aiqbench analysis
SeeR-VLA advances Vision-Language-Action models by explicitly converting implicit 3D geometry in RGB images into robot-centric pointmaps, significantly boosting task success rates across diverse environments. This approach enhances spatial reasoning without increasing token count, demonstrating that aligning coordinate frames with the robot's end-effector yields superior performance over standard camera-frame representations.
See like a Robot: Robot-Centric Pointmaps for VLA Models
arXiv:2607.11498v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Vision-language-action (VLA) models require 3D spatial reasoning, yet RGB observations encode robot-object geometry only implicitly. Lifting depth with camera intrinsics makes this geometry explicit as dense, image-aligned pointmaps, but their camera-frame coordinates depend on camera placement. We propose SeeR-VLA, which transforms pointmaps into a robot-centric frame with an end-effector origin and robot-base-aligned axes. An encoder initialized from pretrained RGB weights extracts pointmap features, which are added to corresponding RGB tokens without increasing the token count. Across 24 RoboCasa tasks and four real-world tasks, SeeR-VLA improves average success over RGB-only $\pi_{0.5}$ by 6.4 and 32.5 percentage points, respectively. It also exceeds the strongest evaluated 3D-augmented baseline, PointVLA, by 3.5 and 23.7 percentage points, respectively. Beyond these gains, our ablations clarify how coordinate choices affect VLA performance, showing that end-effector centering is most effective with robot-base-aligned axes. The benefits grow as training viewpoints diversify, highlighting the importance of using robot-frame pointmaps when learning from diverse camera configurations.
Abstract:Vision-language-action (VLA) models require 3D spatial reasoning, yet RGB observations encode robot-object geometry only implicitly. Lifting depth with camera intrinsics makes this geometry explicit as dense, image-aligned pointmaps, but their camera-frame coordinates depend on camera placement. We propose SeeR-VLA, which transforms pointmaps into a robot-centric frame with an end-effector origin and robot-base-aligned axes. An encoder initialized from pretrained RGB weights extracts pointmap features, which are added to corresponding RGB tokens without increasing the token count. Across 24 RoboCasa tasks and four real-world tasks, SeeR-VLA improves average success over RGB-only $\pi_{0.5}$ by 6.4 and 32.5 percentage points, respectively. It also exceeds the strongest evaluated 3D-augmented baseline, PointVLA, by 3.5 and 23.7 percentage points, respectively. Beyond these gains, our ablations clarify how coordinate choices affect VLA performance, showing that end-effector centering is most effective with robot-base-aligned axes. The benefits grow as training viewpoints diversify, highlighting the importance of using robot-frame pointmaps when learning from diverse camera configurations.
Robotics (cs.RO); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI)
arXiv:2607.11498 [cs.RO]
(or arXiv:2607.11498v2 [cs.RO] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.11498 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite
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Full text under the publisher's open licence · 249 words
