mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Transporter Networks: Rearranging the Visual World for Robotic Manipulation

arXiv 2010.14406 ↗First posted 27 Oct 2020cs.ROcited by 342

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Cited by 59 in Offline RL and imitation learning from data, but placed by its own abstract, which didn’t fit.

Abstract (arXiv)

Robotic manipulation can be formulated as inducing a sequence of spatial displacements: where the space being moved can encompass an object, part of an object, or end effector. In this work, we propose the Transporter Network, a simple model architecture that rearranges deep features to infer spatial displacements from visual input - which can parameterize robot actions. It makes no assumptions of objectness (e.g. canonical poses, models, or keypoints), it exploits spatial symmetries, and is orders of magnitude more sample efficient than our benchmarked alternatives in learning vision-based manipulation tasks: from stacking a pyramid of blocks, to assembling kits with unseen objects; from manipulating deformable ropes, to pushing piles of small objects with closed-loop feedback. Our method can represent complex multi-modal policy distributions and generalizes to multi-step sequential tasks, as well as 6DoF pick-and-place. Experiments on 10 simulated tasks show that it learns faster and generalizes better than a variety of end-to-end baselines, including policies that use ground-truth object poses. We validate our methods with hardware in the real world. Experiment videos and code are available at https://transporternets.github.io

Key facts. Cited by 342 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). First posted on arXiv 27 Oct 2020.

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Citing papers per year: 2021: 22; 2022: 51; 2023: 79; 2024: 88; 2025: 60; 2026: 42.

342 papers.

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  1. 2023Learning Fine-Grained Bimanual Manipulation with Low-Cost Hardwarecited by 1,490
  2. 2022Inner Monologue: Embodied Reasoning through Planning with Language Modelscited by 1,057
  3. 2021What Matters in Learning from Offline Human Demonstrations for Robot Manipulationcited by 699
  4. 2021CLIPort: What and Where Pathways for Robotic Manipulationcited by 617
  5. 2022Perceiver-Actor: A Multi-Task Transformer for Robotic Manipulationcited by 545
  6. 2022Socratic Models: Composing Zero-Shot Multimodal Reasoning with Languagecited by 513
  7. 2021Implicit Behavioral Cloningcited by 442
  8. 2022VIMA: General Robot Manipulation with Multimodal Promptscited by 403
  9. 2024RoboCasa: Large-Scale Simulation of Everyday Tasks for Generalist Robotscited by 391
  10. 2024Mobile ALOHA: Learning Bimanual Mobile Manipulation with Low-Cost Whole-Body Teleoperationcited by 377
  11. 2023ManiSkill2: A Unified Benchmark for Generalizable Manipulation Skillscited by 313
  12. 2023MimicGen: A Data Generation System for Scalable Robot Learning using Human Demonstrationscited by 308
38 more
  1. 2022Behavior Transformers: Cloning k modes with one stonecited by 299
  2. 20243D Diffuser Actor: Policy Diffusion with 3D Scene Representationscited by 278
  3. 2024A Survey on Vision-Language-Action Models for Embodied AIcited by 274
  4. 2024RoboPoint: A Vision-Language Model for Spatial Affordance Prediction for Roboticscited by 242
  5. 2022Real-World Robot Learning with Masked Visual Pre-trainingcited by 241
  6. 2023RVT: Robotic View Transformer for 3D Object Manipulationcited by 224
  7. 2024NaVid: Video-based VLM Plans the Next Step for Vision-and-Language Navigationcited by 222
  8. 2023Affordances from Human Videos as a Versatile Representation for Roboticscited by 221
  9. 2023RoboGen: Towards Unleashing Infinite Data for Automated Robot Learning via Generative Simulationcited by 206
  10. 2021Neural Descriptor Fields: SE(3)-Equivariant Object Representations for Manipulationcited by 204
  11. 2021ManiSkill: Generalizable Manipulation Skill Benchmark with Large-Scale Demonstrationscited by 193
  12. 2021Simple but Effective: CLIP Embeddings for Embodied AIcited by 191
  13. 2024PIVOT: Iterative Visual Prompting Elicits Actionable Knowledge for VLMscited by 187
  14. 2024Aligning Cyber Space with Physical World: A Comprehensive Survey on Embodied AIcited by 175
  15. 2023Look Before You Leap: Unveiling the Power of GPT-4V in Robotic Vision-Language Planningcited by 161
  16. 2024Personalizing Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback with Variational Preference Learningcited by 147
  17. 2023Structured World Models from Human Videoscited by 144
  18. 2022VIOLA: Imitation Learning for Vision-Based Manipulation with Object Proposal Priorscited by 135
  19. 2023Act3D: 3D Feature Field Transformers for Multi-Task Robotic Manipulationcited by 135
  20. 2024RVT-2: Learning Precise Manipulation from Few Demonstrationscited by 135
  21. 2021Coarse-to-Fine Q-attention: Efficient Learning for Visual Robotic Manipulation via Discretisationcited by 120
  22. 2023GenSim: Generating Robotic Simulation Tasks via Large Language Modelscited by 120
  23. 2025RoboTwin: Dual-Arm Robot Benchmark with Generative Digital Twinscited by 117
  24. 2023Instruct2Act: Mapping Multi-modality Instructions to Robotic Actions with Large Language Modelcited by 115
  25. 2024ManiGaussian: Dynamic Gaussian Splatting for Multi-task Robotic Manipulationcited by 106
  26. 2022DALL-E-Bot: Introducing Web-Scale Diffusion Models to Roboticscited by 105
  27. 2024DexMimicGen: Automated Data Generation for Bimanual Dexterous Manipulation via Imitation Learningcited by 104
  28. 2022Broken Neural Scaling Lawscited by 102
  29. 2022Grounding Language with Visual Affordances over Unstructured Datacited by 101
  30. 2023Toward General-Purpose Robots via Foundation Models: A Survey and Meta-Analysiscited by 99
  31. 2022Instruction-driven history-aware policies for robotic manipulationscited by 93
  32. 2023Large Language Models as Generalizable Policies for Embodied Taskscited by 86
  33. 2021Q-attention: Enabling Efficient Learning for Vision-based Robotic Manipulationcited by 85
  34. 2025Vision-Language-Action Models for Robotics: A Review Towards Real-World Applicationscited by 82
  35. 2022Learning and Retrieval from Prior Data for Skill-based Imitation Learningcited by 77
  36. 2022Can Wikipedia Help Offline Reinforcement Learning?cited by 76
  37. 2023XSkill: Cross Embodiment Skill Discoverycited by 74
  38. 2022VLMbench: A Compositional Benchmark for Vision-and-Language Manipulationcited by 68

50 most cited of 342 All 342 (JSON)