jesmonth, Nikhil J Joshi, Ryan Julian, Dmitry Kalashnikov,...
2023
-
[14]
John, Noah Constant, Mario Guajardo-Cespedes, Steve Yuan, Chris Tar, Yun-Hsuan Sung, Brian Strope, and Ray Kurzweil
Daniel Matthew Cer, Yinfei Yang, Sheng yi Kong, Nan Hua, Nicole Limtiaco, Rhomni St. John, Noah Constant, Mario Guajardo-Cespedes, Steve Yuan, Chris Tar, Yun-Hsuan Sung, Brian Strope, and Ray Kurzweil. Universal sentence encoder. ArXiv, 2018
2018
-
[15]
Gr-3 technical report
Chi-Lam Cheang, Sijin Chen, Zhongren Cui, Yingdong Hu, Liqun Huang, Tao Kong, Hang Li, Yifeng Li, Yuxiao Liu, Xiao Ma, Hao Niu, Wenxuan Ou, Wanli Peng, Zeyu Ren, Haixin Shi, Jiawen Tian, Hongtao Wu, Xin Xiao, Yuyang Xiao, Jiafeng Xu, and Yichu Yang. Gr-3 technical report. ArXi...
2025 arXiv
-
[16]
In-The-Wild
Annie S Chen, Suraj Nair, and Chelsea Finn. Learning Generalizable Robotic Reward Functions from "In-The-Wild" Human Videos . In Robotics: Science and Systems, 2021
2021
-
[17]
Moddm: Text-to-motion synthesis using discrete diffusion model
Xin Chen, Yanchao Li, Zhen Li, Zhen Wang, Li Wang, and Chen Qian. Moddm: Text-to-motion synthesis using discrete diffusion model. arXiv preprint arXiv:2308.06240, 2023
2023 arXiv
-
[18]
Diffusion policy: Visuomotor policy learning via action diffusion
Cheng Chi, Siyuan Feng, Yilun Du, Zhenjia Xu, Eric Cousineau, Benjamin Burchfiel, and Shuran Song. Diffusion policy: Visuomotor policy learning via action diffusion. ArXiv, abs/2303.04137, 2023
2023 arXiv
-
[19]
de Croon, Christophe de Wagter, and Tobias Seidl
Guido C.H.E. de Croon, Christophe de Wagter, and Tobias Seidl. Enhancing optical-flow-based control by learning visual appearance cues for flying robots. Nature Machine Intelligence, 3: 0 33 -- 41, 2021. URL https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:231655448
2021
-
[20]
Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis
Prafulla Dhariwal and Alexander Nichol. Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesis . In Neural Information Processing Systems, 2021
2021
-
[21]
Palm-e: An embodied multimodal language model
Danny Driess, Fei Xia, Mehdi SM Sajjadi, Corey Lynch, Aakanksha Chowdhery, Brian Ichter, Ayzaan Wahid, Jonathan Tompson, Quan Vuong, Tianhe Yu, et al. Palm-e: An embodied multimodal language model. arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.03378, 2023
2023 arXiv
-
[22]
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: Compositional Generation with Energy-Based Diffusion Models and MCMC
Yilun Du, Conor Durkan, Robin Strudel, Joshua B Tenenbaum, Sander Dieleman, Rob Fergus, Jascha Sohl-Dickstein, Arnaud Doucet, and Will Grathwohl. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle: Compositional Generation with Energy-Based Diffusion Models and MCMC . In International Conference on Machi...
2023
-
[23]
Learning Universal Policies via Text-Guided Video Generation
Yilun Du, Mengjiao Yang, Bo Dai, Hanjun Dai, Ofir Nachum, Joshua B Tenenbaum, Dale Schuurmans, and Pieter Abbeel. Learning Universal Policies via Text-Guided Video Generation . arXiv:2302.00111, 2023 b
2023 arXiv
-
[24]
Deep Visual Foresight for Planning Robot Motion
Chelsea Finn and Sergey Levine. Deep Visual Foresight for Planning Robot Motion . In IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2017
2017
-
[25]
Flip: Flow-centric generative planning as general-purpose manipulation world model
Chongkai Gao, Haozhuo Zhang, Zhixuan Xu, Zhehao Cai, and Lin Shao. Flip: Flow-centric generative planning as general-purpose manipulation world model. In ICLR, 2025
2025
-
[26]
Im2flow: Motion hallucination from static images for action recognition
Ruohan Gao, Bo Xiong, and Kristen Grauman. Im2flow: Motion hallucination from static images for action recognition. In CVPR, pp.\ 5937--5947, 2018
2018
-
[27]
Long video generation with time-agnostic vqgan and time-sensitive transformer, 2022
Songwei Ge, Thomas Hayes, Harry Yang, Xi Yin, Guan Pang, David Jacobs, Jia-Bin Huang, and Devi Parikh. Long video generation with time-agnostic vqgan and time-sensitive transformer, 2022
2022
-
[28]
Flight control in drosophila by visual perception of motion
Karl Georg G \"o tz. Flight control in drosophila by visual perception of motion. Kybernetik, 4: 0 199--208, 1968. URL https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:24070951
1968
-
[29]
Seer: Language instructed video prediction with latent diffusion models
Xianfan Gu, Chuan Wen, Jiaming Song, and Yang Gao. Seer: Language instructed video prediction with latent diffusion models. ArXiv, abs/2303.14897, 2023. URL https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:257766959
2023 arXiv
-
[30]
Self-supervised co-training for video representation learning
Tengda Han, Weidi Xie, and Andrew Zisserman. Self-supervised co-training for video representation learning. ArXiv, abs/2010.09709, 2020. URL https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:224703413
2010 arXiv
-
[31]
Denoising diffusion probabilistic models
Jonathan Ho, Ajay Jain, and Pieter Abbeel. Denoising diffusion probabilistic models. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 33: 0 6840--6851, 2020
2020
-
[32]
Video Diffusion Models
Jonathan Ho, Tim Salimans, Alexey Gritsenko, William Chan, Mohammad Norouzi, and David J Fleet. Video Diffusion Models . In Neural Information Processing Systems, 2022
2022
-
[33]
Seeing through pixel motion: Learning obstacle avoidance from optical flow with one camera
Yu Hu, Yuang Zhang, Yunlong Song, Yang Deng, Feng Yu, Linzuo Zhang, Weiyao Lin, Danping Zou, and Wenxian Yu. Seeing through pixel motion: Learning obstacle avoidance from optical flow with one camera. ArXiv, abs/2411.04413, 2024. URL https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:273877940
2024 arXiv
-
[34]
Video prediction policy: A generalist robot policy with predictive visual representations
Yucheng Hu, Yanjiang Guo, Pengchao Wang, Xiaoyu Chen, Yen-Jen Wang, Jianke Zhang, Koushil Sreenath, Chaochao Lu, and Jianyu Chen. Video prediction policy: A generalist robot policy with predictive visual representations. ICML, 2025
2025
-
[35]
Rekep: Spatio-temporal reasoning of relational keypoint constraints for robotic manipulation
Wenlong Huang, Chen Wang, Yunzhu Li, Ruohan Zhang, and Fei-Fei Li. Rekep: Spatio-temporal reasoning of relational keypoint constraints for robotic manipulation. ArXiv, 2024
2024
-
[36]
Physical Intelligence, Kevin Black, Noah Brown, James Darpinian, Karan Dhabalia, Danny Driess, Adnan Esmail, Michael Equi, Chelsea Finn, Niccolo Fusai, Manuel Y. Galliker, Dibya Ghosh, Lachy Groom, Karol Hausman, Brian Ichter, Szymon Jakubczak, Tim Jones, Liyiming Ke, Devin Le...
2025
-
[37]
Tenenbaum, and Sergey Levine
Michael Janner, Yilun Du, Joshua B. Tenenbaum, and Sergey Levine. Planning with Diffusion for Flexible Behavior Synthesis . In International Conference on Machine Learning, 2022
2022
-
[38]
Object-centric world model for language-guided manipulation
Youngjoon Jeong, Junha Chun, Soonwoo Cha, and Taesup Kim. Object-centric world model for language-guided manipulation. ArXiv, abs/2503.06170, 2025. URL https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:276903201
2025 arXiv
-
[39]
Thinking, fast and slow, 2011
Daniel Kahneman. Thinking, fast and slow, 2011
2011
-
[40]
Openvla: An open-source vision-language-action model
Moo Jin Kim, Karl Pertsch, Siddharth Karamcheti, Ted Xiao, Ashwin Balakrishna, Suraj Nair, Rafael Rafailov, Ethan Foster, Grace Lam, Pannag Sanketi, et al. Openvla: An open-source vision-language-action model. arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.09246, 2024
2024 arXiv
-
[41]
Learning to act from actionless videos through dense correspondences
Po-Chen Ko, Jiayuan Mao, Yilun Du, Shao-Hua Sun, and Josh Tenenbaum. Learning to act from actionless videos through dense correspondences. ArXiv, abs/2310.08576, 2023
2023 arXiv
-
[42]
Onlyflow: Optical flow based motion conditioning for video diffusion models, 2024
Mathis Koroglu, Hugo Caselles-Dupr'e, Guillaume Jeanneret Sanmiguel, and Matthieu Cord. Onlyflow: Optical flow based motion conditioning for video diffusion models, 2024
2024
-
[43]
Multi-concept customization of text-to-image diffusion, 2023
Nupur Kumari, Bingliang Zhang, Richard Zhang, Eli Shechtman, and Jun-Yan Zhu. Multi-concept customization of text-to-image diffusion, 2023
2023
-
[44]
Learning Plannable Representations with Causal InfoGAN
Thanard Kurutach, Aviv Tamar, Ge Yang, Stuart J Russell, and Pieter Abbeel. Learning Plannable Representations with Causal InfoGAN . In Neural Information Processing Systems, 2018
2018
-
[45]
Learning Robot Activities from First-Person Human Videos Using Convolutional Future Regression
Jangwon Lee and Michael S Ryoo. Learning Robot Activities from First-Person Human Videos Using Convolutional Future Regression . In CVPRW, 2017
2017
-
[46]
Molmoact: Action reasoning models that can reason in space
Jason Lee, Jiafei Duan, Haoquan Fang, Yuquan Deng, Shuo Liu, Boyang Li, Bohan Fang, Jieyu Zhang, Yi Ru Wang, Sangho Lee, Winson Han, Wilbert Pumacay, Angelica Wu, Rose Hendrix, Karen Farley, Eli VanderBilt, Ali Farhadi, Dieter Fox, and Ranjay Krishna. Molmoact: Action reasonin...
2025
-
[47]
Theodorou
Keuntaek Lee, Jason Gibson, and Evangelos A. Theodorou. Aggressive perception-aware navigation using deep optical flow dynamics and pixelmpc. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 5: 0 1207--1214, 2020. URL https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:210064565
2020
-
[48]
Xiang Li, Cristina Mata, Jong Sung Park, Kumara Kahatapitiya, Yoo Sung Jang, Jinghuan Shang, Kanchana Ranasinghe, Ryan Burgert, Mu Cai, Yong Jae Lee, and Michael S. Ryoo. Llara: Supercharging robot learning data for vision-language policy. ArXiv, abs/2406.20095, 2024
2024 arXiv
-
[49]
Movideo: Motion-aware video generation with diffusion model
Jingyun Liang, Yuchen Fan, Kai Zhang, Radu Timofte, Luc van Gool, and Rakesh Ranjan. Movideo: Motion-aware video generation with diffusion model. In European Conference on Computer Vision, 2024. URL https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:273232410
2024
-
[50]
Selflow: Self-supervised learning of optical flow
Pengpeng Liu, Michael Lyu, Irwin King, and Jia Xu. Selflow: Self-supervised learning of optical flow. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp.\ 4571--4580, 2019
2019
-
[51]
StructDiffusion: Language-Guided Creation of Physically-Valid Structures using Unseen Objects
Weiyu Liu, Yilun Du, Tucker Hermans, Sonia Chernova, and Chris Paxton. StructDiffusion: Language-Guided Creation of Physically-Valid Structures using Unseen Objects . In Robotics: Science and Systems, 2023
2023
-
[52]
Flowdiffuser: Advancing optical flow estimation with diffusion models
Ao Luo, Xin Li, Fan Yang, Jiangyu Liu, Haoqiang Fan, and Shuaicheng Liu. Flowdiffuser: Advancing optical flow estimation with diffusion models. 2024 IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), pp.\ 19167--19176, 2024
2024
-
[53]
Calvin: A benchmark for language-conditioned policy learning for long-horizon robot manipulation tasks
Oier Mees, Luk \'a s Hermann, Erick Rosete-Beas, and Wolfram Burgard. Calvin: A benchmark for language-conditioned policy learning for long-horizon robot manipulation tasks. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 7: 0 7327--7334, 2021
2021
-
[54]
R3M: A Universal Visual Representation for Robot Manipulation
Suraj Nair, Aravind Rajeswaran, Vikash Kumar, Chelsea Finn, and Abhinav Gupta. R3M: A Universal Visual Representation for Robot Manipulation . In Conference on Robot Learning, 2022
2022
-
[55]
Llarva: Vision-action instruction tuning enhances robot learning
Dantong Niu, Yuvan Sharma, Giscard Biamby, Jerome Quenum, Yutong Bai, Baifeng Shi, Trevor Darrell, and Roei Herzig. Llarva: Vision-action instruction tuning enhances robot learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.11815, 2024
2024 arXiv
-
[56]
Gr00t n1: An open foundation model for generalist humanoid robots
Nvidia, Johan Bjorck, et al. Gr00t n1: An open foundation model for generalist humanoid robots. ArXiv, abs/2503.14734, 2025
2025 arXiv
-
[57]
Octo: An open-source generalist robot policy
Octo Model Team , Dibya Ghosh, Homer Walke, Karl Pertsch, Kevin Black, Oier Mees, Sudeep Dasari, Joey Hejna, Charles Xu, Jianlan Luo, Tobias Kreiman, You Liang Tan, Lawrence Yunliang Chen, Pannag Sanketi, Quan Vuong, Ted Xiao, Dorsa Sadigh, Chelsea Finn, and Sergey Levine. Oct...
2024
-
[58]
Open x-embodiment: Robotic learning datasets and rt-x models
Abhishek Padalkar, Acorn Pooley, Ajinkya Jain, Alex Bewley, Alex Herzog, Alex Irpan, Alexander Khazatsky, Anant Rai, Anikait Singh, Anthony Brohan, et al. Open x-embodiment: Robotic learning datasets and rt-x models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.08864, 2023
-
[59]
The Surprising Effectiveness of Representation Learning for Visual Imitation
Jyothish Pari, Nur Muhammad Shafiullah, Sridhar Pandian Arunachalam, and Lerrel Pinto. The Surprising Effectiveness of Representation Learning for Visual Imitation . In Robotics: Science and Systems, 2022
2022
-
[60]
Language models are unsupervised multitask learners, 2019
Alec Radford, Jeff Wu, Rewon Child, David Luan, Dario Amodei, and Ilya Sutskever. Language models are unsupervised multitask learners, 2019
2019
-
[61]
Hierarchical text-conditional image generation with clip latents
Aditya Ramesh, Prafulla Dhariwal, Alex Nichol, Casey Chu, and Mark Chen. Hierarchical text-conditional image generation with clip latents. preprint, 2022. [arxiv:2204.06125]
2022 arXiv
-
[62]
A generalist agent
Scott Reed, Konrad Zolna, Emilio Parisotto, Sergio Gomez Colmenarejo, Alexander Novikov, Gabriel Barth-Maron, Mai Gimenez, Yury Sulsky, Jackie Kay, Jost Tobias Springenberg, Tom Eccles, Jake Bruce, Ali Razavi, Ashley Edwards, Nicolas Heess, Yutian Chen, Raia Hadsell, Oriol Vin...
2022
-
[63]
Motion tracks: A unified representation for human-robot transfer in few-shot imitation learning
Juntao Ren, Priya Sundaresan, Dorsa Sadigh, Sanjiban Choudhury, and Jeannette Bohg. Motion tracks: A unified representation for human-robot transfer in few-shot imitation learning. ArXiv, abs/2501.06994, 2025. URL https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:275471722
2025
-
[64]
Diffusion motion: Generate text-guided 3d human motion by diffusion model
Zhiyuan Ren, Zhihong Pan, Xin Zhou, and Le Kang. Diffusion motion: Generate text-guided 3d human motion by diffusion model. arXiv preprint arXiv:2210.12315, 2022
2022 arXiv
-
[65]
U-net: Convolutional networks for biomedical image segmentation, 2015
Olaf Ronneberger, Philipp Fischer, and Thomas Brox. U-net: Convolutional networks for biomedical image segmentation, 2015
2015
-
[66]
Ros and Andrew A
Ivo G. Ros and Andrew A. Biewener. Optic flow stabilizes flight in ruby-throated hummingbirds. Journal of Experimental Biology, 219: 0 2443 -- 2448, 2016. URL https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:11106817
2016
-
[67]
Saurabh Saxena, Charles Herrmann, Junhwa Hur, Abhishek Kar, Mohammad Norouzi, Deqing Sun, and David J. Fleet. The surprising effectiveness of diffusion models for optical flow and monocular depth estimation. ArXiv, abs/2306.01923, 2023
2023 arXiv
-
[68]
Concept2Robot: Learning Manipulation Concepts from Instructions and Human Demonstrations
Lin Shao, Toki Migimatsu, Qiang Zhang, Karen Yang, and Jeannette Bohg. Concept2Robot: Learning Manipulation Concepts from Instructions and Human Demonstrations . IJRR, 2021
2021
-
[69]
Third-person visual imitation learning via decoupled hierarchical controller
Pratyusha Sharma, Deepak Pathak, and Abhinav Gupta. Third-person visual imitation learning via decoupled hierarchical controller. In Neural Information Processing Systems, 2019
2019
-
[70]
Pixel-level correspondence for self-supervised learning from video
Yash Sharma, Yi Zhu, Chris Russell, and Thomas Brox. Pixel-level correspondence for self-supervised learning from video. ArXiv, abs/2207.03866, 2022. URL https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:250407930
2022 arXiv
-
[71]
Zeromimic: Distilling robotic manipulation skills from web videos, 2025 a
Junyao Shi, Zhuolun Zhao, Tianyou Wang, Ian Pedroza, Amy Luo, Jie Wang, Jason Ma, and Dinesh Jayaraman. Zeromimic: Distilling robotic manipulation skills from web videos, 2025 a
2025
-
[72]
Hi robot: Open-ended instruction following with hierarchical vision-language-action models
Lucy Xiaoyang Shi, Brian Ichter, Michael Equi, Liyiming Ke, Karl Pertsch, Quan Vuong, James Tanner, Anna Walling, Haohuan Wang, Niccolo Fusai, Adrian Li-Bell, Danny Driess, Lachy Groom, Sergey Levine, and Chelsea Finn. Hi robot: Open-ended instruction following with hierarchic...
2025 arXiv
-
[73]
Generative image as action models
Mohit Shridhar, Yat Long Lo, and Stephen James. Generative image as action models. ArXiv, abs/2407.07875, 2024
2024 arXiv
-
[74]
Make-a-video: Text-to-video generation without text-video data, 2022
Uriel Singer, Adam Polyak, Thomas Hayes, Xi Yin, Jie An, Songyang Zhang, Qiyuan Hu, Harry Yang, Oron Ashual, Oran Gafni, Devi Parikh, Sonal Gupta, and Yaniv Taigman. Make-a-video: Text-to-video generation without text-video data, 2022
2022
-
[75]
Robotic Telekinesis: Learning a Robotic Hand Imitator by Watching Humans on Youtube
Aravind Sivakumar, Kenneth Shaw, and Deepak Pathak. Robotic Telekinesis: Learning a Robotic Hand Imitator by Watching Humans on Youtube . In Robotics: Science and Systems, 2022
2022
-
[76]
History-guided video diffusion, 2025
Kiwhan Song, Boyuan Chen, Max Simchowitz, Yilun Du, Russ Tedrake, and Vincent Sitzmann. History-guided video diffusion, 2025
2025
-
[77]
Controlling the world by sleight of hand
Sruthi Sudhakar, Ruoshi Liu, Basile Van Hoorick, Carl Vondrick, and Richard Zemel. Controlling the world by sleight of hand. ArXiv, abs/2408.07147, 2024
2024 arXiv
-
[78]
Neural program synthesis from diverse demonstration videos
Shao-Hua Sun, Hyeonwoo Noh, Sriram Somasundaram, and Joseph Lim. Neural program synthesis from diverse demonstration videos. In International Conference on Machine Learning, 2018
2018
-
[79]
Raft: Recurrent all-pairs field transforms for optical flow
Zachary Teed and Jia Deng. Raft: Recurrent all-pairs field transforms for optical flow. In European Conference on Computer Vision, pp.\ 402--419. Springer, 2020
2020
-
[80]
Predictive inverse dynamics models are scalable learners for robotic manipulation
Yang Tian, Sizhe Yang, Jia Zeng, Ping Wang, Dahua Lin, Hao Dong, and Jiangmiao Pang. Predictive inverse dynamics models are scalable learners for robotic manipulation. ArXiv, abs/2412.15109, 2024. URL https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:274859727
2024 arXiv
-
[81]
Phenaki: Variable length video generation from open domain textual description, 2022
Ruben Villegas, Mohammad Babaeizadeh, Pieter-Jan Kindermans, Hernan Moraldo, Han Zhang, Mohammad Taghi Saffar, Santiago Castro, Julius Kunze, and Dumitru Erhan. Phenaki: Variable length video generation from open domain textual description, 2022
2022
-
[82]
Dense optical flow prediction from a static image
Jacob Walker, Abhinav Kumar Gupta, and Martial Hebert. Dense optical flow prediction from a static image. In ICCV, pp.\ 2443--2451, 2015
2015
-
[83]
Diffusion Model-Augmented Behavioral Cloning
Hsiang-Chun Wang, Shang-Fu Chen, and Shao-Hua Sun. Diffusion Model-Augmented Behavioral Cloning . arXiv:2302.13335, 2023
2023 arXiv
-
[84]
Any-point trajectory modeling for policy learning
Chuan Wen, Xingyu Lin, John So, Kai Chen, Qi Dou, Yang Gao, and Pieter Abbeel. Any-point trajectory modeling for policy learning. ArXiv, 2023
2023
-
[85]
Unleashing large-scale video generative pre-training for visual robot manipulation
Hongtao Wu, Ya Jing, Chilam Cheang, Guangzeng Chen, Jiafeng Xu, Xinghang Li, Minghuan Liu, Hang Li, and Tao Kong. Unleashing large-scale video generative pre-training for visual robot manipulation. arXiv preprint arXiv:2312.13139, 2023
2023 arXiv
-
[86]
GMFlow: Learning Optical Flow via Global Matching
Haofei Xu, Jing Zhang, Jianfei Cai, Hamid Rezatofighi, and Dacheng Tao. GMFlow: Learning Optical Flow via Global Matching . In IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, 2022
2022
-
[87]
Flow as the cross-domain manipulation interface
Mengda Xu, Zhenjia Xu, Yinghao Xu, Cheng Chi, Gordon Wetzstein, Manuela Veloso, and Shuran Song. Flow as the cross-domain manipulation interface. In Conference on Robot Learning, 2024
2024
-
[88]
Meta-World: A Benchmark and Evaluation for Multi-Task and Meta Reinforcement Learning
Tianhe Yu, Deirdre Quillen, Zhanpeng He, Ryan Julian, Karol Hausman, Chelsea Finn, and Sergey Levine. Meta-World: A Benchmark and Evaluation for Multi-Task and Meta Reinforcement Learning . In Conference on Robot Learning, 2019
2019
-
[89]
General flow as foundation affordance for scalable robot learning
Chengbo Yuan, Chuan Wen, Tong Zhang, and Yang Gao. General flow as foundation affordance for scalable robot learning. arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.11439, 2024 a
2024 arXiv
-
[90]
Robopoint: A vision-language model for spatial affordance prediction for robotics
Wentao Yuan, Jiafei Duan, Valts Blukis, Wilbert Pumacay, Ranjay Krishna, Adithyavairavan Murali, Arsalan Mousavian, and Dieter Fox. Robopoint: A vision-language model for spatial affordance prediction for robotics. arXiv preprint arXiv:2406.10721, 2024 b
2024 arXiv
-
[91]
Robotic control via embodied chain-of-thought reasoning
Michal Zawalski, William Chen, Karl Pertsch, Oier Mees, Chelsea Finn, and Sergey Levine. Robotic control via embodied chain-of-thought reasoning. In Conference on Robot Learning, 2024. URL https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:271097636
2024
-
[92]
Adding conditional control to text-to-image diffusion models, 2023
Lvmin Zhang, Anyi Rao, and Maneesh Agrawala. Adding conditional control to text-to-image diffusion models, 2023
2023
-
[93]
Motiondiffuse: Text-driven human motion generation with diffusion model
Mingyuan Zhang, Zhongang Cai, Liang Pan, Fangzhou Hong, Xinying Guo, Lei Yang, and Ziwei Liu. Motiondiffuse: Text-driven human motion generation with diffusion model. arXiv preprint arXiv:2208.15001, 2022
2022 arXiv
-
[94]
Dreamvla: A vision-language-action model dreamed with comprehensive world knowledge
Wenyao Zhang, Hongsi Liu, Zekun Qi, Yunnan Wang, Xinqiang Yu, Jiazhao Zhang, Runpei Dong, Jiawei He, He Wang, Zhizheng Zhang, Li Yi, Wenjun Zeng, and Xin Jin. Dreamvla: A vision-language-action model dreamed with comprehensive world knowledge. ArXiv, abs/2507.04447, 2025. URL ...
2025 arXiv
-
[95]
Universal actions for enhanced embodied foundation models
Jinliang Zheng, Jianxiong Li, Dongxiu Liu, Yinan Zheng, Zhihao Wang, Zhonghong Ou, Yu Liu, Jingjing Liu, Ya-Qin Zhang, and Xianyuan Zhan. Universal actions for enhanced embodied foundation models. ArXiv, abs/2501.10105, 2025. URL https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:275606605
2025 arXiv
-
[96]
Tracevla: Visual trace prompting enhances spatial-temporal awareness for generalist robotic policies
Ruijie Zheng, Yongyuan Liang, Shuaiyi Huang, Jianfeng Gao, Hal Daum \'e III, Andrey Kolobov, Furong Huang, and Jianwei Yang. Tracevla: Visual trace prompting enhances spatial-temporal awareness for generalist robotic policies. arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.10345, 2024
2024 arXiv
-
[97]
@esa (Ref
\@ifxundefined[1] #1\@undefined \@firstoftwo \@secondoftwo \@ifnum[1] #1 \@firstoftwo \@secondoftwo \@ifx[1] #1 \@firstoftwo \@secondoftwo [2] @ #1 \@temptokena #2 #1 @ \@temptokena \@ifclassloaded agu2001 natbib The agu2001 class already includes natbib coding, so you should ...
-
[98]
\@lbibitem[] @bibitem@first@sw\@secondoftwo \@lbibitem[#1]#2 \@extra@b@citeb \@ifundefined br@#2\@extra@b@citeb \@namedef br@#2 \@nameuse br@#2\@extra@b@citeb \@ifundefined b@#2\@extra@b@citeb @num @parse #2 @tmp #1 NAT@b@open@#2 NAT@b@shut@#2 \@ifnum @merge>\@ne @bibitem@firs...
-
[99]
) leads to a modest performance drop (from 53.6\ Removing the previous optical flow input (``Prev Flow
@open @close @open @close and [1] URL: #1 \@ifundefined chapter * \@mkboth \@ifxundefined @sectionbib * \@mkboth * \@mkboth\@gobbletwo \@ifclassloaded amsart * \@ifclassloaded amsbook * \@ifxundefined @heading @heading NAT@ctr thebibliography [1] @ \@biblabel @NAT@ctr \@bibset...
Reviewed August 15, 2026 · model on record in the stance chip above.
Discussion (0). Continue with ORCID to comment.