# Morphologically Equivariant Flow Matching for Bimanual Mobile Manipulation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.12228 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12228/

## 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.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Diffusion and flow policies for robotics](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/diffusion-and-flow-policies-for-robotics/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [Flow Matching for Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02747/) (2022)
- [Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04137/) (2023)
- [π0: A Vision-Language-Action Flow Model for General Robot Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.24164/) (2024)
- [RT-1: Robotics Transformer for Real-World Control at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06817/) (2022)
- [Learning Fine-Grained Bimanual Manipulation with Low-Cost Hardware](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13705/) (2023)
- [Mobile ALOHA: Learning Bimanual Mobile Manipulation with Low-Cost Whole-Body Teleoperation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02117/) (2024)
- [Equivariant Flows: Exact Likelihood Generative Learning for Symmetric Densities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.02425/) (2020)
- [Equivariant flow matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15030/) (2023)
- [On Bringing Robots Home](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16098/) (2023)
- [EquiBot: SIM(3)-Equivariant Diffusion Policy for Generalizable and Data Efficient Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01479/) (2024)
- [Equivariant Diffusion Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01812/) (2024)
- [EquivAct: SIM(3)-Equivariant Visuomotor Policies beyond Rigid Object Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16050/) (2023)
- [EDGI: Equivariant Diffusion for Planning with Embodied Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12410/) (2023)
- [Symmetry Considerations for Learning Task Symmetric Robot Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04359/) (2024)
- [Symmetry-Based Representations for Artificial and Biological General Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.09250/) (2022)
- [ActionFlow: Equivariant, Accurate, and Efficient Policies with Spatially Symmetric Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.04576/) (2024)
- [ET-SEED: Efficient Trajectory-Level SE(3) Equivariant Diffusion Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.03990/) (2024)
- [Leveraging Symmetry in RL-based Legged Locomotion Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.17320/) (2024)
- [SEIL: Simulation-augmented Equivariant Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.00194/) (2022)
- [Morphological Symmetries in Robotics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15552/) (2024)
- [Mobi-π: Mobilizing Your Robot Learning Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.23692/) (2025)
- [HoMeR: Learning In-the-Wild Mobile Manipulation via Hybrid Imitation and Whole-Body Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01185/) (2025)
- [SafeMimic: Towards Safe and Autonomous Human-to-Robot Imitation for Mobile Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.15847/) (2025)
- [On Flow Matching KL Divergence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.05480/) (2025)
- [Morphological-Symmetry-Equivariant Heterogeneous Graph Neural Network for Robotic Dynamics Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.01297/) (2024)
- [Morphologically Symmetric Reinforcement Learning for Ambidextrous Bimanual Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.05287/) (2025)
- [A Practical Guide for Incorporating Symmetry in Diffusion Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13431/) (2025)
- [Beyond Topology: A Morphological Symmetry Graph Representation for Locomotion Policy Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.00727/) (2025)
- [EfficientFlow: Efficient Equivariant Flow Policy Learning for Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.02020/) (2025)
- [EquiBim: Learning Symmetry-Equivariant Policy for Bimanual Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.08541/) (2026)

## 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.
