Morphologically Equivariant Flow Matching for Bimanual Mobile Manipulation
On the map: Diffusion models → Diffusion and flow policies for robotics
Abstract (arXiv)
Mobile manipulation requires coordinated control of high-dimensional, bimanual robots. Imitation learning methods have been broadly used to solve these robotic tasks, yet typically ignore the bilateral morphological symmetry inherent in such systems. We argue that morphological symmetry is an underexplored but crucial inductive bias for learning in bimanual mobile manipulation: knowing how to solve a task in one configuration directly determines how to solve its mirrored counterpart. In this paper, we formalize this symmetry prior and show that it constrains optimal bimanual policies to be ambidextrous and equivariant under reflections across the robot's sagittal plane. We introduce a mathbbC2-equivariant flow matching policy that enforces reflective symmetry either via a regularized training loss or an equivariant velocity network. Across planar and 6-DoF mobile manipulation tasks, symmetry-informed policies consistently improve sample efficiency and achieve zero-shot generalization to mirrored configurations absent from the training distribution. We further validate this zero-shot generalization capability on a real-world manipulation task with a TIAGo++ robot. Together, our findings establish morphological symmetry as an effective, generalizable, and scalable inductive bias for ambidextrous generative policy learning.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Diffusion and flow policies for robotics, one of 14 directions in Diffusion models. Builds on 30 of its 36 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 12 May 2026.
Builds on
30 of 36 references.
Closest ancestors · 7
Same direction, newest first
- 2025A Practical Guide for Incorporating Symmetry in Diffusion Policy19 May
- 2024ET-SEED: Efficient Trajectory-Level SE(3) Equivariant Diffusion Policy6 Nov
- 2024ActionFlow: Equivariant, Accurate, and Efficient Policies with Spatially Symmetric Flow Matching6 Sep
- 2024Equivariant Diffusion Policy1 Jul
- 2024EquiBot: SIM(3)-Equivariant Diffusion Policy for Generalizable and Data Efficient Learning1 Jul
- 2023EDGI: Equivariant Diffusion for Planning with Embodied Agents22 Mar
- 2023Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusion7 Mar
Other references · 23
- 2022Flow Matching for Generative Modelingcited by 5,702
- 2024π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Controlcited by 2,407
- 2022RT-1: Robotics Transformer for Real-World Control at Scalecited by 2,061
- 2023Learning Fine-Grained Bimanual Manipulation with Low-Cost Hardwarecited by 1,568
- 2024Mobile ALOHA: Learning Bimanual Mobile Manipulation with Low-Cost Whole-Body Teleoperationcited by 391
- 2020Equivariant Flows: Exact Likelihood Generative Learning for Symmetric Densitiescited by 250
- 2023Equivariant flow matchingcited by 135
- 2023On Bringing Robots Homecited by 101
- 2023EquivAct: SIM(3)-Equivariant Visuomotor Policies beyond Rigid Object Manipulationcited by 37
- 2024Symmetry Considerations for Learning Task Symmetric Robot Policiescited by 28
- 2022Symmetry-Based Representations for Artificial and Biological General Intelligencecited by 26
- 2024Leveraging Symmetry in RL-based Legged Locomotion Controlcited by 25
11 more
- 2022SEIL: Simulation-augmented Equivariant Imitation Learningcited by 23
- 2024Morphological Symmetries in Roboticscited by 13
- 2025Mobi-π: Mobilizing Your Robot Learning Policycited by 10
- 2025HoMeR: Learning In-the-Wild Mobile Manipulation via Hybrid Imitation and Whole-Body Controlcited by 8
- 2025SafeMimic: Towards Safe and Autonomous Human-to-Robot Imitation for Mobile Manipulationcited by 6
- 2025On Flow Matching KL Divergencecited by 6
- 2024Morphological-Symmetry-Equivariant Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network for Robotic Dynamics Learningcited by 5
- 2025Morphologically Symmetric Reinforcement Learning for Ambidextrous Bimanual Manipulationcited by 5
- 2025Beyond Topology: A Morphological Symmetry Graph Representation for Locomotion Policy Learningcited by 4
- 2025EfficientFlow: Efficient Equivariant Flow Policy Learning for Embodied AIcited by 4
- 2026EquiBim: Learning Symmetry-Equivariant Policy for Bimanual Manipulationcited by 1
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