# xTED: Cross-Domain Adaptation via Diffusion-Based Trajectory Editing

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.08687 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.08687/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 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 66 of its 78 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 Sep 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 66)

- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Soft Actor-Critic: Off-Policy Maximum Entropy Deep Reinforcement Learning with a Stochastic Actor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01290/) (2018)
- [Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04137/) (2023)
- [SDEdit: Guided Image Synthesis and Editing with Stochastic Differential Equations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.01073/) (2021)
- [Decision Transformer: Reinforcement Learning via Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01345/) (2021)
- [Domain Randomization for Transferring Deep Neural Networks from Simulation to the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06907/) (2017)
- [D4RL: Datasets for Deep Data-Driven Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07219/) (2020)
- [Offline Reinforcement Learning with Implicit Q-Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06169/) (2021)
- [Imagic: Text-Based Real Image Editing with Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09276/) (2022)
- [Planning with Diffusion for Flexible Behavior Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.09991/) (2022)
- [A Minimalist Approach to Offline Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06860/) (2021)
- [Sim-to-Real Transfer of Robotic Control with Dynamics Randomization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.06537/) (2017)
- [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)
- [Time-Contrastive Networks: Self-Supervised Learning from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.06888/) (2017)
- [Learning Interactive Real-World Simulators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06114/) (2023)
- [VIP: Towards Universal Visual Reward and Representation via Value-Implicit Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00030/) (2022)
- [Zero-Shot Robotic Manipulation with Pretrained Image-Editing Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10639/) (2023)
- [Diffusion Model-Based Image Editing: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.17525/) (2024)
- [LIV: Language-Image Representations and Rewards for Robotic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00958/) (2023)
- [Imitation from Observation: Learning to Imitate Behaviors from Raw Video via Context Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.03374/) (2017)
- [Video Language Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10625/) (2023)
- [Temporal Cycle-Consistency Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.07846/) (2019)
- [The Ingredients of Real-World Robotic Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12570/) (2020)
- [Diffusion Model is an Effective Planner and Data Synthesizer for Multi-Task Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18459/) (2023)
- [XIRL: Cross-embodiment Inverse Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03911/) (2021)
- [Third-Person Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.01703/) (2017)
- [Synthetic Experience Replay](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06614/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [X-VLA: Soft-Prompted Transformer as Scalable Cross-Embodiment Vision-Language-Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.10274/) (2025)
- [DmC: Nearest Neighbor Guidance Diffusion Model for Offline Cross-domain Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20499/) (2025)
- [SARM2: Multi-Task Stage Aware Reward Modeling for Self Improving Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.10305/) (2026)
- [DADP: Domain Adaptive Diffusion Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.04037/) (2026)
- [Cross-Domain Offline Policy Adaptation via Selective Transition Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05776/) (2026)
- [Bridging Dynamics Gaps via Diffusion Schr"odinger Bridge for Cross-Domain Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.23737/) (2026)
- [Bridging Domain Gaps with Target-Aligned Generation for Offline Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13054/) (2026)
- [Domain Adaptation with Adaptive Imagination for Visual Reinforcement Learning under Limited Target Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.30192/) (2026)
- [Optimizing H-Graph Hybridization for Diffusion-Guided RRT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.32897/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Reusing pre-collected data from different domains is an appealing solution for decision-making tasks, especially when data in the target domain are limited. Existing cross-domain policy transfer methods mostly aim at learning domain correspondences or corrections to facilitate policy learning, such as learning task/domain-specific discriminators, representations, or policies. This design philosophy often results in heavy model architectures or task/domain-specific modeling, lacking flexibility. This reality makes us wonder: can we directly bridge the domain gaps universally at the data level, instead of relying on complex downstream cross-domain policy transfer procedures? In this study, we propose the Cross-Domain Trajectory EDiting (xTED) framework that employs a specially designed diffusion model for cross-domain trajectory adaptation. Our proposed model architecture effectively captures the intricate dependencies among states, actions, and rewards, as well as the dynamics patterns within target data. Edited by adding noises and denoising with the pre-trained diffusion model, source domain trajectories can be transformed to align with target domain properties while preserving original semantic information. This process effectively corrects underlying domain gaps, enhancing state realism and dynamics reliability in source data, and allowing flexible integration with various single-domain and cross-domain downstream policy learning methods. Despite its simplicity, xTED demonstrates superior performance in extensive simulation and real-robot experiments.