# 3D Dynamics-Aware Manipulation: Endowing Manipulation Policies with 3D Foresight

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.10028 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.10028/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Embodied and robot world models, one of 11 directions in World models.
- Builds on 30 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Feb 2025.

## Placed in

- World models / [Embodied and robot world models](https://mlsanity.com/wm/embodied-and-robot-world-models/)

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

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15818/) (2023)
- [OpenVLA: An Open-Source Vision-Language-Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09246/) (2024)
- [π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.24164/) (2024)
- [Learning Fine-Grained Bimanual Manipulation with Low-Cost Hardware](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13705/) (2023)
- [Ego4D: Around the World in 3,000 Hours of Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07058/) (2021)
- [Depth Anything V2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09414/) (2024)
- [LIBERO: Benchmarking Knowledge Transfer for Lifelong Robot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03310/) (2023)
- [Code as Policies: Language Model Programs for Embodied Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07753/) (2022)
- [Recurrent World Models Facilitate Policy Evolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.01999/) (2018)
- [BridgeData V2: A Dataset for Robot Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12952/) (2023)
- [CLIPort: What and Where Pathways for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12098/) (2021)
- [CALVIN: A Benchmark for Language-Conditioned Policy Learning for Long-Horizon Robot Manipulation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.03227/) (2021)
- [Depth Pro: Sharp Monocular Metric Depth in Less Than a Second](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02073/) (2024)
- [Unleashing Large-Scale Video Generative Pre-training for Visual Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13139/) (2023)
- [Video Prediction Policy: A Generalist Robot Policy with Predictive Visual Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.14803/) (2024)
- [3D Diffuser Actor: Policy Diffusion with 3D Scene Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10885/) (2024)
- [Any-point Trajectory Modeling for Policy Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.00025/) (2023)
- [Video Depth Anything: Consistent Depth Estimation for Super-Long Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12375/) (2025)
- [Predictive Inverse Dynamics Models are Scalable Learners for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15109/) (2024)
- [Gen2Act: Human Video Generation in Novel Scenarios enables Generalizable Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.16283/) (2024)
- [Flow as the Cross-Domain Manipulation Interface](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15208/) (2024)
- [UP-VLA: A Unified Understanding and Prediction Model for Embodied Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.18867/) (2025)
- [RoboTAP: Tracking Arbitrary Points for Few-Shot Visual Imitation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.15975/) (2023)
- [General Flow as Foundation Affordance for Scalable Robot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11439/) (2024)
- [MUTEX: Learning Unified Policies from Multimodal Task Specifications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.14320/) (2023)
- [DELTA: Dense Efficient Long-range 3D Tracking for any video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.24211/) (2024)
- [GR-MG: Leveraging Partially Annotated Data via Multi-Modal Goal-Conditioned Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14368/) (2024)
- [G3Flow: Generative 3D Semantic Flow for Pose-aware and Generalizable Object Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18369/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Towards Exploratory and Focused Manipulation with Bimanual Active Perception: A New Problem, Benchmark and Strategy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.01939/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The incorporation of world modeling into manipulation policy learning has pushed the boundary of manipulation performance. However, existing efforts simply model the 2D visual dynamics, which is insufficient for robust manipulation when target tasks involve prominent depth-wise movement. To address this, we present a 3D dynamics-aware manipulation framework that seamlessly integrates 3D world modeling and policy learning. Three self-supervised learning tasks (current depth estimation, future RGB-D prediction, 3D flow prediction) are introduced within our framework, which complement each other and endow the policy model with 3D foresight. Extensive experiments on simulation and the real world show that 3D foresight can greatly boost the performance of manipulation policies without sacrificing inference speed. Code is available at https://github.com/Stardust-hyx/3D-Foresight.
