# Action Representations in Robotics: A Taxonomy and Systematic Classification

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.04317 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.04317/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 12 Sep 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Action Tokenizer Matters in In-Context Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.01206/) (2025)
- [Towards Long-horizon Embodied Agents with Tool-Aligned Vision-Language-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.13119/) (2026)
- [A Glimpse in ChatGPT Capabilities and its impact for AI research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06087/) (2023)
- [SilentDrift: Exploiting Action Chunking for Stealthy Backdoor Attacks on Vision-Language-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.14323/) (2026)
- [Intrinsically Motivated Open-Ended Multi-Task Learning Using Transfer Learning to Discover Task Hierarchy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09854/) (2021)
- [Robots Learn Increasingly Complex Tasks with Intrinsic Motivation and Automatic Curriculum Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.10222/) (2022)
- [A Hierarchical Spatiotemporal Action Tokenizer for In-Context Imitation Learning in Robotics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.15215/) (2026)
- [Unsupervised Learning of Effective Actions in Robotics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02728/) (2024)
- [Pix2Act: Image-Space Manipulation Policies with Equivariant Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.11167/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Understanding and defining the meaning of "action" is substantial for robotics research. This becomes utterly evident when aiming at equipping autonomous robots with robust manipulation skills for action execution. Unfortunately, to this day we still lack both a clear understanding of the concept of an action and a set of established criteria that ultimately characterize an action. In this survey we thus first review existing ideas and theories on the notion and meaning of action. Subsequently we discuss the role of action in robotics and attempt to give a seminal definition of action in accordance with its use in robotics research. Given this definition we then introduce a taxonomy for categorizing action representations in robotics along various dimensions. Finally, we provide a systematic literature survey on action representations in robotics where we categorize relevant literature along our taxonomy. After discussing the current state of the art we conclude with an outlook towards promising research directions.