Title: Vidar: Embodied Video Diffusion Model for Generalist Manipulation
Primary area: applications to robotics, autonomy, planning
Keywords: Robotics, Video Diffusion Model, Computer Vision

Abstract: Scaling general-purpose manipulation to new robot embodiments remains challenging: each platform typically needs large, homogeneous demonstrations, and pixel-to-action VLA pipelines typically degenerate under background and viewpoint shifts. In this paper, we present Vidar, a prior-driven, low-shot adaptation paradigm that replaces most embodiment-specific data with transferable video priors. Vidar consists of an embodied video diffusion model as the generalizable prior and a masked inverse dynamics model (MIDM) adapter based on a key decoupling of the policy. The embodied diffusion model is pre-trained on Internet-scale videos and then domain-adapted to 750K multi-view trajectories from three real-world robot platforms using a unified observation space encoding robot, camera, task, and scene contexts. The MIDM module learns action-relevant pixel masks without dense labels, grounding the prior into the target embodiment's action space while suppressing distractors. Crucially, the generative video prior models the distribution of plausible, temporally coherent interactions, implicitly capturing affordances, contact dynamics, and physical consistency from massive unlabeled video. This shifts the challenge from collecting large amounts of new robot data to efficiently aligning a rich prior with a new embodiment. With only \~20 minutes of human demonstrations on an unseen robot (\~1% of typical data), Vidar outperforms state-of-the-art VLA baselines and generalizes to unseen tasks, backgrounds, and camera layouts. Our results suggest a scalable recipe for ``one prior, many embodiments'': strong, inexpensive video priors + minimal on-robot alignment.