# EMMA: Generalizing Real-World Robot Manipulation via Generative Visual Transfer

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22407 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.22407/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Human-video and latent-action pretraining, one of 13 directions in Vision-language-action models.
- Builds on 46 of its 61 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 26 Sep 2025.

## Placed in

- Vision-language-action models / [Human-video and latent-action pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/vla/human-video-and-latent-action-pretraining/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 46)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.12598/) (2022)
- [Adding Conditional Control to Text-to-Image Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.05543/) (2023)
- [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)
- [Stable Video Diffusion: Scaling Latent Video Diffusion Models to Large Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.15127/) (2023)
- [CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06072/) (2024)
- [π0.5: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.16054/) (2025)
- [HunyuanVideo: A Systematic Framework For Large Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03603/) (2024)
- [GR00T N1: An Open Foundation Model for Generalist Humanoid Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14734/) (2025)
- [Open-Sora: Democratizing Efficient Video Production for All](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.20404/) (2024)
- [CLIPort: What and Where Pathways for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12098/) (2021)
- [AgiBot World Colosseo: A Large-scale Manipulation Platform for Scalable and Intelligent Embodied Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06669/) (2025)
- [Video Depth Anything: Consistent Depth Estimation for Super-Long Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12375/) (2025)
- [DriveDreamer-2: LLM-Enhanced World Models for Diverse Driving Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06845/) (2024)
- [Scaling Robot Learning with Semantically Imagined Experience](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11550/) (2023)
- [Data Scaling Laws in Imitation Learning for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18647/) (2024)
- [GraspVLA: a Grasping Foundation Model Pre-trained on Billion-scale Synthetic Action Data](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03233/) (2025)
- [RoboTwin: Dual-Arm Robot Benchmark with Generative Digital Twins](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13059/) (2025)
- [DeeR-VLA: Dynamic Inference of Multimodal Large Language Models for Efficient Robot Execution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.02359/) (2024)
- [Cosmos-Transfer1: Conditional World Generation with Adaptive Multimodal Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.14492/) (2025)
- [VDT: General-purpose Video Diffusion Transformers via Mask Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.13311/) (2023)
- [OccLLaMA: An Occupancy-Language-Action Generative World Model for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.03272/) (2024)
- [GIM: Learning Generalizable Image Matcher From Internet Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11095/) (2024)
- [SafeVLA: Towards Safety Alignment of Vision-Language-Action Model via Constrained Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03480/) (2025)
- [CACTI: A Framework for Scalable Multi-Task Multi-Scene Visual Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.05711/) (2022)
- [RoboTwin: Dual-Arm Robot Benchmark with Generative Digital Twins (early version)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02920/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [GigaWorld-Policy: An Efficient Action-Centered World--Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.17240/) (2026)
- [GigaWorld-0: World Models as Data Engine to Empower Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19861/) (2025)
- [GigaBrain-0: A World Model-Powered Vision-Language-Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.19430/) (2025)
- [A Survey on Efficient Vision-Language-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.24795/) (2025)
- [SwiftVLA: Unlocking Spatiotemporal Dynamics for Lightweight VLA Models at Minimal Overhead](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00903/) (2025)
- [GigaBrain-0.5M*: a VLA That Learns From World Model-Based Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.12099/) (2026)
- [GigaWorld-1: A Roadmap to Build World Models for Robot Policy Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.02642/) (2026)
- [GigaWorld-Policy-0.5: A Faster and Stronger WAM Empowered by AutoResearch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.13960/) (2026)
- [Towards Interactive Video World Modeling: Frontiers, Challenges, Benchmarks, and Future Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.01164/) (2026)
- [Seeing Realism from Simulation: Efficient Video Transfer for Vision-Language-Action Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.02757/) (2026)
- [StreamEdit: Training-Free Video Editing via Few-Step Streaming Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.21466/) (2026)
- [From Where Things Are to What They Are For: Benchmarking Spatial-Functional Intelligence in Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.02130/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The generalization of vision-language-action (VLA) models heavily relies on diverse training data. However, acquiring large-scale data for robot manipulation across varied object appearances is costly and labor-intensive. To address this limitation, we introduce Embodied Manipulation Media Adaptation (EMMA), a framework for augmenting VLA policies that combines a generative data engine with an effective training pipeline. We introduce DreamTransfer, a diffusion Transformer-based architecture for generating multi-view consistent and geometrically grounded embodied manipulation videos. DreamTransfer enables visual editing of robot videos through prompts, allowing for changes to the foreground, background, and lighting while preserving their 3D structure and geometric validity. We also utilize a hybrid training set of real and generated data and propose AdaMix to enhance the training process. AdaMix is a training strategy that adaptively weights samples according to policy performance to emphasize challenging samples. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that videos created by DreamTransfer yield substantial improvements over previous video generation techniques in multi-view consistency, geometric accuracy, and text-conditioning precision. We conduct extensive evaluations with a total of more than 1800 trials in both simulated and real-world robotic environments. In real-world robotic tasks with zero-shot visual settings, our framework achieves a relative performance increase of over 92% compared to training with real data alone, and improves by an additional 17% with AdaMix, demonstrating its efficacy in enhancing policy generalization.