EmboAlign: Aligning Video Generation with Compositional Constraints for Zero-Shot Manipulation
Authors: name: Gehao Zhang, name: Zhenyang Ni, name: Payal Mohapatra, name: Han Liu, name: Ruohan Zhang, name: Qi Zhu
Organization: Northwestern University

Video generative models (VGMs) pretrained on large-scale internet data can produce temporally coherent rollout videos that capture rich object dynamics, offering a compelling foundation for zero-shot robotic manipulation. However, VGMs often produce physically implausible rollouts, and converting their pixel-space motion into robot actions through geometric retargeting further introduces cumulative errors from imperfect depth estimation and keypoint tracking. To address these challenges, we present , a data-free framework that aligns VGM outputs with compositional constraints generated by vision-language models (VLMs) at inference time. The key insight is that VLMs offer a capability complementary to VGMs: structured spatial reasoning that can identify the physical constraints critical to the success and safety of manipulation execution. Given a language instruction,  uses a VLM to automatically extract a set of compositional constraints capturing task-specific requirements, which are then applied at two stages: (1) constraint-guided rollout selection, which scores and filters a batch of VGM rollouts to retain the most physically plausible candidate, and (2) constraint-based trajectory optimization, which uses the selected rollout as initialization and refines the robot trajectory under the same constraint set to correct retargeting errors. We evaluate  on six real-robot manipulation tasks requiring precise, constraint-sensitive execution, improving the overall success rate by 43.3\% points over the strongest baseline without any task-specific training data.