# Beyond Pick-and-Place: Tackling Robotic Stacking of Diverse Shapes

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.06192 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.06192/

## Key facts

- Cited by 71 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 47 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Oct 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 47)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Domain-Adversarial Training of Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.07818/) (2015)
- [Transformer-XL: Attentive Language Models Beyond a Fixed-Length Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02860/) (2019)
- [Domain Randomization for Transferring Deep Neural Networks from Simulation to the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06907/) (2017)
- [Adversarial Discriminative Domain Adaptation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.05464/) (2017)
- [Off-Policy Deep Reinforcement Learning without Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.02900/) (2018)
- [A Distributional Perspective on Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06887/) (2017)
- [QT-Opt: Scalable Deep Reinforcement Learning for Vision-Based Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.10293/) (2018)
- [Learning Dexterous In-Hand Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1808.00177/) (2018)
- [Sim-to-Real Transfer of Robotic Control with Dynamics Randomization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.06537/) (2017)
- [AWAC: Accelerating Online Reinforcement Learning with Offline Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09359/) (2020)
- [Policy Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.06295/) (2015)
- [Maximum a Posteriori Policy Optimisation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.06920/) (2018)
- [Learning Hand-Eye Coordination for Robotic Grasping with Deep Learning and Large-Scale Data Collection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1603.02199/) (2016)
- [Critic Regularized Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.15134/) (2020)
- [Safe and Efficient Off-Policy Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.02647/) (2016)
- [Dex-Net 2.0: Deep Learning to Plan Robust Grasps with Synthetic Point Clouds and Analytic Grasp Metrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.09312/) (2017)
- [Asymmetric Actor Critic for Image-Based Robot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.06542/) (2017)
- [CAD2RL: Real Single-Image Flight without a Single Real Image](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.04201/) (2016)
- [One-Shot Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07326/) (2017)
- [Supersizing Self-supervision: Learning to Grasp from 50K Tries and 700 Robot Hours](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.06825/) (2015)
- [Deep Dynamics Models for Learning Dexterous Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.11652/) (2019)
- [Sim-to-Real via Sim-to-Sim: Data-efficient Robotic Grasping via Randomized-to-Canonical Adaptation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1812.07252/) (2018)
- [Learning by Playing - Solving Sparse Reward Tasks from Scratch](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.10567/) (2018)
- [OSQP: An Operator Splitting Solver for Quadratic Programs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.08013/) (2017)
- [Using Simulation and Domain Adaptation to Improve Efficiency of Deep Robotic Grasping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07857/) (2017)
- [Reinforcement and Imitation Learning for Diverse Visuomotor Skills](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1802.09564/) (2018)
- [Robotic Pick-and-Place of Novel Objects in Clutter with Multi-Affordance Grasping and Cross-Domain Image Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.01330/) (2017)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 71)

- [A Generalist Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.06175/) (2022)
- [PointOdyssey: A Large-Scale Synthetic Dataset for Long-Term Point Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15055/) (2023)
- [TAP-Vid: A Benchmark for Tracking Any Point in a Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.03726/) (2022)
- [Tracking Everything Everywhere All at Once](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05422/) (2023)
- [SpatialTracker: Tracking Any 2D Pixels in 3D Space](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.04319/) (2024)
- [Scaling Robot Learning with Semantically Imagined Experience](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11550/) (2023)
- [Deep Reinforcement Learning for Robotics: A Survey of Real-World Successes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.03539/) (2024)
- [FurnitureBench: Reproducible Real-World Benchmark for Long-Horizon Complex Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12821/) (2023)
- [Q-Transformer: Scalable Offline Reinforcement Learning via Autoregressive Q-Functions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10150/) (2023)
- [RoboCat: A Self-Improving Generalist Agent for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.11706/) (2023)
- [Toward General-Purpose Robots via Foundation Models: A Survey and Meta-Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.08782/) (2023)
- [Bootstrap Your Own Skills: Learning to Solve New Tasks with Large Language Model Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10021/) (2023)
- [Local All-Pair Correspondence for Point Tracking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15420/) (2024)
- [DELTA: Dense Efficient Long-range 3D Tracking for any video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.24211/) (2024)
- [Dense Optical Tracking: Connecting the Dots](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.00786/) (2023)
- [When to Trust Your Simulator: Dynamics-Aware Hybrid Offline-and-Online Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.13464/) (2022)
- [AllTracker: Efficient Dense Point Tracking at High Resolution](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07310/) (2025)
- [Towards A Unified Agent with Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09668/) (2023)
- [NeRF2Real: Sim2real Transfer of Vision-guided Bipedal Motion Skills using Neural Radiance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.04932/) (2022)
- [JUICER: Data-Efficient Imitation Learning for Robotic Assembly](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.03729/) (2024)
- [Offline Actor-Critic Reinforcement Learning Scales to Large Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.05546/) (2024)
- [Offline Reinforcement Learning for Visual Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08244/) (2022)
- [Lossless Adaptation of Pretrained Vision Models For Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06600/) (2023)
- [Learning to Grasp the Ungraspable with Emergent Extrinsic Dexterity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.01500/) (2022)
- [Learning Transferable Motor Skills with Hierarchical Latent Mixture Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05062/) (2021)
- [Hyperbolic Deep Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01542/) (2022)
- [Generalization with Lossy Affordances: Leveraging Broad Offline Data for Learning Visuomotor Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06601/) (2022)
- [DriveTrack: A Benchmark for Long-Range Point Tracking in Real-World Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09523/) (2023)
- [Compositional Multi-Object Reinforcement Learning with Linear Relation Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.13388/) (2022)
- [FOCUS: Object-Centric World Models for Robotics Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.02427/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We study the problem of robotic stacking with objects of complex geometry. We propose a challenging and diverse set of such objects that was carefully designed to require strategies beyond a simple "pick-and-place" solution. Our method is a reinforcement learning (RL) approach combined with vision-based interactive policy distillation and simulation-to-reality transfer. Our learned policies can efficiently handle multiple object combinations in the real world and exhibit a large variety of stacking skills. In a large experimental study, we investigate what choices matter for learning such general vision-based agents in simulation, and what affects optimal transfer to the real robot. We then leverage data collected by such policies and improve upon them with offline RL. A video and a blog post of our work are provided as supplementary material.