Bootstrap Dynamic-Aware 3D Visual Representation for Scalable Robot Learning

Despite strong results on recognition and segmentation, current 3D visual pre-training methods often underperform on robotic manipulation. We attribute this gap to two factors: the lack of state–action–state dynamics modeling and the unnecessary redundancy of explicit geometric reconstruction. We introduce AFRO, a scalable self-supervised framework that learns dynamics-aware 3D representations directly from point clouds without action or label supervision. AFRO casts state prediction as a generative diffusion process and jointly models forward and inverse dynamics in a shared latent space to capture causal transition structure. To prevent feature leakage in action learning, we employ feature differencing and inverse-consistency supervision, improving the quality and stability of visual features. When combined with Diffusion Policy for control, AFRO substantially increases manipulation success rates across 16 simulated and 4 real-world tasks, outperforming existing pre-training approaches. The framework also scales favorably with data volume and task complexity. Qualitative visualizations indicate that AFRO learns semantically rich, discriminative features, offering an effective pre-training solution for dynamics-aware 3D representation learning in robotics.