# Hierarchical Diffusion Policy for Kinematics-Aware Multi-Task Robotic Manipulation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.03890 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03890/

## Key facts

- Cited by 93 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Diffusion and flow policies for robotics, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models.
- Builds on 37 of its 45 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Mar 2024.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Diffusion and flow policies for robotics](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/diffusion-and-flow-policies-for-robotics/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Hierarchical Text-Conditional Image Generation with CLIP Latents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.06125/) (2022)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [Gaussian Error Linear Units (GELUs)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.08415/) (2016)
- [Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04137/) (2023)
- [DPM-Solver: A Fast ODE Solver for Diffusion Probabilistic Model Sampling in Around 10 Steps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.00927/) (2022)
- [Imagen Video: High Definition Video Generation with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02303/) (2022)
- [Make-A-Video: Text-to-Video Generation without Text-Video Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14792/) (2022)
- [Learning Fine-Grained Bimanual Manipulation with Low-Cost Hardware](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13705/) (2023)
- [Planning with Diffusion for Flexible Behavior Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09991/) (2022)
- [QT-Opt: Scalable Deep Reinforcement Learning for Vision-Based Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.10293/) (2018)
- [RLBench: The Robot Learning Benchmark & Learning Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12271/) (2019)
- [Perceiver IO: A General Architecture for Structured Inputs & Outputs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.14795/) (2021)
- [Diffusion Policies as an Expressive Policy Class for Offline Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.06193/) (2022)
- [Perceiver-Actor: A Multi-Task Transformer for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.05451/) (2022)
- [Is Conditional Generative Modeling all you need for Decision-Making?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15657/) (2022)
- [Novel View Synthesis with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04628/) (2022)
- [DiffTaichi: Differentiable Programming for Physical Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.00935/) (2019)
- [RVT: Robotic View Transformer for 3D Object Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14896/) (2023)
- [Efficient Diffusion Policies for Offline Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.20081/) (2023)
- [Sim-to-Real Reinforcement Learning for Deformable Object Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.07851/) (2018)
- [Coarse-to-Fine Q-attention: Efficient Learning for Visual Robotic Manipulation via Discretisation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.12534/) (2021)
- [Accelerated Policy Learning with Parallel Differentiable Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.07137/) (2022)
- [PlasticineLab: A Soft-Body Manipulation Benchmark with Differentiable Physics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.03311/) (2021)
- [Q-attention: Enabling Efficient Learning for Vision-based Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14829/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 93)

- [Learning Robotic Manipulation Policies from Point Clouds with Conditional Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.07343/) (2024)
- [ManiCM: Real-time 3D Diffusion Policy via Consistency Model for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01586/) (2024)
- [Sparse Diffusion Policy: A Sparse, Reusable, and Flexible Policy for Robot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01531/) (2024)
- [Bidirectional Decoding: Improving Action Chunking via Guided Test-Time Sampling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.17355/) (2024)
- [VidBot: Learning Generalizable 3D Actions from In-the-Wild 2D Human Videos for Zero-Shot Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.07135/) (2025)
- [Generative Trajectory Stitching through Diffusion Composition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05153/) (2025)
- [Diffusion Models for Robotic Manipulation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.08438/) (2025)
- [Deep Generative Models in Robotics: A Survey on Learning from Multimodal Demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.04380/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Embodied Learning for Object-Centric Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11537/) (2024)
- [BiGym: A Demo-Driven Mobile Bi-Manual Manipulation Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07788/) (2024)
- [M2Diffuser: Diffusion-based Trajectory Optimization for Mobile Manipulation in 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11402/) (2024)
- [UniPhys: Unified Planner and Controller with Diffusion for Flexible Physics-Based Character Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12540/) (2025)
- [Spatial-Temporal Graph Diffusion Policy with Kinematic Modeling for Bimanual Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10743/) (2025)
- [Render and Diffuse: Aligning Image and Action Spaces for Diffusion-based Behaviour Cloning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18196/) (2024)
- [Generative Image as Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07875/) (2024)
- [Manipulation Facing Threats: Evaluating Physical Vulnerabilities in End-to-End Vision Language Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.13174/) (2024)
- [Chain-of-Action: Trajectory Autoregressive Modeling for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09990/) (2025)
- [Reinforcement Learning for Flow-Matching Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15073/) (2025)
- [Language-Guided Object-Centric Diffusion Policy for Generalizable and Collision-Aware Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00451/) (2024)
- [Score and Distribution Matching Policy: Advanced Accelerated Visuomotor Policies via Matched Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09265/) (2024)
- [FreqPolicy: Efficient Flow-based Visuomotor Policy via Frequency Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08822/) (2025)
- [FlowRAM: Grounding Flow Matching Policy with Region-Aware Mamba Framework for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16201/) (2025)
- [Rethinking Bimanual Robotic Manipulation: Learning with Decoupled Interaction Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09186/) (2025)
- [Green Screen Augmentation Enables Scene Generalisation in Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.07868/) (2024)
- [Effective Tuning Strategies for Generalist Robot Manipulation Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01220/) (2024)
- [BFA: Best-Feature-Aware Fusion for Multi-View Fine-grained Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.11161/) (2025)
- [D3P: Dynamic Denoising Diffusion Policy via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.06804/) (2025)
- [GuidedVLA: Specifying Task-Relevant Factors via Plug-and-Play Action Attention Specialization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12369/) (2026)
- [Latent Theory of Mind: A Decentralized Diffusion Architecture for Cooperative Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09144/) (2025)
- [3D Flow Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Generating Flow in 3D Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.18676/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This paper introduces Hierarchical Diffusion Policy (HDP), a hierarchical agent for multi-task robotic manipulation. HDP factorises a manipulation policy into a hierarchical structure: a high-level task-planning agent which predicts a distant next-best end-effector pose (NBP), and a low-level goal-conditioned diffusion policy which generates optimal motion trajectories. The factorised policy representation allows HDP to tackle both long-horizon task planning while generating fine-grained low-level actions. To generate context-aware motion trajectories while satisfying robot kinematics constraints, we present a novel kinematics-aware goal-conditioned control agent, Robot Kinematics Diffuser (RK-Diffuser). Specifically, RK-Diffuser learns to generate both the end-effector pose and joint position trajectories, and distill the accurate but kinematics-unaware end-effector pose diffuser to the kinematics-aware but less accurate joint position diffuser via differentiable kinematics. Empirically, we show that HDP achieves a significantly higher success rate than the state-of-the-art methods in both simulation and real-world.