mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Masked Generative Policy for Robotic Control

arXiv 2512.09101 ↗First posted 9 Dec 2025cs.RO cs.AIcited by 2

On the map: Offline RL and imitation learning from data → Robot manipulation imitation learning

Abstract (arXiv)

We present Masked Generative Policy (MGP), a novel framework for visuomotor imitation learning. We represent actions as discrete tokens, and train a conditional masked transformer that generates tokens in parallel and then rapidly refines only low-confidence tokens. We further propose two new sampling paradigms: MGP-Short, which performs parallel masked generation with score-based refinement for Markovian tasks, and MGP-Long, which predicts full trajectories in a single pass and dynamically refines low-confidence action tokens based on new observations. With globally coherent prediction and robust adaptive execution capabilities, MGP-Long enables reliable control on complex and non-Markovian tasks that prior methods struggle with. Extensive evaluations on 150 robotic manipulation tasks spanning the Meta-World and LIBERO benchmarks show that MGP achieves both rapid inference and superior success rates compared to state-of-the-art diffusion and autoregressive policies. Specifically, MGP increases the average success rate by 9% across 150 tasks while cutting per-sequence inference time by up to 35x. It further improves the average success rate by 60% in dynamic and missing-observation environments, and solves two non-Markovian scenarios where other state-of-the-art methods fail.

Key facts. Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Robot manipulation imitation learning, one of 13 directions in Offline RL and imitation learning from data. Builds on 37 of its 46 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 9 Dec 2025.

Builds on

37 of 46 references.

Closest ancestors · 5

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2024FlowPolicy: Enabling Fast and Robust 3D Flow-based Policy via Consistency Flow Matching for Robot Manipulation6 Dec
  2. 2023Learning Fine-Grained Bimanual Manipulation with Low-Cost Hardware23 Apr
  3. 2022Behavior Transformers: Cloning k modes with one stone22 Jun
  4. 2020Deep Imitation Learning for Bimanual Robotic Manipulation11 Oct
  5. 2019Self-Supervised Correspondence in Visuomotor Policy Learning16 Sep

Other references · 32

  1. 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 20,851
  2. 2021Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learnerscited by 7,339
  3. 2017Neural Discrete Representation Learningcited by 4,650
  4. 2023Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusioncited by 2,730
  5. 2021BEiT: BERT Pre-Training of Image Transformerscited by 2,360
  6. 2022RT-1: Robotics Transformer for Real-World Control at Scalecited by 2,007
  7. 2016Generative Adversarial Imitation Learningcited by 1,576
  8. 2016Context Encoders: Feature Learning by Inpaintingcited by 1,424
  9. 2023LIBERO: Benchmarking Knowledge Transfer for Lifelong Robot Learningcited by 1,338
  10. 2019Meta-World: A Benchmark and Evaluation for Multi-Task and Meta Reinforcement Learningcited by 1,168
  11. 2022MaskGIT: Masked Generative Image Transformercited by 1,082
  12. 2022Planning with Diffusion for Flexible Behavior Synthesiscited by 1,023
20 more
  1. 2023Muse: Text-To-Image Generation via Masked Generative Transformerscited by 640
  2. 2018Behavioral Cloning from Observationcited by 482
  3. 2021Implicit Behavioral Cloningcited by 442
  4. 2023MoMask: Generative Masked Modeling of 3D Human Motionscited by 388
  5. 20243D Diffuser Actor: Policy Diffusion with 3D Scene Representationscited by 278
  6. 2023StyleDrop: Text-to-Image Generation in Any Stylecited by 197
  7. 2022Masked World Models for Visual Controlcited by 169
  8. 2024Behavior Generation with Latent Actionscited by 159
  9. 2024Consistency Policy: Accelerated Visuomotor Policies via Consistency Distillationcited by 159
  10. 2023A Survey of Imitation Learning: Algorithms, Recent Developments, and Challengescited by 145
  11. 2023Q-Transformer: Scalable Offline Reinforcement Learning via Autoregressive Q-Functionscited by 129
  12. 2023MMM: Generative Masked Motion Modelcited by 129
  13. 2018Variational Discriminator Bottleneck: Improving Imitation Learning, Inverse RL, and GANs by Constraining Information Flowcited by 103
  14. 2022From Play to Policy: Conditional Behavior Generation from Uncurated Robot Datacited by 103
  15. 2017Deeply AggreVaTeD: Differentiable Imitation Learning for Sequential Predictioncited by 93
  16. 2021A Review of the Gumbel-max Trick and its Extensions for Discrete Stochasticity in Machine Learningcited by 82
  17. 2023SafeDiffuser: Safe Planning with Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 69
  18. 2024QueST: Self-Supervised Skill Abstractions for Learning Continuous Controlcited by 51
  19. 2024Chain-of-Action: Faithful and Multimodal Question Answering through Large Language Modelscited by 27
  20. 2024Autoregressive Action Sequence Learning for Robotic Manipulationcited by 26

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 2.

2 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026Generative Control as Optimization: Time Unconditional Flow Matching for Adaptive and Robust Robotic Control
  2. 2026Where Should Action Generation Begin? A Learnable Source Prior for Generative Robot Policies
  3. 2026One-Step Flow Policy: Self-Distillation for Fast Visuomotor Policies
  4. 2025DemoSpeedup: Accelerating Visuomotor Policies via Entropy-Guided Demonstration Acceleration
  5. 2024Dreamitate: Real-World Visuomotor Policy Learning via Video Generation
  6. 2026HybridFlow: A 2-NFE Generative Policy for Real-Time Robotic Manipulation
  7. 2026Primary-Fine Decoupling for Action Generation in Robotic Imitation
  8. 2024How Generalizable Is My Behavior Cloning Policy? A Statistical Approach to Trustworthy Performance Evaluation