mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

SpatialVAM:Spatial-Aware Multi-View Video Diffusion as a Data-Efficient Robot Policy

arXiv 2604.03181 ↗First posted 3 Apr 2026cs.RO cs.CVcited by 8

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

Abstract (arXiv)

Robotic manipulation requires understanding both the 3D spatial structure of the environment and its temporal evolution, yet most existing policies neglect one or both aspects. They often rely on 2D visual observations or backbones pretrained on static image--text pairs, which leads to high data requirements and limited comprehension of environment dynamics. To address this, we introduce SpatialVAM, the first 3D Video Action Model that simultaneously predict spatial-aware multi-view heatmap videos and RGB videos. Our key insight is that this design naturally injects 3D information into video foundation models while aligning the representation format between video pretraining and action finetuning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SpatialVAM enables data-efficient, robust, generalizable, and interpretable manipulation. With only ten demonstration trajectories and no additional pretraining, SpatialVAM handles challenging long-horizon and contact-rich tasks, generalizes to out-of-distribution settings, and predicts realistic future videos. Evaluations on Meta-World (22%uparrow), RoboCasa (15%uparrow) and real-world robotic platforms (16%uparrow) show that SpatialVAM consistently outperforms other video action models, vision language action models and 3D-based policies, establishing a new state-of-the-art in data-efficient multi-task manipulation.

Key facts. Cited by 8 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 52 of its 60 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 3 Apr 2026.

Builds on

52 of 60 references.

Closest ancestors · 8

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026DiT4DiT: Jointly Modeling Video Dynamics and Actions for Generalizable Robot Control11 Mar
  2. 2026World Action Models are Zero-shot Policies17 Feb
  3. 2026Cosmos Policy: Fine-Tuning Video Models for Visuomotor Control and Planning22 Jan
  4. 2025CoVAR: Co-generation of Video and Action for Robotic Manipulation via Multi-Modal Diffusion17 Dec
  5. 2025RoboEnvision: A Long-Horizon Video Generation Model for Multi-Task Robot Manipulation27 Jun
  6. 2024Prediction with Action: Visual Policy Learning via Joint Denoising Process27 Nov
  7. 20243D Diffuser Actor: Policy Diffusion with 3D Scene Representations16 Feb
  8. 2023Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusion7 Mar

Other references · 44

  1. 2023Visual Instruction Tuningcited by 7,869
  2. 2022Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformerscited by 6,054
  3. 2022Flow Matching for Generative Modelingcited by 5,702
  4. 2025Qwen2.5-VL Technical Reportcited by 5,587
  5. 2024Qwen2-VL: Enhancing Vision-Language Model's Perception of the World at Any Resolutioncited by 4,234
  6. 2025Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Modelscited by 2,708
  7. 2024π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Controlcited by 2,407
  8. 2024CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformercited by 2,261
  9. 2025π0.5: a Vision-Language-Action Model with Open-World Generalizationcited by 1,761
  10. 2019Meta-World: A Benchmark and Evaluation for Multi-Task and Meta Reinforcement Learningcited by 1,204
  11. 2024PaliGemma: A versatile 3B VLM for transfercited by 696
  12. 2022R3M: A Universal Visual Representation for Robot Manipulationcited by 694
32 more
  1. 2025FAST: Efficient Action Tokenization for Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 665
  2. 2023Learning Universal Policies via Text-Guided Video Generationcited by 522
  3. 2025SpatialVLA: Exploring Spatial Representations for Visual-Language-Action Modelcited by 519
  4. 2024RoboCasa: Large-Scale Simulation of Everyday Tasks for Generalist Robotscited by 407
  5. 2023Unleashing Large-Scale Video Generative Pre-training for Visual Robot Manipulationcited by 364
  6. 2026Fast-WAM: Do World Action Models Need Test-time Future Imagination?cited by 349
  7. 2026Causal World Modeling for Robot Controlcited by 321
  8. 2025π*0.6: a VLA That Learns From Experiencecited by 303
  9. 2024GR-2: A Generative Video-Language-Action Model with Web-Scale Knowledge for Robot Manipulationcited by 296
  10. 2024Video Prediction Policy: A Generalist Robot Policy with Predictive Visual Representationscited by 289
  11. 2025Motus: A Unified Latent Action World Modelcited by 251
  12. 2025Unified World Models: Coupling Video and Action Diffusion for Pretraining on Large Robotic Datasetscited by 240
  13. 2025Real-Time Execution of Action Chunking Flow Policiescited by 216
  14. 2025Unified Video Action Modelcited by 205
  15. 2023Learning to Act from Actionless Videos through Dense Correspondencescited by 164
  16. 2024Gen2Act: Human Video Generation in Novel Scenarios enables Generalizable Robot Manipulationcited by 153
  17. 2025mimic-video: Video-Action Models for Generalizable Robot Control Beyond VLAscited by 142
  18. 2023Act3D: 3D Feature Field Transformers for Multi-Task Robotic Manipulationcited by 138
  19. 2024RVT-2: Learning Precise Manipulation from Few Demonstrationscited by 137
  20. 2025Spatial Forcing: Implicit Spatial Representation Alignment for Vision-language-action Modelcited by 134
  21. 2024Track2Act: Predicting Point Tracks from Internet Videos enables Generalizable Robot Manipulationcited by 124
  22. 2025GR-3 Technical Reportcited by 111
  23. 2024SynCamMaster: Synchronizing Multi-Camera Video Generation from Diverse Viewpointscited by 93
  24. 2025BridgeVLA: Input-Output Alignment for Efficient 3D Manipulation Learning with Vision-Language Modelscited by 80
  25. 2023PolarNet: 3D Point Clouds for Language-Guided Robotic Manipulationcited by 56
  26. 2025Igniting VLMs toward the Embodied Spacecited by 53
  27. 2024GR-MG: Leveraging Partially Annotated Data via Multi-Modal Goal-Conditioned Policycited by 39
  28. 2025FP3: A 3D Foundation Policy for Robotic Manipulationcited by 32
  29. 2020A Modular Robotic Arm Control Stack for Research: Franka-Interface and FrankaPycited by 25
  30. 2021Rendering Point Clouds with Compute Shaders and Vertex Order Optimizationcited by 14
  31. 2025EC-Flow: Enabling Versatile Robotic Manipulation from Action-Unlabeled Videos via Embodiment-Centric Flowcited by 11
  32. 2025VERM: Leveraging Foundation Models to Create a Virtual Eye for Efficient 3D Robotic Manipulationcited by 2

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 8.

8 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2025Geometry-aware 4D Video Generation for Robot Manipulation
  2. 2025Video2Act: A Dual-System Video Diffusion Policy with Robotic Spatio-Motional Modeling
  3. 2026PointAction: 3D Points as Universal Action Representations for Robot Control
  4. 2026Say, Dream, and Act: Learning Video World Models for Instruction-Driven Robot Manipulation
  5. 2026STARRY: Spatial-Temporal Action-Centric World Modeling for Robotic Manipulation
  6. 2026Spatially Aware World Action Model via Geometric Latent Diffusion
  7. 2026DeltaWAM: Change-Centric Visual Foresight via Delta Tokens for an Efficient World-Action Model
  8. 2026EA-WM: Event-Aware Generative World Model with Structured Kinematic-to-Visual Action Fields