# Robotic Manipulation by Imitating Generated Videos Without Physical Demonstrations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.00990 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00990/

## Key facts

- Cited by 38 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 113 of its 142 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Jul 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 113)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [3D Gaussian Splatting for Real-Time Radiance Field Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.04079/) (2023)
- [Grounding DINO: Marrying DINO with Grounded Pre-Training for Open-Set Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.05499/) (2023)
- [Learning Fine-Grained Bimanual Manipulation with Low-Cost Hardware](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13705/) (2023)
- [Open X-Embodiment: Robotic Learning Datasets and RT-X Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08864/) (2023)
- [VoxPoser: Composable 3D Value Maps for Robotic Manipulation with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05973/) (2023)
- [MotionGPT: Human Motion as a Foreign Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14795/) (2023)
- [Learning Universal Policies via Text-Guided Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00111/) (2023)
- [InternVid: A Large-scale Video-Text Dataset for Multimodal Understanding and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06942/) (2023)
- [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)
- [FoundationPose: Unified 6D Pose Estimation and Tracking of Novel Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08344/) (2023)
- [Video PreTraining (VPT): Learning to Act by Watching Unlabeled Online Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.11795/) (2022)
- [GMFlow: Learning Optical Flow via Global Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.13680/) (2021)
- [Latent Action Pretraining from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11758/) (2024)
- [ReKep: Spatio-Temporal Reasoning of Relational Keypoint Constraints for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.01652/) (2024)
- [CosyPose: Consistent multi-view multi-object 6D pose estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.08465/) (2020)
- [Deep Object Pose Estimation for Semantic Robotic Grasping of Household Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.10790/) (2018)
- [One-Shot Visual Imitation Learning via Meta-Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.04905/) (2017)
- [VideoPhy: Evaluating Physical Commonsense for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.03520/) (2024)
- [Affordances from Human Videos as a Versatile Representation for Robotics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08488/) (2023)
- [MimicPlay: Long-Horizon Imitation Learning by Watching Human Play](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12422/) (2023)
- [Pix2Pose: Pixel-Wise Coordinate Regression of Objects for 6D Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07433/) (2019)
- [Perpetual Humanoid Control for Real-time Simulated Avatars](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06456/) (2023)
- [AnyGrasp: Robust and Efficient Grasp Perception in Spatial and Temporal Domains](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08333/) (2022)
- [DexMV: Imitation Learning for Dexterous Manipulation from Human Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05877/) (2021)
- [RoboTurk: A Crowdsourcing Platform for Robotic Skill Learning through Imitation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.02790/) (2018)
- [PVN3D: A Deep Point-wise 3D Keypoints Voting Network for 6DoF Pose Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.04231/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [PointWorld: Scaling 3D World Models for In-The-Wild Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03782/) (2026)
- [Large VLM-based Vision-Language-Action Models for Robotic Manipulation: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13073/) (2025)
- [World Action Models: The Next Frontier in Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12090/) (2026)
- [NovaFlow: Zero-Shot Manipulation via Actionable Flow from Generated Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.08568/) (2025)
- [Interactive World Simulator for Robot Policy Training and Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.08546/) (2026)
- [LLM-as-a-Verifier: A General-Purpose Verification Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.05391/) (2026)
- [ViPRA: Video Prediction for Robot Actions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.07732/) (2025)
- [Dream2Flow: Bridging Video Generation and Open-World Manipulation with 3D Object Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.24766/) (2025)
- [Robot Learning from a Physical World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.07416/) (2025)
- [PlayWorld: Learning Robot World Models from Autonomous Play](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.09030/) (2026)
- [HumanEgo: Zero-Shot Robot Learning from Minutes of Human Egocentric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.24934/) (2026)
- [SimToolReal: An Object-Centric Policy for Zero-Shot Dexterous Tool Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.16863/) (2026)
- [Dex4D: Task-Agnostic Point Track Policy for Zero-Shot Dexterous Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.15828/) (2026)
- [World Action Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.20781/) (2026)
- [Dexterous Manipulation Policies from RGB Human Videos via 3D Hand-Object Trajectory Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.09013/) (2026)
- [What Happens Next? Anticipating Future Motion by Generating Point Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21592/) (2025)
- [NovaPlan: Zero-Shot Long-Horizon Manipulation via Closed-Loop Video Language Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.20119/) (2026)
- [Video Generation Models as World Models: Efficient Paradigms, Architectures and Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.28489/) (2026)
- [Robot Learning from Human Videos: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.27621/) (2026)
- [Vesta: A Generalist Embodied Reasoning Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.20905/) (2026)
- [From World Models to World Action Models: A Concise Tutorial for Robotics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.00836/) (2026)
- [Imagine2Real: Towards Zero-shot Humanoid-Object Interaction via Video Generative Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.22272/) (2026)
- [GenVid2Robot: From Video Generation to Robot Manipulation via Rigid-Geometric Consistency](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.09191/) (2026)
- [Learning Physics-Guided Residual Dynamics for Deformable Object Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.13451/) (2026)
- [Unified Visuomotor Targets: Supervising VLAs Beyond Physical Actions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.03563/) (2026)
- [AnchorD: Metric Grounding of Monocular Depth Using Factor Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.02667/) (2026)
- [CRAFT: A Tendon-Driven Hand with Hybrid Hard-Soft Compliance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12120/) (2026)
- [LAMP: Lift Image-Editing as General 3D Priors for Open-world Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.08475/) (2026)
- [Prompt-to-Gesture: Measuring the Capabilities of Image-to-Video Deictic Gesture Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.14953/) (2026)
- [Deform360: A Massive Multi-view Visuotactile Dataset for Deformable World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.05390/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

This work introduces Robots Imitating Generated Videos (RIGVid), a system that enables robots to perform complex manipulation tasks--such as pouring, wiping, and mixing--purely by imitating AI-generated videos, without requiring any physical demonstrations or robot-specific training. Given a language command and an initial scene image, a video diffusion model generates potential demonstration videos, and a vision-language model (VLM) automatically filters out results that do not follow the command. A 6D pose tracker then extracts object trajectories from the video, and the trajectories are retargeted to the robot in an embodiment-agnostic fashion. Through extensive real-world evaluations, we show that filtered generated videos are as effective as real demonstrations, and that performance improves with generation quality. We also show that relying on generated videos outperforms more compact alternatives such as keypoint prediction using VLMs, and that strong 6D pose tracking outperforms other ways to extract trajectories, such as dense feature point tracking. These findings suggest that videos produced by a state-of-the-art off-the-shelf model can offer an effective source of supervision for robotic manipulation.