# Generalizable Humanoid Manipulation with 3D Diffusion Policies

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.10803 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10803/

## Key facts

- Cited by 54 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 30 of its 44 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Oct 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 30)

- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Learning Fine-Grained Bimanual Manipulation with Low-Cost Hardware](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13705/) (2023)
- [R3M: A Universal Visual Representation for Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12601/) (2022)
- [Mobile ALOHA: Learning Bimanual Mobile Manipulation with Low-Cost Whole-Body Teleoperation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02117/) (2024)
- [OmniH2O: Universal and Dexterous Human-to-Humanoid Whole-Body Teleoperation and Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.08858/) (2024)
- [Real-World Humanoid Locomotion with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03381/) (2023)
- [HumanPlus: Humanoid Shadowing and Imitation from Humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10454/) (2024)
- [DexCap: Scalable and Portable Mocap Data Collection System for Dexterous Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07788/) (2024)
- [AnyTeleop: A General Vision-Based Dexterous Robot Arm-Hand Teleoperation System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.04577/) (2023)
- [Open-TeleVision: Teleoperation with Immersive Active Visual Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01512/) (2024)
- [Expressive Whole-Body Control for Humanoid Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.16796/) (2024)
- [Learning Human-to-Humanoid Real-Time Whole-Body Teleoperation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04436/) (2024)
- [Humanoid Parkour Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10759/) (2024)
- [Bunny-VisionPro: Real-Time Bimanual Dexterous Teleoperation for Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03162/) (2024)
- [Learning Visuotactile Skills with Two Multifingered Hands](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16823/) (2024)
- [EquiBot: SIM(3)-Equivariant Diffusion Policy for Generalizable and Data Efficient Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01479/) (2024)
- [Humanoid Locomotion as Next Token Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.19469/) (2024)
- [Equivariant Diffusion Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01812/) (2024)
- [On Pre-Training for Visuo-Motor Control: Revisiting a Learning-from-Scratch Baseline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05749/) (2022)
- [Advancing Humanoid Locomotion: Mastering Challenging Terrains with Denoising World Model Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14472/) (2024)
- [Deep Imitation Learning for Humanoid Loco-manipulation through Human Teleoperation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01952/) (2023)
- [Robot Utility Models: General Policies for Zero-Shot Deployment in New Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.05865/) (2024)
- [Learning to Manipulate Anywhere: A Visual Generalizable Framework For Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15815/) (2024)
- [Twisting Lids Off with Two Hands](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.02338/) (2024)
- [RISE: 3D Perception Makes Real-World Robot Imitation Simple and Effective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12281/) (2024)
- [View-Invariant Policy Learning via Zero-Shot Novel View Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.03685/) (2024)
- [ACE: A Cross-Platform Visual-Exoskeletons System for Low-Cost Dexterous Teleoperation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11805/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 54)

- [TWIST: Teleoperated Whole-Body Imitation System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.02833/) (2025)
- [ResMimic: From General Motion Tracking to Humanoid Whole-body Loco-Manipulation via Residual Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05070/) (2025)
- [From Spatial to Actions: Grounding Vision-Language-Action Model in Spatial Foundation Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17439/) (2025)
- [VisualMimic: Visual Humanoid Loco-Manipulation via Motion Tracking and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.20322/) (2025)
- [OmniVGGT: Omni-Modality Driven Visual Geometry Grounded Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10560/) (2025)
- [StereoVLA: Enhancing Vision-Language-Action Models with Stereo Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.21970/) (2025)
- [A Survey of Robotic Navigation and Manipulation with Physics Simulators in the Era of Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.01458/) (2025)
- [H3DP: Triply-Hierarchical Diffusion Policy for Visuomotor Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.07819/) (2025)
- [HumanoidGen: Data Generation for Bimanual Dexterous Manipulation via LLM Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00833/) (2025)
- [Manipulation as in Simulation: Enabling Accurate Geometry Perception in Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02530/) (2025)
- [Humanoid Manipulation Interface: Humanoid Whole-Body Manipulation from Robot-Free Demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06643/) (2026)
- [UMI-on-Air: Embodiment-Aware Guidance for Embodiment-Agnostic Visuomotor Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.02614/) (2025)
- [OmniVLA: Physically-Grounded Multimodal VLA with Unified Multi-Sensor Perception for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01210/) (2025)
- [HEX: Humanoid-Aligned Experts for Cross-Embodiment Whole-Body Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.07993/) (2026)
- [SafeBimanual: Diffusion-based Trajectory Optimization for Safe Bimanual Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18268/) (2025)
- [Compose Your Policies! Improving Diffusion-based or Flow-based Robot Policies via Test-time Distribution-level Composition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.01068/) (2025)
- [Learning Human-Humanoid Coordination for Collaborative Object Carrying](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.14293/) (2025)
- [R2RGEN: Real-to-Real 3D Data Generation for Spatially Generalized Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08547/) (2025)
- [Humanoid Occupancy: Enabling A Generalized Multimodal Occupancy Perception System on Humanoid Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.20217/) (2025)
- [D2PPO: Diffusion Policy Policy Optimization with Dispersive Loss](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.02644/) (2025)
- [FieldGen: From Teleoperated Pre-Manipulation Trajectories to Field-Guided Data Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.20774/) (2025)
- [Coordinated Humanoid Manipulation with Choice Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.25072/) (2025)
- [From Flow to One Step: Real-Time Multi-Modal Trajectory Policies via Implicit Maximum Likelihood Estimation-based Distribution Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09415/) (2026)
- [UMIGen: A Unified Framework for Egocentric Point Cloud Generation and Cross-Embodiment Robotic Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.09302/) (2025)
- [FAR-Dex: Few-shot Data Augmentation and Adaptive Residual Policy Refinement for Dexterous Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.10451/) (2026)
- [PhysDrift: Bridging the Embodiment Gap in Humanoid Co-Speech Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.19935/) (2026)
- [Structured 4D Latent Predictive Model for Robot Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.01166/) (2026)
- [TrajBooster: Boosting Humanoid Whole-Body Manipulation via Trajectory-Centric Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.11839/) (2025)
- [A Review of Online Diffusion Policy RL Algorithms for Scalable Robotic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.06133/) (2026)
- [CoLA-Flow Policy: Temporally Coherent Imitation Learning via Continuous Latent Action Flow Matching for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.23087/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Humanoid robots capable of autonomous operation in diverse environments have long been a goal for roboticists. However, autonomous manipulation by humanoid robots has largely been restricted to one specific scene, primarily due to the difficulty of acquiring generalizable skills and the expensiveness of in-the-wild humanoid robot data. In this work, we build a real-world robotic system to address this challenging problem. Our system is mainly an integration of 1) a whole-upper-body robotic teleoperation system to acquire human-like robot data, 2) a 25-DoF humanoid robot platform with a height-adjustable cart and a 3D LiDAR sensor, and 3) an improved 3D Diffusion Policy learning algorithm for humanoid robots to learn from noisy human data. We run more than 2000 episodes of policy rollouts on the real robot for rigorous policy evaluation. Empowered by this system, we show that using only data collected in one single scene and with only onboard computing, a full-sized humanoid robot can autonomously perform skills in diverse real-world scenarios. Videos are available at https://humanoid-manipulation.github.io .