Diffusion Sequence Models for Generative In-Context Meta-Learning of Robot Dynamics

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Moroncelli, Angelo, Rufolo, Matteo, Aydin, Gunes Cagin, Shahid, Asad Ali, Roveda, Loris
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866908979708297216
author Moroncelli, Angelo
Rufolo, Matteo
Aydin, Gunes Cagin
Shahid, Asad Ali
Roveda, Loris
author_facet Moroncelli, Angelo
Rufolo, Matteo
Aydin, Gunes Cagin
Shahid, Asad Ali
Roveda, Loris
contents Accurate modeling of robot dynamics is essential for model-based control, yet remains challenging under distributional shifts and real-time constraints. In this work, we formulate system identification as an in-context meta-learning problem and compare deterministic and generative sequence models for forward dynamics prediction. We take a Transformer-based meta-model, as a strong deterministic baseline, and introduce to this setting two complementary diffusion-based approaches: (i) inpainting diffusion (Diffuser), which learns the joint input-observation distribution, and (ii) conditioned diffusion models (CNN and Transformer), which generate future observations conditioned on control inputs. Through large-scale randomized simulations, we analyze performance across in-distribution and out-of-distribution regimes, as well as computational trade-offs relevant for control. We show that diffusion models significantly improve robustness under distribution shift, with inpainting diffusion achieving the best performance in our experiments. Finally, we demonstrate that warm-started sampling enables diffusion models to operate within real-time constraints, making them viable for control applications. These results highlight generative meta-models as a promising direction for robust system identification in robotics.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2604_13366
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Diffusion Sequence Models for Generative In-Context Meta-Learning of Robot Dynamics
Moroncelli, Angelo
Rufolo, Matteo
Aydin, Gunes Cagin
Shahid, Asad Ali
Roveda, Loris
Machine Learning
Robotics
Systems and Control
Accurate modeling of robot dynamics is essential for model-based control, yet remains challenging under distributional shifts and real-time constraints. In this work, we formulate system identification as an in-context meta-learning problem and compare deterministic and generative sequence models for forward dynamics prediction. We take a Transformer-based meta-model, as a strong deterministic baseline, and introduce to this setting two complementary diffusion-based approaches: (i) inpainting diffusion (Diffuser), which learns the joint input-observation distribution, and (ii) conditioned diffusion models (CNN and Transformer), which generate future observations conditioned on control inputs. Through large-scale randomized simulations, we analyze performance across in-distribution and out-of-distribution regimes, as well as computational trade-offs relevant for control. We show that diffusion models significantly improve robustness under distribution shift, with inpainting diffusion achieving the best performance in our experiments. Finally, we demonstrate that warm-started sampling enables diffusion models to operate within real-time constraints, making them viable for control applications. These results highlight generative meta-models as a promising direction for robust system identification in robotics.
title Diffusion Sequence Models for Generative In-Context Meta-Learning of Robot Dynamics
topic Machine Learning
Robotics
Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.13366