Multimodal Diffusion Forcing for Forceful Manipulation

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Huang, Zixuan, Hou, Huaidian, Berenson, Dmitry
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Huang, Zixuan
Hou, Huaidian
Berenson, Dmitry
author_facet Huang, Zixuan
Hou, Huaidian
Berenson, Dmitry
contents Given a dataset of expert trajectories, standard imitation learning approaches typically learn a direct mapping from observations (e.g., RGB images) to actions. However, such methods often overlook the rich interplay between different modalities, i.e., sensory inputs, actions, and rewards, which is crucial for modeling robot behavior and understanding task outcomes. In this work, we propose Multimodal Diffusion Forcing, a unified framework for learning from multimodal robot trajectories that extends beyond action generation. Rather than modeling a fixed distribution, MDF applies random partial masking and trains a diffusion model to reconstruct the trajectory. This training objective encourages the model to learn temporal and cross-modal dependencies, such as predicting the effects of actions on force signals or inferring states from partial observations. We evaluate MDF on contact-rich, forceful manipulation tasks in simulated and real-world environments. Our results show that MDF not only delivers versatile functionalities, but also achieves strong performance, and robustness under noisy observations. More visualizations can be found on our $\href{https://unified-df.github.io}{website}$.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_04812
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Multimodal Diffusion Forcing for Forceful Manipulation
Huang, Zixuan
Hou, Huaidian
Berenson, Dmitry
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Given a dataset of expert trajectories, standard imitation learning approaches typically learn a direct mapping from observations (e.g., RGB images) to actions. However, such methods often overlook the rich interplay between different modalities, i.e., sensory inputs, actions, and rewards, which is crucial for modeling robot behavior and understanding task outcomes. In this work, we propose Multimodal Diffusion Forcing, a unified framework for learning from multimodal robot trajectories that extends beyond action generation. Rather than modeling a fixed distribution, MDF applies random partial masking and trains a diffusion model to reconstruct the trajectory. This training objective encourages the model to learn temporal and cross-modal dependencies, such as predicting the effects of actions on force signals or inferring states from partial observations. We evaluate MDF on contact-rich, forceful manipulation tasks in simulated and real-world environments. Our results show that MDF not only delivers versatile functionalities, but also achieves strong performance, and robustness under noisy observations. More visualizations can be found on our $\href{https://unified-df.github.io}{website}$.
title Multimodal Diffusion Forcing for Forceful Manipulation
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.04812