English

ChronoFlow-Policy: Unifying Past-Current-Future Interaction Flow in Visuomotor Policy Learning

Robotics 2026-06-30 v1

Abstract

Visual signals play a crucial role in policy learning by enabling models to capture object motion and interaction dynamics. Just as humans reason about actions using both past experience and anticipated outcomes, effective policies should integrate past interactions with future predictions. However, existing visuomotor policies typically model either historical context or future dynamics in isolation, lacking a unified temporal representation of interaction dynamics. In this work, we introduce \textbf{ChronoFlow}, a temporally unified representation that captures \textbf{past, current, and future} interaction dynamics through sparse 3D keypoints of both objects and the gripper. Based on this representation, we propose \textbf{ChronoFlow-Policy}, a diffusion-based visuomotor policy that jointly learns ChronoFlow and action sequences through a co-training objective. Experiments on 14 simulated tasks and 5 real-world manipulation tasks demonstrate that ChronoFlow-Policy consistently outperforms strong diffusion-policy baselines and improves robustness in long-horizon and non-Markovian manipulation scenarios.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2606.31493,
  title  = {ChronoFlow-Policy: Unifying Past-Current-Future Interaction Flow in Visuomotor Policy Learning},
  author = {Bokai Lin and Yifu Xu and Xinyu Zhan and Hongjie Fang and Jialin Tian and Fu-Cheng Zhang and Yong-Lu Li and Cewu Lu and Lixin Yang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2606.31493},
  year   = {2026}
}