StableIDM: Stabilizing Inverse Dynamics Model against Manipulator Truncation via Spatio-Temporal Refinement

TL;DR

StableIDM is a spatio-temporal framework that enhances inverse dynamics models for embodied AI, significantly improving stability and accuracy under manipulator truncation through feature refinement and motion smoothing.

Contribution

It introduces a novel combination of masking, geometry-aware spatial reasoning, and temporal refinement to stabilize action predictions in partial observability scenarios.

Findings

Improves strict action accuracy by 12.1% under severe truncation.

Increases average task success by 9.7% in real-robot replay.

Boosts grasp success by 11.5% and downstream success by 17.6%.

Abstract

Inverse Dynamics Models (IDMs) map visual observations to low-level action commands, serving as central components for data labeling and policy execution in embodied AI. However, their performance degrades severely under manipulator truncation, a common failure mode that makes state recovery ill-posed and leads to unstable control. We present StableIDM, a spatio-temporal framework that refines features from visual inputs to stabilize action predictions under such partial observability. StableIDM integrates three complementary components: (1) auxiliary robot-centric masking to suppress background clutter, (2) Directional Feature Aggregation (DFA) for geometry-aware spatial reasoning, which extracts anisotropic features along directions inferred from the visible arm and (3) Temporal Dynamics Refinement (TDR) to smooth and correct predictions via motion continuity. Extensive evaluations validate our approach: StableIDM improves strict action accuracy by 12.1% under severe truncation on the AgiBot benchmark, and increases average task success by 9.7% in real-robot replay. Moreover, it boosts end-to-end grasp success by 11.5% when decoding video-generated plans, and improves downstream VLA real-robot success by 17.6% when functioning as an automatic annotator. These results demonstrate that StableIDM provides a robust and scalable backbone for both policy execution and data generation in embodied artificial intelligence.