mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Sample from What You See: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Diffusion Bridge with Observation-Embedded Stochastic Differential Equation

arXiv 2512.07212 ↗First posted 8 Dec 2025cs.AI cs.LGcited by 3

On the map: Diffusion models → Diffusion and flow policies for robotics

also in 1 more
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

  1. 2025VITA: Vision-to-Action Flow Matching Policy17 Jul
  2. 2025GenPO: Generative Diffusion Models Meet On-Policy Reinforcement Learning24 May
  3. 2024FlowPolicy: Enabling Fast and Robust 3D Flow-based Policy via Consistency Flow Matching for Robot Manipulation6 Dec
  4. 2024AffordDP: Generalizable Diffusion Policy with Transferable Affordance4 Dec
  5. 2024Diffusion-based Reinforcement Learning via Q-weighted Variational Policy Optimization25 May
  6. 2024Consistency Policy: Accelerated Visuomotor Policies via Consistency Distillation13 May
  7. 2024Don't Start from Scratch: Behavioral Refinement via Interpolant-based Policy Diffusion25 Feb
  8. 2023EDMP: Ensemble-of-costs-guided Diffusion for Motion Planning20 Sep
  9. 2023Goal-Conditioned Imitation Learning using Score-based Diffusion Policies5 Apr
  10. 2023Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusion7 Mar
  11. 2023Imitating Human Behaviour with Diffusion Models25 Jan

Other references · 43

  1. 2021Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervisioncited by 33,744
  2. 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 21,076
  3. 2021High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Modelscited by 18,863
  4. 2017Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithmscited by 15,215
  5. 2020Denoising Diffusion Implicit Modelscited by 9,781
  6. 2020Score-Based Generative Modeling through Stochastic Differential Equationscited by 9,122
  7. 2021Diffusion Models Beat GANs on Image Synthesiscited by 8,255
  8. 2022Classifier-Free Diffusion Guidancecited by 5,847
  9. 2022Flow Matching for Generative Modelingcited by 5,702
  10. 2016PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentationcited by 5,248
  11. 2022Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flowcited by 3,700
  12. 2022DPM-Solver: A Fast ODE Solver for Diffusion Probabilistic Model Sampling in Around 10 Stepscited by 1,979
31 more
  1. 2019Meta-World: A Benchmark and Evaluation for Multi-Task and Meta Reinforcement Learningcited by 1,204
  2. 2022Planning with Diffusion for Flexible Behavior Synthesiscited by 1,061
  3. 2023Stochastic Interpolants: A Unifying Framework for Flows and Diffusionscited by 939
  4. 2022DPM-Solver++: Fast Solver for Guided Sampling of Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 938
  5. 2017Learning Complex Dexterous Manipulation with Deep Reinforcement Learning and Demonstrationscited by 715
  6. 2021Diffusion Schr"odinger Bridge with Applications to Score-Based Generative Modelingcited by 602
  7. 2018An Algorithmic Perspective on Imitation Learningcited by 459
  8. 2024Mobile ALOHA: Learning Bimanual Mobile Manipulation with Low-Cost Whole-Body Teleoperationcited by 391
  9. 2024Flow Matching Guide and Codecited by 301
  10. 2020Learning Agile Robotic Locomotion Skills by Imitating Animalscited by 251
  11. 2022BBDM: Image-to-image Translation with Brownian Bridge Diffusion Modelscited by 225
  12. 2021Likelihood Training of Schr"odinger Bridge using Forward-Backward SDEs Theorycited by 219
  13. 2023I2SB: Image-to-Image Schr"odinger Bridgecited by 218
  14. 2023GELLO: A General, Low-Cost, and Intuitive Teleoperation Framework for Robot Manipulatorscited by 189
  15. 2023Image Restoration with Mean-Reverting Stochastic Differential Equationscited by 183
  16. 2023Denoising Diffusion Bridge Modelscited by 178
  17. 2023On Bringing Robots Homecited by 101
  18. 2023GNFactor: Multi-Task Real Robot Learning with Generalizable Neural Feature Fieldscited by 99
  19. 2021CAT: Cross Attention in Vision Transformercited by 92
  20. 2025Align Your Flow: Scaling Continuous-Time Flow Map Distillationcited by 87
  21. 2023DexArt: Benchmarking Generalizable Dexterous Manipulation with Articulated Objectscited by 66
  22. 2023Deep Imitation Learning for Humanoid Loco-manipulation through Human Teleoperationcited by 54
  23. 2022VRL3: A Data-Driven Framework for Visual Deep Reinforcement Learningcited by 52
  24. 2024AdaFlow: Imitation Learning with Variance-Adaptive Flow-Based Policiescited by 50
  25. 2022Visual Reinforcement Learning with Self-Supervised 3D Representationscited by 45
  26. 2023Image Restoration Through Generalized Ornstein-Uhlenbeck Bridgecited by 41
  27. 2025UniDB: A Unified Diffusion Bridge Framework via Stochastic Optimal Controlcited by 20
  28. 2023Memory-Consistent Neural Networks for Imitation Learningcited by 14
  29. 2024Implicit Image-to-Image Schrodinger Bridge for Image Restorationcited by 14
  30. 2023Robust Visual Imitation Learning with Inverse Dynamics Representationscited by 8
  31. 2025Diffusion-based learning framework for Constrained Nonconvex Optimization with Weighted Bootstrapped Refinementcited by 1

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 3.

3 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2023Crossway Diffusion: Improving Diffusion-based Visuomotor Policy via Self-supervised Learning
  2. 2025Prior Does Matter: Visual Navigation via Denoising Diffusion Bridge Models
  3. 2024One-Step Diffusion Policy: Fast Visuomotor Policies via Diffusion Distillation
  4. 2026STEP: Warm-Started Visuomotor Policies with Spatiotemporal Consistency Prediction
  5. 2024Streaming Diffusion Policy: Fast Policy Synthesis with Variable Noise Diffusion Models
  6. 2026Latent Diffusion Policy: Shaping Latent Spaces for Diffusion-Based Robotic Manipulation
  7. 2025CDP: Towards Robust Autoregressive Visuomotor Policy Learning via Causal Diffusion
  8. 2025Latent Diffusion Planning for Imitation Learning