Choose What to Observe: Task-Aware Semantic-Geometric Representations for Visuomotor Policy

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ding, Haoran, Ma, Liang, Yang, Yaxun, Yang, Wen, Liu, Tianyu, Duan, Anqing, Liang, Xiaodan, Song, Dezhen, Laptev, Ivan, Nakamura, Yoshihiko
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Ding, Haoran
Ma, Liang
Yang, Yaxun
Yang, Wen
Liu, Tianyu
Duan, Anqing
Liang, Xiaodan
Song, Dezhen
Laptev, Ivan
Nakamura, Yoshihiko
author_facet Ding, Haoran
Ma, Liang
Yang, Yaxun
Yang, Wen
Liu, Tianyu
Duan, Anqing
Liang, Xiaodan
Song, Dezhen
Laptev, Ivan
Nakamura, Yoshihiko
contents Visuomotor policies learned from demonstrations often overfit to nuisance visual factors in raw RGB observations, resulting in brittle behavior under appearance shifts such as background changes and object recoloring. We propose a task-aware observation interface that canonicalizes visual input into a shared representation, improving robustness to out-of-distribution (OOD) appearance changes without modifying or fine-tuning the policy. Given an RGB image and an open-vocabulary specification of task-relevant entities, we use SAM3 to segment the target object and robot/gripper. We construct an L0 observation by repainting segmented entities with predefined semantic colors on a constant background. For tasks requiring stronger geometric cues, we further inject monocular depth from Depth Anything 3 into the segmented regions via depth-guided overwrite, yielding a unified semantic--geometric observation (L1) that remains a standard 3-channel, image-like input. We evaluate on RoboMimic (Lift), ManiSkill YCB grasping under clutter, four RLBench tasks under controlled appearance shifts, and two real-world Franka tasks (ReachX and CloseCabinet). Across benchmarks and policy backbones (Flow Matching Policy and SmolVLA), our interface preserves in-distribution performance while substantially improving robustness under OOD visual shifts.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_07875
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Choose What to Observe: Task-Aware Semantic-Geometric Representations for Visuomotor Policy
Ding, Haoran
Ma, Liang
Yang, Yaxun
Yang, Wen
Liu, Tianyu
Duan, Anqing
Liang, Xiaodan
Song, Dezhen
Laptev, Ivan
Nakamura, Yoshihiko
Robotics
Visuomotor policies learned from demonstrations often overfit to nuisance visual factors in raw RGB observations, resulting in brittle behavior under appearance shifts such as background changes and object recoloring. We propose a task-aware observation interface that canonicalizes visual input into a shared representation, improving robustness to out-of-distribution (OOD) appearance changes without modifying or fine-tuning the policy. Given an RGB image and an open-vocabulary specification of task-relevant entities, we use SAM3 to segment the target object and robot/gripper. We construct an L0 observation by repainting segmented entities with predefined semantic colors on a constant background. For tasks requiring stronger geometric cues, we further inject monocular depth from Depth Anything 3 into the segmented regions via depth-guided overwrite, yielding a unified semantic--geometric observation (L1) that remains a standard 3-channel, image-like input. We evaluate on RoboMimic (Lift), ManiSkill YCB grasping under clutter, four RLBench tasks under controlled appearance shifts, and two real-world Franka tasks (ReachX and CloseCabinet). Across benchmarks and policy backbones (Flow Matching Policy and SmolVLA), our interface preserves in-distribution performance while substantially improving robustness under OOD visual shifts.
title Choose What to Observe: Task-Aware Semantic-Geometric Representations for Visuomotor Policy
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.07875