Frequency-Guided Action Diffusion via Sub-Frequency Manifold Traversal

1University of Pennsylvania

Learning visuomotor policies via behavior cloning typically involves mimicking expert demonstrations collected by human operators. However, natural human demonstrations inherently contain high-frequency noise, such as intermittent jerks, pauses, and action jitter. Training policies to directly imitate these raw trajectories inevitably causes the model to inherit these suboptimal behaviors. This pathology is particularly pronounced in diffusion-based policies, where iterative denoising steps can inadvertently amplify high-frequency artifacts at the expense of meaningful fine-grained details. To address these limitations, we present a novel frequency-based algorithm that enables implicit spectral maneuvering and smooth action generation. Our method, Frequency Guidance Operator (FGO), steers the generation process of diffusion polices by progressively driving the noisy samples through intermediate sub-frequency manifolds with expanding spectral bands. Validated on 13 robotic manipulation tasks from 4 benchmarks, FGO achieves superior performance in enhancing action smoothness and temporal consistency while preserving the fine-grained details necessary for successful task execution.


Simulated Environments & Tasks

Benchmark Results
Method / Task Robosuite MimicGen Average
Lift Stack Can Square Three Piece Assembly Stack Three
DP3
88.7±4.2
72.0±2.0
64.7±1.2
36.7±1.2
35.3±6.4
20.0±3.5
52.9
DiT-Policy
90.7±4.2
68.7±7.6
64.7±3.1
34.7±2.3
37.3±7.6
18.7±5.0
52.5
FreqPolicy
89.3±1.2
71.3±1.2
63.3±2.3
36.0±3.5
27.3±8.1
22.0±4.0
51.5
FGO (Ours)
92.7±3.1
79.3±3.1
66.0±0.0
36.7±3.1
39.3±7.0
25.3±3.1
56.6

Table 1: Comparison of success rates (%) on the Robosuite and MimicGen benchmarks. Results are computed across 3 training seeds.

Method / Task Adroit DexArt Average
Hammer Door Pen Laptop Toilet Faucet Bucket
DP3
100.0±0.0
61.3±7.6
46.0±5.3
77.3±5.0
60.7±4.2
21.3±4.2
24.7±2.3
55.9
DiT-Policy
100.0±0.0
63.3±7.6
52.0±2.0
75.3±3.1
63.3±5.0
20.7±3.1
19.3±3.1
56.3
FreqPolicy
98.7±1.2
68.0±3.5
52.0±3.5
78.0±8.0
58.7±4.6
20.7±5.0
18.7±3.1
56.4
FGO (Ours)
100.0±0.0
69.3±2.3
55.3±1.2
81.3±6.4
66.7±1.2
24.0±3.5
25.3±2.3
60.3

Table 2: Comparison of success rates (%) on the Adroit and DexArt benchmarks. Results are computed across 3 training seeds.

Method ATV ↓ (×10-3 rad/s) JerkRMS ↓ (rad/s3) Training Time ↓ (GPU h) Inference Speed ↓ (ms)
DP3
14.83±0.17
50.87±1.27
0.47
39.49
DiT-Policy
14.84±0.22
51.01±1.16
0.42
17.20
FreqPolicy
15.25±0.39
46.91±1.58
0.35
33.49
FGO (Ours)
14.76±0.17
40.79±0.46
0.48
44.22

Table 3: Comparison of Action Total Variation (ATV), JerkRMS, training time, and inference speed.


BibTex

@article{wang2026fgo,
  author    = {Wang, Junlin},
  title     = {Frequency-Guided Action Diffusion via Sub-Frequency Manifold Traversal},
  journal   = {arXiv preprint},
  year      = {2026},
}