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Main Authors: Feng, Yao, Tan, Hengkai, Mao, Xinyi, Xiang, Chendong, Liu, Guodong, Huang, Shuhe, Su, Hang, Zhu, Jun
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12898
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author Feng, Yao
Tan, Hengkai
Mao, Xinyi
Xiang, Chendong
Liu, Guodong
Huang, Shuhe
Su, Hang
Zhu, Jun
author_facet Feng, Yao
Tan, Hengkai
Mao, Xinyi
Xiang, Chendong
Liu, Guodong
Huang, Shuhe
Su, Hang
Zhu, Jun
contents Scaling general-purpose manipulation to new robot embodiments remains challenging: each platform typically needs large, homogeneous demonstrations, and end-to-end pixel-to-action pipelines may degenerate under background and viewpoint shifts. Based on previous advances in video-based robot control, we present Vidar, consisting of an embodied video diffusion model as the generalizable prior and a masked inverse dynamics model (MIDM) as the adapter. We leverage a video diffusion model pre-trained at Internet scale, and further continuously pre-train it for the embodied domain using 750K multi-view trajectories collected from three real-world robot platforms. For this embodied pre-training, we introduce a unified observation space that jointly encodes robot, camera, task, and scene contexts. The MIDM module learns action-relevant pixel masks without dense labels, grounding the prior into the target embodiment's action space while suppressing distractors. With only 20 minutes of human demonstrations on an unseen robot (1% of typical data), Vidar outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and generalizes to unseen tasks, backgrounds, and camera layouts. Our results suggest a scalable recipe for "one prior, many embodiments": strong, inexpensive video priors together with minimal on-robot alignment.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_12898
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Vidar: Embodied Video Diffusion Model for Generalist Manipulation
Feng, Yao
Tan, Hengkai
Mao, Xinyi
Xiang, Chendong
Liu, Guodong
Huang, Shuhe
Su, Hang
Zhu, Jun
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Robotics
Scaling general-purpose manipulation to new robot embodiments remains challenging: each platform typically needs large, homogeneous demonstrations, and end-to-end pixel-to-action pipelines may degenerate under background and viewpoint shifts. Based on previous advances in video-based robot control, we present Vidar, consisting of an embodied video diffusion model as the generalizable prior and a masked inverse dynamics model (MIDM) as the adapter. We leverage a video diffusion model pre-trained at Internet scale, and further continuously pre-train it for the embodied domain using 750K multi-view trajectories collected from three real-world robot platforms. For this embodied pre-training, we introduce a unified observation space that jointly encodes robot, camera, task, and scene contexts. The MIDM module learns action-relevant pixel masks without dense labels, grounding the prior into the target embodiment's action space while suppressing distractors. With only 20 minutes of human demonstrations on an unseen robot (1% of typical data), Vidar outperforms state-of-the-art baselines and generalizes to unseen tasks, backgrounds, and camera layouts. Our results suggest a scalable recipe for "one prior, many embodiments": strong, inexpensive video priors together with minimal on-robot alignment.
title Vidar: Embodied Video Diffusion Model for Generalist Manipulation
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12898