ImplicitRDP: An End-to-End Visual-Force Diffusion Policy with Structural Slow-Fast Learning

Abstract:Human-level contact-rich manipulation relies on the distinct roles of two key modalities: vision provides spatially rich but temporally slow global context, while force sensing captures rapid local contact dynamics. Integrating these signals is challenging due to their fundamental frequency and informational disparities. In this work, we propose ImplicitRDP, a unified end-to-end visual-force diffusion policy that integrates visual planning and reactive force control within a single network. We introduce Structural Slow-Fast Learning, a mechanism utilizing causal attention to simultaneously process asynchronous visual and force tokens, allowing the policy to perform rapid force control at the action rate while maintaining the temporal coherence of action chunks. Furthermore, to mitigate modality collapse where end-to-end models fail to adjust the weights across different modalities, we propose Virtual-target-based Representation Regularization. This auxiliary objective maps force feedback into the same space as the action, providing a stronger, physics-grounded learning signal than raw force prediction. Extensive experiments on contact-rich tasks demonstrate that ImplicitRDP significantly outperforms both vision-only and hierarchical baselines, achieving superior reactivity and success rates with a streamlined training pipeline. Code and videos are available at this https URL.

Accepted to RA-L 2026. Project page: this https URL

Robotics (cs.RO); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2512.10946 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2512.10946v2 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2512.10946 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite

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