# Self-Supervised Correspondence in Visuomotor Policy Learning

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1909.06933 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.06933/

## Key facts

- Cited by 107 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Robot manipulation imitation learning, one of 13 directions in Offline RL and imitation learning from data.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Sep 2019.

## Placed in

- Offline RL and imitation learning from data / [Robot manipulation imitation learning](https://mlsanity.com/offlinerl/robot-manipulation-imitation-learning/)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 107)

- [Learning Fine-Grained Bimanual Manipulation with Low-Cost Hardware](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13705/) (2023)
- [What Matters in Learning from Offline Human Demonstrations for Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.03298/) (2021)
- [CLIPort: What and Where Pathways for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12098/) (2021)
- [Socratic Models: Composing Zero-Shot Multimodal Reasoning with Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.00598/) (2022)
- [Implicit Behavioral Cloning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.00137/) (2021)
- [VIMA: General Robot Manipulation with Multimodal Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03094/) (2022)
- [Behavior Transformers: Cloning k modes with one stone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.11251/) (2022)
- [Diffusion Policy Policy Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.00588/) (2024)
- [TAP-Vid: A Benchmark for Tracking Any Point in a Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03726/) (2022)
- [Real-World Robot Learning with Masked Visual Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03109/) (2022)
- [MimicPlay: Long-Horizon Imitation Learning by Watching Human Play](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12422/) (2023)
- [How to Train Your Robot with Deep Reinforcement Learning; Lessons We've Learned](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02915/) (2021)
- [DexCap: Scalable and Portable Mocap Data Collection System for Dexterous Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07788/) (2024)
- [Reconciling Reality through Simulation: A Real-to-Sim-to-Real Approach for Robust Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.03949/) (2024)
- [VIOLA: Imitation Learning for Vision-Based Manipulation with Object Proposal Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11339/) (2022)
- [Spatial Forcing: Implicit Spatial Representation Alignment for Vision-language-action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.12276/) (2025)
- [Distilled Feature Fields Enable Few-Shot Language-Guided Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07931/) (2023)
- [XIRL: Cross-embodiment Inverse Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03911/) (2021)
- [Coarse-to-Fine Imitation Learning: Robot Manipulation from a Single Demonstration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06411/) (2021)
- [Dreamitate: Real-World Visuomotor Policy Learning via Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16862/) (2024)
- [NeRF-Supervision: Learning Dense Object Descriptors from Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01913/) (2022)
- [S4RL: Surprisingly Simple Self-Supervision for Offline Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.06326/) (2021)
- [General Flow as Foundation Affordance for Scalable Robot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.11439/) (2024)
- [You Only Demonstrate Once: Category-Level Manipulation from Single Visual Demonstration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.12716/) (2022)
- [VAT-Mart: Learning Visual Action Trajectory Proposals for Manipulating 3D ARTiculated Objects](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14440/) (2021)
- [XSkill: Cross Embodiment Skill Discovery](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09955/) (2023)
- [Unpacking Failure Modes of Generative Policies: Runtime Monitoring of Consistency and Progress](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.04640/) (2024)
- [Equivariant Diffusion Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01812/) (2024)
- [Waypoint-Based Imitation Learning for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.14326/) (2023)
- [Learning Generalizable Manipulation Policies with Object-Centric 3D Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.14386/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper we explore using self-supervised correspondence for improving the generalization performance and sample efficiency of visuomotor policy learning. Prior work has primarily used approaches such as autoencoding, pose-based losses, and end-to-end policy optimization in order to train the visual portion of visuomotor policies. We instead propose an approach using self-supervised dense visual correspondence training, and show this enables visuomotor policy learning with surprisingly high generalization performance with modest amounts of data: using imitation learning, we demonstrate extensive hardware validation on challenging manipulation tasks with as few as 50 demonstrations. Our learned policies can generalize across classes of objects, react to deformable object configurations, and manipulate textureless symmetrical objects in a variety of backgrounds, all with closed-loop, real-time vision-based policies. Simulated imitation learning experiments suggest that correspondence training offers sample complexity and generalization benefits compared to autoencoding and end-to-end training.