Is Diversity All You Need for Scalable Robotic Manipulation?

Data scaling has driven remarkable success in foundation models for natural language processing (NLP) and computer vision (CV), yet the principles of effective data scaling in robotic manipulation remain insufficiently understood. In this work, we investigate the nuanced role of data diversity in robot learning by examining three critical dimensions - task (what to do), embodiment (which robot to use), and expert (who demonstrates) - challenging the conventional intuition of 'more diverse is better.' Throughout extensive experiments on various robot platforms, we reveal that first, task diversity proves more critical than per-task demonstration quantity, with scene diversity playing a more important role than skill diversity for robustness and generalization under distribution shifts, second, multiembodiment pretraining data are nonessential for cross-embodiment transfer - models trained on high-quality single-embodiment data can efficiently transfer to different platforms, showing desirable scaling property during fine-tuning and its potential of replacing large-scale multiembodiment pretraining, and third, expert diversity, arising from individual operational preferences and stochastic variations in human demonstrations, can be confounding to policy learning, with action rate multimodality emerging as a key contributing factor. Based on this insight, we propose a distribution debiasing method to mitigate action rate ambiguity, the yielding GO-1-Pro achieves substantial performance gains of 15%, equivalent to using 2.5× pretraining data. Collectively, these findings provide new perspectives and offer practical guidance on how to scale robotic manipulation datasets effectively. The code will be released.