Information Filtering via Variational Regularization for Robot Manipulation

Diffusion-based visuomotor policies built on 3D visual representations have achieved strong performance in learning complex robotic skills. However, most existing methods employ an oversized denoising decoder. While increasing model capacity can improve denoising, empirical evidence suggests that it also introduces redundancy and noise in intermediate feature blocks. Crucially, we find that randomly masking backbone features at inference time (without changing training) can improve performance, confirming the presence of task-irrelevant noise in intermediate features. To this end, we propose Variational Regularization (VR), a lightweight module that imposes a timestep-conditioned Gaussian over backbone features and applies a KL-divergence regularizer, forming an adaptive information bottleneck. Extensive experiments on three simulation benchmarks (RoboTwin2.0, Adroit, and MetaWorld) show that, compared to the baseline DP3, our approach improves the success rate by 6.1% on RoboTwin2.0 and by 4.1% on Adroit and MetaWorld, achieving new state-of-the-art results. Real-world experiments further demonstrate that our method performs well in practical deployments. Code will released.

PocketDP3: Efficient Pocket-Scale 3D Visuomotor Policy

Recently, 3D vision-based diffusion policies have shown strong capability in learning complex robotic manipulation skills. However, a common architectural mismatch exists in these models: a tiny yet efficient point-cloud encoder is often paired with a massive decoder. Given a compact scene representation, we argue that this may lead to substantial parameter waste in the decoder. Motivated by this observation, we propose PocketDP3, a pocket-scale 3D diffusion policy that replaces the heavy conditional U-Net decoder used in prior methods with a lightweight Diffusion Mixer (DiM) built on MLP-Mixer blocks. This architecture enables efficient fusion across temporal and channel dimensions, significantly reducing model size. Notably, without any additional consistency distillation techniques, our method supports two-step inference without sacrificing performance, improving practicality for real-time deployment. Across three simulation benchmarks--RoboTwin2.0, Adroit, and MetaWorld--PocketDP3 achieves state-of-the-art performance with fewer than 1% of the parameters of prior methods, while also accelerating inference. Real-world experiments further demonstrate the practicality and transferability of our method in real-world settings. Code will be released.