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arXiv · 2509.22652

Pixel Motion Diffusion is What We Need for Robot Control

E-Ro Nguyen·Yichi Zhang·Kanchana Ranasinghe·Xiang Li·Michael S. Ryoo
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Abstract

We present DAWN (Diffusion is All We Need for robot control), a unified diffusion-based framework for language-conditioned robotic manipulation that bridges high-level motion intent and low-level robot action via structured pixel motion representation. In DAWN, both the high-level and low-level controllers are modeled as diffusion processes, yielding a fully trainable, end-to-end system with interpretable intermediate motion abstractions. DAWN achieves state-of-the-art results on the challenging CALVIN benchmark, demonstrating strong multi-task performance, and further validates its effectiveness on MetaWorld. Despite the substantial domain gap between simulation and reality and limited real-world data, we demonstrate reliable real-world transfer with only minimal finetuning, illustrating the practical viability of diffusion-based motion abstractions for robotic control. Our results show the effectiveness of combining diffusion modeling with motion-centric representations as a strong baseline for scalable and robust robot learning. Project page: https://eronguyen.github.io/DAWN/

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E-Ro Nguyen, Yichi Zhang, Kanchana Ranasinghe, Xiang Li, Michael S. Ryoo. 2026-04-01. Pixel Motion Diffusion is What We Need for Robot Control. https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.22652

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