Papers › Act3D: 3D Feature Field Transformers for Multi-Task Robotic Manipulation

Act3D: 3D Feature Field Transformers for Multi-Task Robotic Manipulation

30 Jun 2023arXiv:2306.17817archive 2025-07-28

Theophile Gervet, Zhou Xian, Nikolaos Gkanatsios, Katerina Fragkiadaki

3D perceptual representations are well suited for robot manipulation as they easily encode occlusions and simplify spatial reasoning. Many manipulation tasks require high spatial precision in end-effector pose prediction, which typically demands high-resolution 3D feature grids that are computationally expensive to process. As a result, most manipulation policies operate directly in 2D, foregoing 3D inductive biases. In this paper, we introduce Act3D, a manipulation policy transformer that represents the robot's workspace using a 3D feature field with adaptive resolutions dependent on the task at hand. The model lifts 2D pre-trained features to 3D using sensed depth, and attends to them to compute features for sampled 3D points. It samples 3D point grids in a coarse to fine manner, featurizes them using relative-position attention, and selects where to focus the next round of point sampling. In this way, it efficiently computes 3D action maps of high spatial resolution. Act3D sets a new state-of-the-art in RL-Bench, an established manipulation benchmark, where it achieves 10% absolute improvement over the previous SOTA 2D multi-view policy on 74 RLBench tasks and 22% absolute improvement with 3x less compute over the previous SOTA 3D policy. We quantify the importance of relative spatial attention, large-scale vision-language pre-trained 2D backbones, and weight tying across coarse-to-fine attentions in ablative experiments. Code and videos are available on our project website: https://act3d.github.io/.

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Code

nickgkan/3d_diffuser_actor mentioned on GitHubpytorchMIT report

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Tasks

Action DetectionPose PredictionRobot ManipulationSpatial Reasoning

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

TaskDatasetModelMetricValueRank at snapshotLeaderboardReport
Robot Manipulation RLBench Act3D Input Image Size 256 #9 of 18 Archive leaderboard report
Robot Manipulation RLBench Act3D Succ. Rate (18 tasks, 10 demo/task) 48 #9 of 18 Archive leaderboard report
Robot Manipulation RLBench Act3D Succ. Rate (18 tasks, 100 demo/task) 65 #9 of 18 Archive leaderboard report
Robot Manipulation RLBench Act3D Training Time (V100 x 8 x day) 5 #9 of 18 Archive leaderboard report

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Methods

Absolute Position EncodingsAdamAttentionBPEDense ConnectionsDropoutFocusLabel SmoothingLayer NormalizationLinear LayerMulti-Head AttentionPosition-Wise Feed-Forward LayerResidual ConnectionSoftmaxTransformerWeight Tying

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