Diffusion Transformer Policy: Scaling Diffusion Transformer for Generalist Vision-Language-Action Learning

Recent large vision-language action models pretrained on diverse robot datasets have demonstrated the potential for generalizing to new environments with a few in-domain data. However, those approaches usually predict individual discretized or continuous action by a small action head, which limits the ability in handling diverse action spaces. In contrast, we model the continuous action sequence with a large multi-modal diffusion transformer, dubbed as Diffusion Transformer Policy, in which we directly denoise action chunks by a large transformer model rather than a small action head for action embedding. By leveraging the scaling capability of transformers, the proposed approach can effectively model continuous end-effector actions across large diverse robot datasets, and achieve better generalization performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and generalization of Diffusion Transformer Policy on Maniskill2, Libero, Calvin and SimplerEnv, as well as the real-world Franka arm, achieving consistent better performance on Real-to-Sim benchmark SimplerEnv, real-world Franka Arm and Libero compared to OpenVLA and Octo. Specifically, without bells and whistles, the proposed approach achieves state-of-the-art performance with only a single third-view camera stream in the Calvin task ABC->D, improving the average number of tasks completed in a row of 5 to 3.6, and the pretraining stage significantly facilitates the success sequence length on the Calvin by over 1.2. Project Page: https://zhihou7.github.io/dit_policy_vla/