Choose What to Manipulate: Revealing Data Scaling Laws in Bounding-Box Guided Policies for Semantic Manipulation

arXiv:2602.11885v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Diffusion-based policies generalize poorly in semantic manipulation, a key obstacle to real-world deployment, because text-only instructions cannot reliably steer the policy toward the target object in cluttered, dynamic scenes. We instead use bounding-box instructions to specify the target directly, and study how performance scales with data. To this end, we build Label-UMI, a handheld segmentation device with an automated annotation pipeline for efficiently collecting semantically labeled demonstrations, and propose a semantic-motion-decoupled framework that couples object detection with a bounding-box-guided diffusion policy; a first-frame anchoring mechanism keeps execution robust to missed detections and noisy boxes. We find that generalization follows a bounded, saturating data-scaling law with diminishing returns, validated on four real-world tasks with 6,400 demonstrations, and distill an object-diversity-first collection strategy reaching 85% success in cluttered scenes. All data and code will be released.

Source: arXiv cs.RO | 2026-08-03