ContactFlow: A video action conditioning thattransfers across embodiments

World models offer a promising route toward robot planning by enabling agents to imagine and verify the consequences of actions before execution. However, current video-based world models often struggle to capture the physical constraints that govern manipulation, particularly contact. Further, their action conditioning is often constrained to specific embodiments such as parallel grippers. We propose \emph{Contact Flow}, an embodiment-agnostic action representation that encodes manipulation through the trajectory of 3D contact points between an actor and a target object. By discarding actor-specific appearance and kinematics, Contact Flow provides a shared conditioning signal for both human demonstrations and robotic execution. Therefore, we can train a large-scale video generative model on both human and robotic object interaction videos conditioned on Contact Flow, yielding a world model that predicts physically plausible manipulation outcomes. We integrate this model into a propose-imagine-verify-act pipeline, where generated rollouts are assessed by a vision-language model before execution. Experiments on the DROID dataset and real-world tabletop manipulation tasks demonstrate that Contact Flow enables transfer between human demonstrations and different robotic embodiments.

  • Published in:
    arXiv
  • Type:
    Article
  • Authors:
    Azirar, Sami; Pallotta, Enrico; Nogga, Jan; Gall, Jürgen; Behnke, Sven; Blum, Hermann
  • Year:
    2026
  • Source:
    https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26579

Citation information

Azirar, Sami; Pallotta, Enrico; Nogga, Jan; Gall, Jürgen; Behnke, Sven; Blum, Hermann: ContactFlow: A video action conditioning thattransfers across embodiments, arXiv, 2026, July, https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.26579, Azirar.etal.2026b,

Associated Lamarr Researchers

lamarr institute person Gall Juergen - Lamarr Institute for Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Prof. Dr. Jürgen Gall

Principal Investigator Embodied AI to the profile
lamarr institute person Behnke Sven - Lamarr Institute for Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Prof. Dr. Sven Behnke

Area Chair Embodied AI to the profile
Blum Hermann - Lamarr Institute for Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Jun. Prof. Dr. Hermann Blum

Principal Investigator Embodied AI to the profile