# Physical Kernel: Structured Visual Latents for Dark Manipulation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.13244 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.13244/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 15 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Diffusion Policy: Visuomotor Policy Learning via Action Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04137/) (2023)
- [Dream to Control: Learning Behaviors by Latent Imagination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01603/) (2019)
- [Learning Fine-Grained Bimanual Manipulation with Low-Cost Hardware](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13705/) (2023)
- [Learning Latent Dynamics for Planning from Pixels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1811.04551/) (2018)
- [Mastering Diverse Domains through World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.04104/) (2023)
- [Self-Supervised Learning from Images with a Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.08243/) (2023)
- [Revisiting Feature Prediction for Learning Visual Representations from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.08471/) (2024)
- [Time-Contrastive Networks: Self-Supervised Learning from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.06888/) (2017)
- [Implicit Behavioral Cloning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00137/) (2021)
- [ManiSkill2: A Unified Benchmark for Generalizable Manipulation Skills](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04659/) (2023)
- [ManiSkill3: GPU Parallelized Robotics Simulation and Rendering for Generalizable Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00425/) (2024)
- [PHYRE: A New Benchmark for Physical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.05656/) (2019)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We study dark manipulation: after a brief lit Write encodes z0 = Enc(rgb), a policy pi(z) and open-loop dynamics f(z,a) complete contact-rich skills without further pixels (dark_f). On ManiSkill StackCube (n=160; seed packs 0/1000), dark_f attains 68.1% stacked on the five-rung chain (near_A -> grasped -> lifted -> on_B -> stacked), compared with 35.6% for per-step lit_reenc and 0% for freeze/encode_black. On a shared Write->HOLD protocol (n=40), occlusion and camera-aligned GT contact-neighbor masks drive lit lift from 43% to 0%, while dark_f holds 82.5%; shuffling actions inflates dynamics MSE by ~9.4x; write-time appearance shifts break encoding (night: 0% stacked), yet the same shifts during HOLD leave dark_f lift unchanged; Write length Tw is flat once the stop phase is reached, while earlier stops and write-time blur/JPEG sharply cut stacked. A dedicated pi_write reaches 35% vision-budget stacked (n=80); matched Dreamer-style/pixel nulls without privileged geom stay at 0%. Privileged state-RSSM MPC reaches ~35% stacked with 9D dark observations -- a stronger-observation null, not a matched visual baseline.