Video Generators are Robot Policies

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Liang, Junbang, Tokmakov, Pavel, Liu, Ruoshi, Sudhakar, Sruthi, Shah, Paarth, Ambrus, Rares, Vondrick, Carl
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Liang, Junbang
Tokmakov, Pavel
Liu, Ruoshi
Sudhakar, Sruthi
Shah, Paarth
Ambrus, Rares
Vondrick, Carl
author_facet Liang, Junbang
Tokmakov, Pavel
Liu, Ruoshi
Sudhakar, Sruthi
Shah, Paarth
Ambrus, Rares
Vondrick, Carl
contents Despite tremendous progress in dexterous manipulation, current visuomotor policies remain fundamentally limited by two challenges: they struggle to generalize under perceptual or behavioral distribution shifts, and their performance is constrained by the size of human demonstration data. In this paper, we use video generation as a proxy for robot policy learning to address both limitations simultaneously. We propose Video Policy, a modular framework that combines video and action generation that can be trained end-to-end. Our results demonstrate that learning to generate videos of robot behavior allows for the extraction of policies with minimal demonstration data, significantly improving robustness and sample efficiency. Our method shows strong generalization to unseen objects, backgrounds, and tasks, both in simulation and the real world. We further highlight that task success is closely tied to the generated video, with action-free video data providing critical benefits for generalizing to novel tasks. By leveraging large-scale video generative models, we achieve superior performance compared to traditional behavior cloning, paving the way for more scalable and data-efficient robot policy learning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_00795
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Video Generators are Robot Policies
Liang, Junbang
Tokmakov, Pavel
Liu, Ruoshi
Sudhakar, Sruthi
Shah, Paarth
Ambrus, Rares
Vondrick, Carl
Robotics
Despite tremendous progress in dexterous manipulation, current visuomotor policies remain fundamentally limited by two challenges: they struggle to generalize under perceptual or behavioral distribution shifts, and their performance is constrained by the size of human demonstration data. In this paper, we use video generation as a proxy for robot policy learning to address both limitations simultaneously. We propose Video Policy, a modular framework that combines video and action generation that can be trained end-to-end. Our results demonstrate that learning to generate videos of robot behavior allows for the extraction of policies with minimal demonstration data, significantly improving robustness and sample efficiency. Our method shows strong generalization to unseen objects, backgrounds, and tasks, both in simulation and the real world. We further highlight that task success is closely tied to the generated video, with action-free video data providing critical benefits for generalizing to novel tasks. By leveraging large-scale video generative models, we achieve superior performance compared to traditional behavior cloning, paving the way for more scalable and data-efficient robot policy learning.
title Video Generators are Robot Policies
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00795