UMR: Universal Manipulation Representation

Abstract:General-purpose embodied manipulation hinges on a unified action representation that generalizes across embodiments and scales readily. Yet existing policies rely on embodiment-specific action spaces, making cross-embodiment demonstrations difficult to leverage at scale and limiting transfer to new embodiments and spatial variations. To this end, we introduce Universal Manipulation Representation (UMR), a unified action representation that enables zero-shot skill transfer from human demonstrations to heterogeneous robots. UMR decomposes manipulation into two functionally distinct yet geometrically linked components: embodiment-agnostic World Flow, which describes task-relevant object motion in the world frame, and Ego Trajectory, which represents end-effector motion relative to the current pose. We instantiate UMR as World--Ego Point VLA (WEPVLA), a compact 0.5B-parameter policy that learns in the unified geometric action space through a dual-stream Point Action Adapter and a unified Point Action Expert, with an $SE(3)$ conjugation coupling the two components. To improve data efficiency, we complement UMR with a Data-Efficient Strategy (DES) that diversifies object configurations through stage-aware point-cloud editing while preserving demonstrated contact geometry. In simulation, WEPVLA achieves average success rates of 97.5\% on LIBERO and 85.7\% on the 10-task RLBench benchmark. In real-world experiments, a single policy trained on human demonstrations augmented by DES transfers zero-shot to diverse deployment conditions. With about 10 minutes of collected human demonstrations per task and no robot demonstrations, it achieves 91.7\% average success across six evaluation settings, compared with 60.8\% for HumanEgo. Code and additional materials are available at this https URL.

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2609.34256 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2609.34256v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.34256 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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