Sample from What You See: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Diffusion Bridge with Observation-Embedded Stochastic Differential Equation
On the map: Diffusion models → Diffusion and flow policies for robotics
Abstract (arXiv)
Imitation learning with diffusion models has advanced robotic control by capturing the multi-modal action distributions. However, existing methods typically treat observations only as high-level conditions to the denoising network, rather than integrating them into the stochastic dynamics of the diffusion process itself. As a result, the sampling is forced to begin from random noise, weakening the coupling between perception and control and often yielding suboptimal performance. We propose BridgePolicy, a generative visuomotor policy that directly integrates observations into the stochastic dynamics via a diffusion-bridge formulation. By constructing an observation-informed trajectory, BridgePolicy enables sampling to start from a rich and informative prior rather than random noise, substantially improving precision and reliability in control. A key difficulty is that diffusion bridge normally connects distributions of matched dimensionality, while robotic observations are heterogeneous and not naturally aligned with actions. To overcome this, we introduce a semantic aligner to unify the visual and state inputs and align the observations with action representations, making diffusion bridge applicable to heterogeneous robot data. Extensive experiments across 52 simulation tasks on three benchmarks and 5 real-world tasks demonstrate that BridgePolicy consistently outperforms state-of-the-art generative policies. Our code is available at https://jianghcsr.github.io/BridgePolicy_page/.
Key facts. Cited by 3 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 54 of its 60 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 8 Dec 2025.
Builds on
54 of 60 references.
Closest ancestors · 11
Same direction, newest first
- 2025VITA: Vision-to-Action Flow Matching Policy17 Jul
- 2025GenPO: Generative Diffusion Models Meet On-Policy Reinforcement Learning24 May
- 2024FlowPolicy: Enabling Fast and Robust 3D Flow-based Policy via Consistency Flow Matching for Robot Manipulation6 Dec
- 2024AffordDP: Generalizable Diffusion Policy with Transferable Affordance4 Dec
- 2024Diffusion-based Reinforcement Learning via Q-weighted Variational Policy Optimization25 May
- 2024Consistency Policy: Accelerated Visuomotor Policies via Consistency Distillation13 May
- 2024Don't Start from Scratch: Behavioral Refinement via Interpolant-based Policy Diffusion25 Feb
- 2023EDMP: Ensemble-of-costs-guided Diffusion for Motion Planning20 Sep
- 2023Goal-Conditioned Imitation Learning using Score-based Diffusion Policies5 Apr
- 2023Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusion7 Mar
- 2023Imitating Human Behaviour with Diffusion Models25 Jan
Other references · 43
- 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,744
- 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 21,076
- 2021High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Modelscited by 18,863
- 2017Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithmscited by 15,215
- 2020Denoising Diffusion Implicit Modelscited by 9,781
- 2020Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equationscited by 9,122
- 2021Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesiscited by 8,255
- 2022Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidancecited by 5,847
- 2022Flow Matching for Generative Modelingcited by 5,702
- 2016PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentationcited by 5,248
- 2022Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flowcited by 3,700
- 2022DPM-Solver: A Fast ODE Solver for Diffusion Probabilistic Model Sampling in Around 10 Stepscited by 1,979
31 more
- 2019Meta-World: A Benchmark and Evaluation for Multi-Task and Meta Reinforcement Learningcited by 1,204
- 2022Planning with Diffusion for Flexible Behavior Synthesiscited by 1,061
- 2023Stochastic Interpolants: A Unifying Framework for Flows and Diffusionscited by 939
- 2022DPM-Solver++: Fast Solver for Guided Sampling of Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 938
- 2017Learning Complex Dexterous Manipulation with Deep Reinforcement Learning and Demonstrationscited by 715
- 2021Diffusion Schr"odinger Bridge with Applications to Score-Based Generative Modelingcited by 602
- 2018An Algorithmic Perspective on Imitation Learningcited by 459
- 2024Mobile ALOHA: Learning Bimanual Mobile Manipulation with Low-Cost Whole-Body Teleoperationcited by 391
- 2024Flow Matching Guide and Codecited by 301
- 2020Learning Agile Robotic Locomotion Skills by Imitating Animalscited by 251
- 2022BBDM: Image-to-image Translation with Brownian Bridge Diffusion Modelscited by 225
- 2021Likelihood Training of Schr"odinger Bridge using Forward-Backward SDEs Theorycited by 219
- 2023I2SB: Image-to-Image Schr"odinger Bridgecited by 218
- 2023GELLO: A General, Low-Cost, and Intuitive Teleoperation Framework for Robot Manipulatorscited by 189
- 2023Image Restoration with Mean-Reverting Stochastic Differential Equationscited by 183
- 2023Denoising Diffusion Bridge Modelscited by 178
- 2023On Bringing Robots Homecited by 101
- 2023GNFactor: Multi-Task Real Robot Learning with Generalizable Neural Feature Fieldscited by 99
- 2021CAT: Cross Attention in Vision Transformercited by 92
- 2025Align Your Flow: Scaling Continuous-Time Flow Map Distillationcited by 87
- 2023DexArt: Benchmarking Generalizable Dexterous Manipulation with Articulated Objectscited by 66
- 2023Deep Imitation Learning for Humanoid Loco-manipulation through Human Teleoperationcited by 54
- 2022VRL3: A Data-Driven Framework for Visual Deep Reinforcement Learningcited by 52
- 2024AdaFlow: Imitation Learning with Variance-Adaptive Flow-Based Policiescited by 50
- 2022Visual Reinforcement Learning with Self-Supervised 3D Representationscited by 45
- 2023Image Restoration Through Generalized Ornstein-Uhlenbeck Bridgecited by 41
- 2025UniDB: A Unified Diffusion Bridge Framework via Stochastic Optimal Controlcited by 20
- 2023Memory-Consistent Neural Networks for Imitation Learningcited by 14
- 2024Implicit Image-to-Image Schrodinger Bridge for Image Restorationcited by 14
- 2023Robust Visual Imitation Learning with Inverse Dynamics Representationscited by 8
- 2025Diffusion-based learning framework for Constrained Nonconvex Optimization with Weighted Bootstrapped Refinementcited by 1
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2026: 3.
3 papers.
- 2026Where Should Action Generation Begin? A Learnable Source Prior for Generative Robot Policiescited by 2
- 2026The Gaussian Is Enough: Flow-Matching Priors Do Not Help When Fine-Tuning Large Behavior Modelscited by 0
- 2026CFG-Policy: Unified Diffusion Policy Learning Framework via Classifier-free Guidancecited by 0
- 2026CFG-Policy: Unified Diffusion Policy Learning Framework via Classifier-free Guidance10 Oct 2026
- 2026The Gaussian Is Enough: Flow-Matching Priors Do Not Help When Fine-Tuning Large Behavior Models22 Sep 2026
- 2026Where Should Action Generation Begin? A Learnable Source Prior for Generative Robot Policies16 Jun 2026
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- 2026STEP: Warm-Started Visuomotor Policies with Spatiotemporal Consistency Prediction
- 2024Streaming Diffusion Policy: Fast Policy Synthesis with Variable Noise Diffusion Models
- 2026Latent Diffusion Policy: Shaping Latent Spaces for Diffusion-Based Robotic Manipulation
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