CLaD: Planning with Grounded Foresight via Cross-Modal Latent Dynamics

2026-03-31

AI Summary

Existing robotic planning methods lack explicit modeling of the dynamic cross-modal coupling between proprioceptive and semantic states, resulting in actions that are neither embodied nor semantically consistent. This work proposes a cross-modal latent dynamics framework that jointly models their evolution in a shared latent space through an asymmetric cross-attention mechanism. To prevent representational collapse, the approach integrates self-supervised objectives, auxiliary reconstruction losses, and an exponential moving average (EMA) target encoder. The predicted embodied future state is fused with observations to condition a diffusion-based policy for action generation. Evaluated on the LIBERO-LONG benchmark, the method achieves a 94.7% success rate with significantly fewer parameters, matching the performance of large vision-language-action models.

Abstract

Robotic manipulation involves kinematic and semantic transitions that are inherently coupled via underlying actions. However, existing approaches plan within either semantic or latent space without explicitly aligning these cross-modal transitions. To address this, we propose CLaD, a framework that models how proprioceptive and semantic states jointly evolve under actions through asymmetric cross-attention that allows kinematic transitions to query semantic ones. CLaD predicts grounded latent foresights via self-supervised objectives with EMA target encoders and auxiliary reconstruction losses, preventing representation collapse while anchoring predictions to observable states. Predicted foresights are modulated with observations to condition a diffusion policy for action generation. On LIBERO-LONG benchmark, CLaD achieves 94.7\% success rate, competitive with large VLAs with significantly fewer parameters.

Problem

• robotic manipulation
• cross-modal dynamics
• semantic-kinematic alignment
• planning
• latent foresight

Innovation

• cross-modal latent dynamics
• asymmetric cross-attention
• grounded foresight
• self-supervised prediction
• diffusion policy