# ManiSkill: Generalizable Manipulation Skill Benchmark with Large-Scale Demonstrations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.14483 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.14483/

## Key facts

- Cited by 197 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 61 of its 79 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Jul 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 61)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [PointNet: Deep Learning on Point Sets for 3D Classification and Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.00593/) (2016)
- [PointNet++: Deep Hierarchical Feature Learning on Point Sets in a Metric Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.02413/) (2017)
- [ShapeNet: An Information-Rich 3D Model Repository](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03012/) (2015)
- [CARLA: An Open Urban Driving Simulator](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.03938/) (2017)
- [Addressing Function Approximation Error in Actor-Critic Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.09477/) (2018)
- [Offline Reinforcement Learning: Tutorial, Review, and Perspectives on Open Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.01643/) (2020)
- [Conservative Q-Learning for Offline Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.04779/) (2020)
- [OpenAI Gym](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.01540/) (2016)
- [Generative Adversarial Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.03476/) (2016)
- [Point Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00931/) (2020)
- [D4RL: Datasets for Deep Data-Driven Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.07219/) (2020)
- [Off-Policy Deep Reinforcement Learning without Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02900/) (2018)
- [Soft Actor-Critic Algorithms and Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.05905/) (2018)
- [4D Spatio-Temporal ConvNets: Minkowski Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08755/) (2019)
- [KPConv: Flexible and Deformable Convolution for Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.08889/) (2019)
- [Meta-World: A Benchmark and Evaluation for Multi-Task and Meta Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10897/) (2019)
- [Habitat: A Platform for Embodied AI Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.01201/) (2019)
- [Hindsight Experience Replay](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.01495/) (2017)
- [A Minimalist Approach to Offline Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.06860/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Training of Deep Visuomotor Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.00702/) (2015)
- [AI2-THOR: An Interactive 3D Environment for Visual AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.05474/) (2017)
- [QT-Opt: Scalable Deep Reinforcement Learning for Vision-Based Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.10293/) (2018)
- [Learning Complex Dexterous Manipulation with Deep Reinforcement Learning and Demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.10087/) (2017)
- [RLBench: The Robot Learning Benchmark & Learning Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12271/) (2019)
- [Deep Hough Voting for 3D Object Detection in Point Clouds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09664/) (2019)
- [SAPIEN: A SimulAted Part-based Interactive ENvironment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.08515/) (2020)
- [PartNet: A Large-scale Benchmark for Fine-grained and Hierarchical Part-level 3D Object Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02713/) (2018)
- [robosuite: A Modular Simulation Framework and Benchmark for Robot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.12293/) (2020)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 197)

- [LIBERO: Benchmarking Knowledge Transfer for Lifelong Robot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.03310/) (2023)
- [BridgeData V2: A Dataset for Robot Learning at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12952/) (2023)
- [Evaluating Real-World Robot Manipulation Policies in Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05941/) (2024)
- [ProcTHOR: Large-Scale Embodied AI Using Procedural Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.06994/) (2022)
- [HOI4D: A 4D Egocentric Dataset for Category-Level Human-Object Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01577/) (2022)
- [ManiSkill2: A Unified Benchmark for Generalizable Manipulation Skills](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04659/) (2023)
- [MimicGen: A Data Generation System for Scalable Robot Learning using Human Demonstrations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17596/) (2023)
- [LIBERO-Plus: In-depth Robustness Analysis of Vision-Language-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.13626/) (2025)
- [Diffusion-based Generation, Optimization, and Planning in 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.06015/) (2023)
- [ManiSkill3: GPU Parallelized Robotics Simulation and Rendering for Generalizable Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00425/) (2024)
- [Habitat 3.0: A Co-Habitat for Humans, Avatars and Robots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13724/) (2023)
- [RoboGen: Towards Unleashing Infinite Data for Automated Robot Learning via Generative Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.01455/) (2023)
- [VLABench: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Language-Conditioned Robotics Manipulation with Long-Horizon Reasoning Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.18194/) (2024)
- [Agent AI: Surveying the Horizons of Multimodal Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03568/) (2024)
- [BEHAVIOR-1K: A Human-Centered, Embodied AI Benchmark with 1,000 Everyday Activities and Realistic Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.09227/) (2024)
- [Scaling Proprioceptive-Visual Learning with Heterogeneous Pre-trained Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.20537/) (2024)
- [Data Scaling Laws in Imitation Learning for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18647/) (2024)
- [GAPartNet: Cross-Category Domain-Generalizable Object Perception and Manipulation via Generalizable and Actionable Parts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05272/) (2022)
- [SceneVerse: Scaling 3D Vision-Language Learning for Grounded Scene Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.09340/) (2024)
- [PhyScene: Physically Interactable 3D Scene Synthesis for Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09465/) (2024)
- [UniDexGrasp: Universal Robotic Dexterous Grasping via Learning Diverse Proposal Generation and Goal-Conditioned Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.00938/) (2023)
- [UniDexGrasp++: Improving Dexterous Grasping Policy Learning via Geometry-aware Curriculum and Iterative Generalist-Specialist Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.00464/) (2023)
- [HomeRobot: Open-Vocabulary Mobile Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11565/) (2023)
- [DexPoint: Generalizable Point Cloud Reinforcement Learning for Sim-to-Real Dexterous Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.09423/) (2022)
- [Vision-Language-Action Models for Robotics: A Review Towards Real-World Applications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.07077/) (2025)
- [Dita: Scaling Diffusion Transformer for Generalist Vision-Language-Action Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.19757/) (2025)
- [Policy Decorator: Model-Agnostic Online Refinement for Large Policy Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13630/) (2024)
- [VQ-VLA: Improving Vision-Language-Action Models via Scaling Vector-Quantized Action Tokenizers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.01016/) (2025)
- [GeoVLA: Empowering 3D Representations in Vision-Language-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.09071/) (2025)
- [ARNOLD: A Benchmark for Language-Grounded Task Learning With Continuous States in Realistic 3D Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04321/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Object manipulation from 3D visual inputs poses many challenges on building generalizable perception and policy models. However, 3D assets in existing benchmarks mostly lack the diversity of 3D shapes that align with real-world intra-class complexity in topology and geometry. Here we propose SAPIEN Manipulation Skill Benchmark (ManiSkill) to benchmark manipulation skills over diverse objects in a full-physics simulator. 3D assets in ManiSkill include large intra-class topological and geometric variations. Tasks are carefully chosen to cover distinct types of manipulation challenges. Latest progress in 3D vision also makes us believe that we should customize the benchmark so that the challenge is inviting to researchers working on 3D deep learning. To this end, we simulate a moving panoramic camera that returns ego-centric point clouds or RGB-D images. In addition, we would like ManiSkill to serve a broad set of researchers interested in manipulation research. Besides supporting the learning of policies from interactions, we also support learning-from-demonstrations (LfD) methods, by providing a large number of high-quality demonstrations (~36,000 successful trajectories, ~1.5M point cloud/RGB-D frames in total). We provide baselines using 3D deep learning and LfD algorithms. All code of our benchmark (simulator, environment, SDK, and baselines) is open-sourced, and a challenge facing interdisciplinary researchers will be held based on the benchmark.