# ManipDreamer: Boosting Robotic Manipulation World Model with Action Tree and Visual Guidance

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.16464 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16464/

## Key facts

- Cited by 11 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 49 of its 63 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Apr 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 49)

- [The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Deep Features as a Perceptual Metric](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.03924/) (2018)
- [DINOv2: Learning Robust Visual Features without Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.07193/) (2023)
- [SAM 2: Segment Anything in Images and Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00714/) (2024)
- [Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20314/) (2025)
- [Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.03458/) (2022)
- [RT-1: Robotics Transformer for Real-World Control at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06817/) (2022)
- [Make-A-Video: Text-to-Video Generation without Text-Video Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.14792/) (2022)
- [Depth Anything V2](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.09414/) (2024)
- [Towards Accurate Generative Models of Video: A New Metric & Challenges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.01717/) (2018)
- [CogVideo: Large-scale Pretraining for Text-to-Video Generation via Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.15868/) (2022)
- [Cosmos World Foundation Model Platform for Physical AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.03575/) (2025)
- [RLBench: The Robot Learning Benchmark & Learning Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12271/) (2019)
- [Animate Anyone: Consistent and Controllable Image-to-Video Synthesis for Character Animation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17117/) (2023)
- [MotionCtrl: A Unified and Flexible Motion Controller for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03641/) (2023)
- [DynamiCrafter: Animating Open-domain Images with Video Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.12190/) (2023)
- [I2VGen-XL: High-Quality Image-to-Video Synthesis via Cascaded Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04145/) (2023)
- [Vista: A Generalizable Driving World Model with High Fidelity and Versatile Controllability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.17398/) (2024)
- [RoboDreamer: Learning Compositional World Models for Robot Imagination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12377/) (2024)
- [RoboAgent: Generalization and Efficiency in Robot Manipulation via Semantic Augmentations and Action Chunking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01918/) (2023)
- [Learning to Act from Actionless Videos through Dense Correspondences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08576/) (2023)
- [Open-Sora 2.0: Training a Commercial-Level Video Generation Model in 200k](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.09642/) (2025)
- [Video Generation From Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.00421/) (2017)
- [Make-Your-Video: Customized Video Generation Using Textual and Structural Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00943/) (2023)
- [DriveDreamer4D: World Models Are Effective Data Machines for 4D Driving Scene Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13571/) (2024)
- [ManiGaussian: Dynamic Gaussian Splatting for Multi-task Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.08321/) (2024)
- [UniScene: Unified Occupancy-centric Driving Scene Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05435/) (2024)
- [textitS3Gaussian: Self-Supervised Street Gaussians for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.20323/) (2024)
- [Instruction-driven history-aware policies for robotic manipulations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.04899/) (2022)
- [Animate-A-Story: Storytelling with Retrieval-Augmented Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06940/) (2023)
- [ReconDreamer: Crafting World Models for Driving Scene Reconstruction via Online Restoration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19548/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [A Comprehensive Survey on World Models for Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.16732/) (2025)
- [World Model for Robot Learning: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.00080/) (2026)
- [OA-WAM: Object-Addressable World Action Model for Robust Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.06481/) (2026)
- [A Step Toward World Models: A Survey on Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.02097/) (2025)
- [MinD: Learning A Dual-System World Model for Real-Time Planning and Implicit Risk Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18897/) (2025)
- [Wow, wo, val! A Comprehensive Embodied World Model Evaluation Turing Test](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04137/) (2026)
- [ManipDreamer3D : Synthesizing Plausible Robotic Manipulation Video with Occupancy-aware 3D Trajectory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.05314/) (2025)
- [ParkGaussian: Surround-view 3D Gaussian Splatting for Autonomous Parking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.01386/) (2026)
- [GraspFoM: Towards Reconstruction-Driven Robotic Grasping with 3D Foundation Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.08440/) (2026)
- [XPACE: Joint World and Action Modeling from Heterogeneous Experience](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.17372/) (2026)
- [Toward Unified Robot Learning: Bridging Representation, Vision-Language-Action, and World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.03927/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

While recent advancements in robotic manipulation video synthesis have shown promise, significant challenges persist in ensuring effective instruction-following and achieving high visual quality. Recent methods, like RoboDreamer, utilize linguistic decomposition to divide instructions into separate lower-level primitives, conditioning the world model on these primitives to achieve compositional instruction-following. However, these separate primitives do not consider the relationships that exist between them. Furthermore, recent methods neglect valuable visual guidance, including depth and semantic guidance, both crucial for enhancing visual quality. This paper introduces ManipDreamer, an advanced world model based on the action tree and visual guidance. To better learn the relationships between instruction primitives, we represent the instruction as the action tree and assign embeddings to tree nodes, each instruction can acquire its embeddings by navigating through the action tree. The instruction embeddings can be used to guide the world model. To enhance visual quality, we combine depth and semantic guidance by introducing a visual guidance adapter compatible with the world model. This visual adapter enhances both the temporal and physical consistency of video generation. Based on the action tree and visual guidance, ManipDreamer significantly boosts the instruction-following ability and visual quality. Comprehensive evaluations on robotic manipulation benchmarks reveal that ManipDreamer achieves large improvements in video quality metrics in both seen and unseen tasks, with PSNR improved from 19.55 to 21.05, SSIM improved from 0.7474 to 0.7982 and reduced Flow Error from 3.506 to 3.201 in unseen tasks, compared to the recent RoboDreamer model. Additionally, our method increases the success rate of robotic manipulation tasks by 2.5% in 6 RLbench tasks on average.