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arXiv · 2602.11885

Choose What to Manipulate: Revealing Data Scaling Laws in Bounding-Box Guided Policies for Semantic Manipulation

Yihao Wu·Jinming Ma·Junbo Tan·Yanzhao Yu·Shoujie Li·Mingliang Zhou·Diyun Xiang·Xueqian Wang
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Abstract

Diffusion-based policies generalize poorly in semantic manipulation, a key obstacle to real-world deployment, because text-only instructions cannot reliably steer the policy toward the target object in cluttered, dynamic scenes. We instead use bounding-box instructions to specify the target directly, and study how performance scales with data. To this end, we build Label-UMI, a handheld segmentation device with an automated annotation pipeline for efficiently collecting semantically labeled demonstrations, and propose a semantic-motion-decoupled framework that couples object detection with a bounding-box-guided diffusion policy; a first-frame anchoring mechanism keeps execution robust to missed detections and noisy boxes. We find that generalization follows a bounded, saturating data-scaling law with diminishing returns, validated on four real-world tasks with 6,400 demonstrations, and distill an object-diversity-first collection strategy reaching 85\% success in cluttered scenes. All data and code will be released.

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Yihao Wu, Jinming Ma, Junbo Tan, Yanzhao Yu, Shoujie Li, Mingliang Zhou, Diyun Xiang, Xueqian Wang. 2026-07-31. Choose What to Manipulate: Revealing Data Scaling Laws in Bounding-Box Guided Policies for Semantic Manipulation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.11885

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