# ManiCM: Real-time 3D Diffusion Policy via Consistency Model for Robotic Manipulation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.01586 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01586/

## Key facts

- Cited by 57 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 46 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 3 Jun 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 46)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.10752/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Deep Unsupervised Learning using Nonequilibrium Thermodynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1503.03585/) (2015)
- [Improved Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09672/) (2021)
- [RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15818/) (2023)
- [Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04137/) (2023)
- [RT-1: Robotics Transformer for Real-World Control at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06817/) (2022)
- [Consistency Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.01469/) (2023)
- [Meta-World: A Benchmark and Evaluation for Multi-Task and Meta Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10897/) (2019)
- [Variational Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00630/) (2021)
- [Planning with Diffusion for Flexible Behavior Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09991/) (2022)
- [Latent Consistency Models: Synthesizing High-Resolution Images with Few-Step Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04378/) (2023)
- [What Matters in Learning from Offline Human Demonstrations for Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03298/) (2021)
- [Learning Complex Dexterous Manipulation with Deep Reinforcement Learning and Demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.10087/) (2017)
- [RLBench: The Robot Learning Benchmark & Learning Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12271/) (2019)
- [CLIPort: What and Where Pathways for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12098/) (2021)
- [Diffusion Policies as an Expressive Policy Class for Offline Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.06193/) (2022)
- [Learning Universal Policies via Text-Guided Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00111/) (2023)
- [Is Conditional Generative Modeling all you need for Decision-Making?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.15657/) (2022)
- [3D Diffuser Actor: Policy Diffusion with 3D Scene Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10885/) (2024)
- [Imitating Human Behaviour with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.10677/) (2023)
- [Goal-Conditioned Imitation Learning using Score-based Diffusion Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02532/) (2023)
- [LCM-LoRA: A Universal Stable-Diffusion Acceleration Module](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05556/) (2023)
- [Scaling Robot Learning with Semantically Imagined Experience](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11550/) (2023)
- [Masked World Models for Visual Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.14244/) (2022)
- [MotionLCM: Real-time Controllable Motion Generation via Latent Consistency Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.19759/) (2024)
- [Consistency Policy: Accelerated Visuomotor Policies via Consistency Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07503/) (2024)
- [PIXART-δ: Fast and Controllable Image Generation with Latent Consistency Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05252/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 57)

- [RoboTwin: Dual-Arm Robot Benchmark with Generative Digital Twins](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13059/) (2025)
- [FlowPolicy: Enabling Fast and Robust 3D Flow-based Policy via Consistency Flow Matching for Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04987/) (2024)
- [ManiFlow: A General Robot Manipulation Policy via Consistency Flow Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.01819/) (2025)
- [RMBench: Memory-Dependent Robotic Manipulation Benchmark with Insights into Policy Design](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.01229/) (2026)
- [CEED-VLA: Consistency Vision-Language-Action Model with Early-Exit Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13725/) (2025)
- [G3Flow: Generative 3D Semantic Flow for Pose-aware and Generalizable Object Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18369/) (2024)
- [CARP: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Coarse-to-Fine Autoregressive Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.06782/) (2024)
- [FASTER: Rethinking Real-Time Flow VLAs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.19199/) (2026)
- [Fast and Robust Visuomotor Riemannian Flow Matching Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10855/) (2024)
- [CordViP: Correspondence-based Visuomotor Policy for Dexterous Manipulation in Real-World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08449/) (2025)
- [H3DP: Triply-Hierarchical Diffusion Policy for Visuomotor Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.07819/) (2025)
- [Falcon: Fast Visuomotor Policies via Partial Denoising](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00339/) (2025)
- [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)
- [GuidedVLA: Specifying Task-Relevant Factors via Plug-and-Play Action Attention Specialization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12369/) (2026)
- [Hierarchical Memory for Long Video QA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.00603/) (2024)
- [Fast Flow-based Visuomotor Policies via Conditional Optimal Transport Couplings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.01179/) (2025)
- [Demystifying Diffusion Policies: Action Memorization and Simple Lookup Table Alternatives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05787/) (2025)
- [VFP: Variational Flow-Matching Policy for Multi-Modal Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.01622/) (2025)
- [SafeBimanual: Diffusion-based Trajectory Optimization for Safe Bimanual Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18268/) (2025)
- [Benchmarking Generalizable Bimanual Manipulation: RoboTwin Dual-Arm Collaboration Challenge at CVPR 2025 MEIS Workshop](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23351/) (2025)
- [One-Step Flow Policy: Self-Distillation for Fast Visuomotor Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12480/) (2026)
- [Efficient Video Diffusion Models: Advancements and Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15911/) (2026)
- [BiKC: Keypose-Conditioned Consistency Policy for Bimanual Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10093/) (2024)
- [Time-Unified Diffusion Policy with Action Discrimination for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09422/) (2025)
- [FieldGen: From Teleoperated Pre-Manipulation Trajectories to Field-Guided Data Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.20774/) (2025)
- [OMP: One-step Meanflow Policy with Directional Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.19347/) (2025)
- [WarmPrior: Straightening Flow-Matching Policies with Temporal Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13959/) (2026)
- [Accelerating Diffusion Planners in Offline RL via Reward-Aware Consistency Trajectory Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07822/) (2025)
- [FAR-Dex: Few-shot Data Augmentation and Adaptive Residual Policy Refinement for Dexterous Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.10451/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Diffusion models have been verified to be effective in generating complex distributions from natural images to motion trajectories. Recent diffusion-based methods show impressive performance in 3D robotic manipulation tasks, whereas they suffer from severe runtime inefficiency due to multiple denoising steps, especially with high-dimensional observations. To this end, we propose a real-time robotic manipulation model named ManiCM that imposes the consistency constraint to the diffusion process, so that the model can generate robot actions in only one-step inference. Specifically, we formulate a consistent diffusion process in the robot action space conditioned on the point cloud input, where the original action is required to be directly denoised from any point along the ODE trajectory. To model this process, we design a consistency distillation technique to predict the action sample directly instead of predicting the noise within the vision community for fast convergence in the low-dimensional action manifold. We evaluate ManiCM on 31 robotic manipulation tasks from Adroit and Metaworld, and the results demonstrate that our approach accelerates the state-of-the-art method by 10 times in average inference speed while maintaining competitive average success rate.