English

Masked Generative Policy for Robotic Control

Robotics 2026-01-27 v2 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

We present Masked Generative Policy (MGP), a novel framework for visuomotor imitation learning. We represent actions as discrete tokens, and train a conditional masked transformer that generates tokens in parallel and then rapidly refines only low-confidence tokens. We further propose two new sampling paradigms: MGP-Short, which performs parallel masked generation with score-based refinement for Markovian tasks, and MGP-Long, which predicts full trajectories in a single pass and dynamically refines low-confidence action tokens based on new observations. With globally coherent prediction and robust adaptive execution capabilities, MGP-Long enables reliable control on complex and non-Markovian tasks that prior methods struggle with. Extensive evaluations on 150 robotic manipulation tasks spanning the Meta-World and LIBERO benchmarks show that MGP achieves both rapid inference and superior success rates compared to state-of-the-art diffusion and autoregressive policies. Specifically, MGP increases the average success rate by 9% across 150 tasks while cutting per-sequence inference time by up to 35x. It further improves the average success rate by 60% in dynamic and missing-observation environments, and solves two non-Markovian scenarios where other state-of-the-art methods fail.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2512.09101,
  title  = {Masked Generative Policy for Robotic Control},
  author = {Lipeng Zhuang and Shiyu Fan and Florent P. Audonnet and Yingdong Ru and Edmond S. L. Ho and Gerardo Aragon Camarasa and Paul Henderson},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2512.09101},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T08:17:56.742Z