# Perceiver-Actor: A Multi-Task Transformer for Robotic Manipulation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.05451 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.05451/

## Key facts

- Cited by 551 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 89 of its 116 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Sep 2022.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 89)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [U-Net: Convolutional Networks for Biomedical Image Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1505.04597/) (2015)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [End-to-End Object Detection with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.12872/) (2020)
- [Mask R-CNN](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06870/) (2017)
- [Instant Neural Graphics Primitives with a Multiresolution Hash Encoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.05989/) (2022)
- [Do As I Can, Not As I Say: Grounding Language in Robotic Affordances](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.01691/) (2022)
- [FiLM: Visual Reasoning with a General Conditioning Layer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.07871/) (2017)
- [Vision Transformers for Dense Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.13413/) (2021)
- [Plenoxels: Radiance Fields without Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.05131/) (2021)
- [Decision Transformer: Reinforcement Learning via Sequence Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01345/) (2021)
- [ALFWorld: Aligning Text and Embodied Environments for Interactive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03768/) (2020)
- [Meta-World: A Benchmark and Evaluation for Multi-Task and Meta Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10897/) (2019)
- [Perceiver: General Perception with Iterative Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03206/) (2021)
- [Language Models as Zero-Shot Planners: Extracting Actionable Knowledge for Embodied Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.07207/) (2022)
- [Object-Centric Learning with Slot Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.15055/) (2020)
- [End-to-End Training of Deep Visuomotor Policies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1504.00702/) (2015)
- [MDETR -- Modulated Detection for End-to-End Multi-Modal Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.12763/) (2021)
- [A Generalist Agent](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.06175/) (2022)
- [Efficient Transformers: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.06732/) (2020)
- [PoseCNN: A Convolutional Neural Network for 6D Object Pose Estimation in Cluttered Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.00199/) (2017)
- [QT-Opt: Scalable Deep Reinforcement Learning for Vision-Based Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.10293/) (2018)
- [R3M: A Universal Visual Representation for Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12601/) (2022)
- [RLBench: The Robot Learning Benchmark & Learning Environment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.12271/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 551)

- [RT-2: Vision-Language-Action Models Transfer Web Knowledge to Robotic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.15818/) (2023)
- [PaLM-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03378/) (2023)
- [RT-1: Robotics Transformer for Real-World Control at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06817/) (2022)
- [Learning Fine-Grained Bimanual Manipulation with Low-Cost Hardware](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13705/) (2023)
- [Octo: An Open-Source Generalist Robot Policy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12213/) (2024)
- [VoxPoser: Composable 3D Value Maps for Robotic Manipulation with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.05973/) (2023)
- [SpatialVLA: Exploring Spatial Representations for Visual-Language-Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15830/) (2025)
- [YOLOv9: Learning What You Want to Learn Using Programmable Gradient Information](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13616/) (2024)
- [CogACT: A Foundational Vision-Language-Action Model for Synergizing Cognition and Action in Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.19650/) (2024)
- [VIMA: General Robot Manipulation with Multimodal Prompts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03094/) (2022)
- [Mobile ALOHA: Learning Bimanual Mobile Manipulation with Low-Cost Whole-Body Teleoperation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02117/) (2024)
- [Unleashing Large-Scale Video Generative Pre-training for Visual Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.13139/) (2023)
- [Robotic Control via Embodied Chain-of-Thought Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.08693/) (2024)
- [ManiSkill2: A Unified Benchmark for Generalizable Manipulation Skills](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04659/) (2023)
- [ChatGPT for Robotics: Design Principles and Model Abilities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17582/) (2023)
- [GR-2: A Generative Video-Language-Action Model with Web-Scale Knowledge for Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06158/) (2024)
- [3D Diffuser Actor: Policy Diffusion with 3D Scene Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10885/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Vision-Language-Action Models for Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14093/) (2024)
- [RoboPoint: A Vision-Language Model for Spatial Affordance Prediction for Robotics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10721/) (2024)
- [ManiSkill3: GPU Parallelized Robotics Simulation and Rendering for Generalizable Embodied AI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.00425/) (2024)
- [Michelangelo: Conditional 3D Shape Generation based on Shape-Image-Text Aligned Latent Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17115/) (2023)
- [RVT: Robotic View Transformer for 3D Object Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14896/) (2023)
- [Text2Motion: From Natural Language Instructions to Feasible Plans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12153/) (2023)
- [MimicPlay: Long-Horizon Imitation Learning by Watching Human Play](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12422/) (2023)
- [MemoryVLA: Perceptual-Cognitive Memory in Vision-Language-Action Models for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19236/) (2025)
- [LIV: Language-Image Representations and Rewards for Robotic Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00958/) (2023)
- [LLaVA-3D: A Simple yet Effective Pathway to Empowering LMMs with 3D-awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.18125/) (2024)
- [HybridVLA: Collaborative Diffusion and Autoregression in a Unified Vision-Language-Action Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10631/) (2025)
- [Scaling Robot Learning with Semantically Imagined Experience](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11550/) (2023)
- [RoboMIND: Benchmark on Multi-embodiment Intelligence Normative Data for Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13877/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Transformers have revolutionized vision and natural language processing with their ability to scale with large datasets. But in robotic manipulation, data is both limited and expensive. Can manipulation still benefit from Transformers with the right problem formulation? We investigate this question with PerAct, a language-conditioned behavior-cloning agent for multi-task 6-DoF manipulation. PerAct encodes language goals and RGB-D voxel observations with a Perceiver Transformer, and outputs discretized actions by ``detecting the next best voxel action''. Unlike frameworks that operate on 2D images, the voxelized 3D observation and action space provides a strong structural prior for efficiently learning 6-DoF actions. With this formulation, we train a single multi-task Transformer for 18 RLBench tasks (with 249 variations) and 7 real-world tasks (with 18 variations) from just a few demonstrations per task. Our results show that PerAct significantly outperforms unstructured image-to-action agents and 3D ConvNet baselines for a wide range of tabletop tasks.