mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Flow as Flow: Modeling Robot Velocity Fields as Probability Velocity Fields for Flow-Based Object Manipulation

arXiv 2606.23090 ↗First posted 22 Jun 2026cs.ROcited by 1

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

Abstract (arXiv)

Cross-embodiment data have become central to training robotic foundation models. To leverage such heterogeneous data, we focus on flow-based object manipulation, where robot flows (robot velocity fields) serve as embodiment-agnostic motion representations. Previous studies do not formulate robot flows as dense velocity fields, but as displacements of sparse keypoints, even though dense velocity fields better match the continuous-time nature of motions. To address this, we propose Flow as Flow, a framework that models robot flows as probability flows based on a flow matching formulation. By naturally modeling such velocity fields within this formulation, our method achieves efficient and high-quality robot flow generation. Across standard benchmarks, our method outperforms representative baseline methods on standard metrics, while achieving approximately 24× faster generation than standard flow matching. Furthermore, through real-world experiments evaluating 9 methods with 260 trials per method across 13 manipulation tasks, we show that our method achieves a higher average success rate than the baseline methods.

Key facts. Cited by 1 paper 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 80 of its 85 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 22 Jun 2026.

Builds on

80 of 85 references.

Closest ancestors · 8

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2026HiFlow: Tokenization-Free Scale-Wise Autoregressive Policy Learning via Flow Matching28 Mar
  2. 2025CDP: Towards Robust Autoregressive Visuomotor Policy Learning via Causal Diffusion17 Jun
  3. 2025ReinFlow: Fine-tuning Flow Matching Policy with Online Reinforcement Learning28 May
  4. 2025Streaming Flow Policy: Simplifying diffusion/flow-matching policies by treating action trajectories as flow trajectories28 May
  5. 2024FlowPolicy: Enabling Fast and Robust 3D Flow-based Policy via Consistency Flow Matching for Robot Manipulation6 Dec
  6. 2024The Ingredients for Robotic Diffusion Transformers14 Oct
  7. 2024Multimodal Diffusion Transformer: Learning Versatile Behavior from Multimodal Goals8 Jul
  8. 2023Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusion7 Mar

Other references · 72

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  2. 2020Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Modelscited by 21,076
  3. 2021High-Resolution Image Synthesis with Latent Diffusion Modelscited by 18,863
  4. 2022Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformerscited by 6,054
  5. 2022Flow Matching for Generative Modelingcited by 5,702
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38 more
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  32. 2021XIRL: Cross-embodiment Inverse Reinforcement Learningcited by 107
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 1.

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  4. 2026Trajectory-Consistent Flow Matching for Robust Visuomotor Policy Learning
  5. 2026RoboFlow4D: A Lightweight Flow World Model Toward Real-Time Flow-Guided Robotic Manipulation
  6. 2025Flow with the Force Field: Learning 3D Compliant Flow Matching Policies from Force and Demonstration-Guided Simulation Data
  7. 2025Towards Safe Imitation Learning via Potential Field-Guided Flow Matching
  8. 2026ConFlow: Constraints-Guided Learning with Flow Matching for Motion Generation