How Well do Diffusion Policies Learn Kinematic Constraint Manifolds?

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Foland, Lexi, Cohn, Thomas, Wei, Adam, Pfaff, Nicholas, Chen, Boyuan, Tedrake, Russ
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866911188652130304
author Foland, Lexi
Cohn, Thomas
Wei, Adam
Pfaff, Nicholas
Chen, Boyuan
Tedrake, Russ
author_facet Foland, Lexi
Cohn, Thomas
Wei, Adam
Pfaff, Nicholas
Chen, Boyuan
Tedrake, Russ
contents Diffusion policies have shown impressive results in robot imitation learning, even for tasks that require satisfaction of kinematic equality constraints. However, task performance alone is not a reliable indicator of the policy's ability to precisely learn constraints in the training data. To investigate, we analyze how well diffusion policies discover these manifolds with a case study on a bimanual pick-and-place task that encourages fulfillment of a kinematic constraint for success. We study how three factors affect trained policies: dataset size, dataset quality, and manifold curvature. Our experiments show diffusion policies learn a coarse approximation of the constraint manifold with learning affected negatively by decreases in both dataset size and quality. On the other hand, the curvature of the constraint manifold showed inconclusive correlations with both constraint satisfaction and task success. A hardware evaluation verifies the applicability of our results in the real world. Project website with additional results and visuals: https://diffusion-learns-kinematic.github.io
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_01404
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle How Well do Diffusion Policies Learn Kinematic Constraint Manifolds?
Foland, Lexi
Cohn, Thomas
Wei, Adam
Pfaff, Nicholas
Chen, Boyuan
Tedrake, Russ
Robotics
Diffusion policies have shown impressive results in robot imitation learning, even for tasks that require satisfaction of kinematic equality constraints. However, task performance alone is not a reliable indicator of the policy's ability to precisely learn constraints in the training data. To investigate, we analyze how well diffusion policies discover these manifolds with a case study on a bimanual pick-and-place task that encourages fulfillment of a kinematic constraint for success. We study how three factors affect trained policies: dataset size, dataset quality, and manifold curvature. Our experiments show diffusion policies learn a coarse approximation of the constraint manifold with learning affected negatively by decreases in both dataset size and quality. On the other hand, the curvature of the constraint manifold showed inconclusive correlations with both constraint satisfaction and task success. A hardware evaluation verifies the applicability of our results in the real world. Project website with additional results and visuals: https://diffusion-learns-kinematic.github.io
title How Well do Diffusion Policies Learn Kinematic Constraint Manifolds?
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01404