LiMA: Bridging Long-term Imagination to Real-time Dexterous Manipulation via Asynchronous Diffusion

Ning Chen1,2,*, Yankai Fu1,2,*, Junkai Zhao2,†, Qianpu Sun1,
Guocai Yao2, Pengwei Wang2, Zhongyuan Wang2, Shanghang Zhang1,2,✉

1 State Key Laboratory of Multimedia Information Processing, School of Computer Science, Peking University

2 Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence

* Equal contribution  ·  Project leader  ·  Corresponding author

CoRL 2026

Abstract

Comparison of inverse dynamics models, world-action models, and LiMA

Dexterous manipulation demands long-term foresight and rapid reactive control. Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, while proficient in high-level reasoning, often lack a fine-grained understanding of physical dynamics and spatial perception. Conversely, World-Action Models (WAMs) typically suffer from high inference latency due to iterative generation. These deficiencies result in a critical temporal misalignment where the model's intent fails to adapt to rapid physical contact changes. To overcome this fundamental bottleneck, we propose LiMA, an asynchronous dual-system generative framework that systematically decouples intent planning from reactive execution. LiMA organizes computation into a multi-scale hierarchy: a slow system handles sparse long-horizon spatiotemporal intent generation, while a fast system focuses on dense high-frequency motion refinement. To align sparse intent predictions with dense action trajectories, we introduce a Latent Schrödinger Bridge Coupling mechanism that formulates refinement as an entropy-regularized probabilistic transport process. LiMA reduces inference latency by 45.8% compared with Cosmos-Policy via asynchronous decoupling. Evaluated across six bimanual dexterous manipulation tasks spanning multiple horizons, LiMA achieves an overall success rate of 70.8% and an average subtask success rate of 78.5%, while maintaining performance in unseen scenarios.

Method

LiMA architecture with Future Dreamer and Motion Refiner
  • Asynchronous Dual System

    The Future Dreamer periodically refreshes long-horizon visual and action intent, while the Motion Refiner updates fine-grained actions from the latest observations.

  • Latent Schrödinger Bridge

    A stochastic bridge uses the Dreamer's structured intent as a prior for action and visual refinement, instead of starting from unconditioned Gaussian noise.

  • Spatiotemporal Adaptive Modulation

    View-aligned modulation fuses imagined future visuals with live camera features, while the current robot state grounds each local motion correction.

Experiments

Attention visualization for the Dreamer, Refiner, and Cosmos-Policy
Attention visualization.
Six real-world bimanual dexterous manipulation tasks
Real-world task suite.

Real-World Manipulation

Comparison of LiMA and baselines on real-world tasks. Each experiment is evaluated with 20 trials.
Method Stack Cup Roll T-shirt Cook Rice Make Sandwich Make Coffee Assemble Package Latency
SRPSR SRPSR SRPSR SRPSR SRPSR SRPSR
GR00T N1.685.087.570.071.770.072.065.072.555.071.750.061.7270 ms
VPP80.080.055.056.755.060.050.061.350.056.740.048.3225 ms
InternVLA-A190.090.075.088.370.078.065.077.550.066.750.058.3360 ms
Cosmos-Policy80.082.560.070.060.067.060.071.355.063.345.051.7600 ms
LiMA (Ours)90.095.075.083.380.082.070.080.060.070.050.063.3325 ms

SR and PSR are reported in %. Inference latency is measured on an NVIDIA H100 GPU.

Generation

Radar chart comparing LiMA, Cosmos-Policy, and GR00T N1.6 on base, unseen object, unseen background, unseen lighting, and cluttered settings