2026
Demystifying Robot Diffusion Policies: Action Memorization and a Simple Lookup Table Alternative
Chengyang He, Xu Liu, Gadiel Mark Sznaier Camps, Joseph Bruno, Guillaume Adrien Sartoretti, Mac Schwager
ICLR 2026poster
Diffusion policies for visuomotor robot manipulation tasks achieve remarkable dexterity and robustness while only training on a small number of task demonstrations. However, the reason for this performance remains a mystery. In this paper, we offer a surprising hypothesis: diffusion policies essent…