RobotAPO: Adversarial Physics Preference Optimization for Robotic Manipulation Video Generation

Abstract:Robotic manipulation videos are increasingly used as visual plans for embodied agents, but optimizing purely for visual plausibility often fails to capture the fragile physical manifold of real-world interactions. Even minor physics-violating errors at the interaction boundary, such as interpenetration or premature object motion, can completely invalidate the inferred timing and pose needed for downstream execution. Because standard supervised fine-tuning lacks the direct pressure to penalize these localized failures, we introduce AgiBot-PhysPref. This rigorously curated 10,000-sample preference dataset isolates condition-matched physics violations, turning the generator's own failure distribution into a foundational signal for physical consistency. Building upon this, we propose RobotAPO, an adversarial physics preference optimization framework operating in the continuous flow-matching denoising space. To prevent the policy from merely memorizing static curated failures, RobotAPO employs a lightweight adversarial counterfactual proposer that learns a condition-dependent, physical-failure-biased direction in denoising space. This encourages the model to explore and better respect the physical interaction boundary, all while maintaining a pure prompt-and-reference inference interface without requiring external structural conditioning. Comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that explicitly correcting these localized physics violations improves downstream robot execution from generated videos. On held-out AgiBot conditions, RobotAPO outperforms the strongest controlled internal baseline in physical consistency by 6.8% hard score and 10.0% soft score. Crucially, in real-robot replay, it translates these physical-consistency gains into a 37.4% relative improvement in task success over the strongest controlled internal baseline.

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2610.09454 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2610.09454v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.09454 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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