# Spatially Conditioned Diffusion Policy: Learning Precise and Robust Manipulation with a Single RGB Camera

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.14535 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.14535/

## 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 38 of its 43 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Jun 2026.

## Placed in

- Diffusion models / [Diffusion and flow policies for robotics](https://mlsanity.com/diffusion/diffusion-and-flow-policies-for-robotics/)
- Offline RL and imitation learning from data / [Robot manipulation imitation learning](https://mlsanity.com/offlinerl/robot-manipulation-imitation-learning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 38)

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Denoising Diffusion Implicit Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02502/) (2020)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [SegFormer: Simple and Efficient Design for Semantic Segmentation with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.15203/) (2021)
- [Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04137/) (2023)
- [FiLM: Visual Reasoning with a General Conditioning Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07871/) (2017)
- [Dynamic Graph CNN for Learning on Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.07829/) (2018)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [Learning Fine-Grained Bimanual Manipulation with Low-Cost Hardware](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13705/) (2023)
- [Meta-World: A Benchmark and Evaluation for Multi-Task and Meta Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10897/) (2019)
- [R3M: A Universal Visual Representation for Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12601/) (2022)
- [BC-Z: Zero-Shot Task Generalization with Robotic Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.02005/) (2022)
- [CoTracker: It is Better to Track Together](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.07635/) (2023)
- [An Algorithmic Perspective on Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.06711/) (2018)
- [VIP: Towards Universal Visual Reward and Representation via Value-Implicit Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00030/) (2022)
- [Universal Manipulation Interface: In-The-Wild Robot Teaching Without In-The-Wild Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10329/) (2024)
- [Masked World Models for Visual Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.14244/) (2022)
- [Open-World Object Manipulation using Pre-trained Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00905/) (2023)
- [VIOLA: Imitation Learning for Vision-Based Manipulation with Object Proposal Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11339/) (2022)
- [ALOHA Unleashed: A Simple Recipe for Robot Dexterity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.13126/) (2024)
- [ForceVLA: Enhancing VLA Models with a Force-aware MoE for Contact-rich Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22159/) (2025)
- [A Unified Multi-scale Deep Convolutional Neural Network for Fast Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1607.07155/) (2016)
- [DexArt: Benchmarking Generalizable Dexterous Manipulation with Articulated Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05706/) (2023)
- [Learning Generalizable Manipulation Policies with Object-Centric 3D Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14386/) (2023)
- [OTTER: A Vision-Language-Action Model with Text-Aware Visual Feature Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03734/) (2025)
- [DINOBot: Robot Manipulation via Retrieval and Alignment with Vision Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13181/) (2024)
- [RISE: 3D Perception Makes Real-World Robot Imitation Simple and Effective](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.12281/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent visual imitation learning systems have widely adopted multi-camera setups with wrist-mounted cameras as the de facto standard. However, manipulation from a single global view remains challenging, as the policy should capture fine-grained interaction details and identify task-relevant regions without local wrist views. To address this challenge, we present Spatially Conditioned Diffusion Policy (SCDP), a diffusion-based visuomotor policy that achieves precise and robust manipulation in a single-camera setting. Our key idea is that end-effector trajectories can serve as visual attention anchors that reflect task-relevant regions. Building on this idea, SCDP consists of two key components: (i) a visual encoder that produces multi-scale feature maps to capture both broader context and fine-grained visual features, and (ii) a spatial conditioning module that samples point-wise features along intermediate end-effector trajectories in the diffusion loop. Extensive simulation experiments show that SCDP consistently outperforms strong single-view baselines and achieves performance comparable to multi-camera baselines. Real-world experiments further demonstrate precise manipulation and robustness to visual distractors, highlighting the potential of single-camera imitation learning.