Start Right, Arrive Right: Asynchronous Execution via Initial Noise Selection

arXiv:2606.19774v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Action chunking enables robot policies to produce temporally coherent behavior, but generating multi-step action sequences with flow-based policies incurs latency that is incompatible with real-time control. Under asynchronous execution, the robot continues executing the current chunk while the next one is generated, causing even minor delays to create inconsistencies at chunk boundaries. Existing methods address this problem by steering generation toward the already executed action prefix. We instead show that prefix consistency can be achieved by selecting an appropriate initial noise before generation begins, allowing the unmodified flow ODE to produce a coherent next chunk. This establishes initial-noise selection as a complementary approach to gradient-based asynchronous execution. We introduce extbf{PAINT}, a training-free method that finds this noise via backward Euler inversion and constructs the final chunk through a repainting rule. In summary, exttt{PAINT} requires no gradients, retraining, or policy modification; and achieves task performance comparable to RTC while improving prefix consistency across extit{12 simulated benchmarks} and extit{6 real-world manipulation tasks} spanning single-arm, bimanual, and humanoid embodiments. Project site is available at: ~href{https://paint-action-chunking.github.io}{exttt{https://paint-action-chunking.github.io}}.

Source: arXiv cs.RO | 2026-10-14