Visuo-Tactile Transformers for Manipulation
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Abstract (arXiv)
Learning representations in the joint domain of vision and touch can improve manipulation dexterity, robustness, and sample-complexity by exploiting mutual information and complementary cues. Here, we present Visuo-Tactile Transformers (VTTs), a novel multimodal representation learning approach suited for model-based reinforcement learning and planning. Our approach extends the Visual Transformer citedosovitskiy2021image to handle visuo-tactile feedback. Specifically, VTT uses tactile feedback together with self and cross-modal attention to build latent heatmap representations that focus attention on important task features in the visual domain. We demonstrate the efficacy of VTT for representation learning with a comparative evaluation against baselines on four simulated robot tasks and one real world block pushing task. We conduct an ablation study over the components of VTT to highlight the importance of cross-modality in representation learning.
Key facts. Cited by 43 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 38 of its 48 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 30 Sep 2022.
Builds on
38 of 48 references.
References · 38
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- 2018Making Sense of Vision and Touch: Self-Supervised Learning of Multimodal Representations for Contact-Rich Taskscited by 150
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- 2021Coupling Vision and Proprioception for Navigation of Legged Robotscited by 46
- 2021GelSlim3.0: High-Resolution Measurement of Shape, Force and Slip in a Compact Tactile-Sensing Fingercited by 39
- 2021LASER: Learning a Latent Action Space for Efficient Reinforcement Learningcited by 32
- 2021Sim-to-Real for Robotic Tactile Sensing via Physics-Based Simulation and Learned Latent Projectionscited by 27
- 2021Model-Based Reinforcement Learning via Latent-Space Collocationcited by 27
- 2022VIRDO: Visio-tactile Implicit Representations of Deformable Objectscited by 25
- 2019Imitation Learning from Video by Leveraging Proprioceptioncited by 23
- 2019Multi-modality Latent Interaction Network for Visual Question Answeringcited by 23
- 2019Soft-bubble: A highly compliant dense geometry tactile sensor for robot manipulationcited by 15
- 2018Learning Awareness Modelscited by 13
- 2021Touch-based Curiosity for Sparse-Reward Taskscited by 6
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Citing papers per year: 2023: 2; 2024: 10; 2025: 10; 2026: 21.
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- 2023General In-Hand Object Rotation with Vision and Touchcited by 87
- 20243D-ViTac: Learning Fine-Grained Manipulation with Visuo-Tactile Sensingcited by 67
- 2023Robot Synesthesia: In-Hand Manipulation with Visuotactile Sensingcited by 51
- 2024Transferable Tactile Transformers for Representation Learning Across Diverse Sensors and Taskscited by 44
- 2024Multimodal Visual-Tactile Representation Learning through Self-Supervised Contrastive Pre-Trainingcited by 30
- 2025TA-VLA: Elucidating the Design Space of Torque-aware Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 30
- 2024ManiWAV: Learning Robot Manipulation from In-the-Wild Audio-Visual Datacited by 29
- 2025Touch in the Wild: Learning Fine-Grained Manipulation with a Portable Visuo-Tactile Grippercited by 29
- 2024AnySkin: Plug-and-play Skin Sensing for Robotic Touchcited by 22
- 2024VITaL Pretraining: Visuo-Tactile Pretraining for Tactile and Non-Tactile Manipulation Policiescited by 14
- 2026TaF-VLA: Tactile-Force Alignment in Vision-Language-Action Models for Force-aware Manipulationcited by 11
- 2025Multi-Modal Manipulation via Multi-Modal Policy Consensuscited by 9
31 more
- 2024M2CURL: Sample-Efficient Multimodal Reinforcement Learning via Self-Supervised Representation Learning for Robotic Manipulationcited by 7
- 2025ConViTac: Aligning Visual-Tactile Fusion with Contrastive Representationscited by 7
- 2024Generalize by Touching: Tactile Ensemble Skill Transfer for Robotic Furniture Assemblycited by 6
- 2025Enhancing Tactile-based Reinforcement Learning for Robotic Controlcited by 5
- 2026FlexiTac: A Low-Cost, Open-Source, Scalable Tactile Sensing Solution for Robotic Systemscited by 4
- 2024Precision-Focused Reinforcement Learning Model for Robotic Object Pushingcited by 3
- 2025Multimodal Diffusion Forcing for Forceful Manipulationcited by 3
- 2026ViTaS: Visual Tactile Soft Fusion Contrastive Learning for Visuomotor Learningcited by 3
- 2026CoRE-VLA: Towards Scalable and Robust Vision-Language-Action Modeling via Conditional Routing of Expertscited by 3
- 2024AugInsert: Learning Robust Visual-Force Policies via Data Augmentation for Object Assembly Taskscited by 2
- 2025VTAO-BiManip: Masked Visual-Tactile-Action Pre-training with Object Understanding for Bimanual Dexterous Manipulationcited by 2
- 2025ViTaPEs: Visuotactile Position Encodings for Cross-Modal Alignment in Multimodal Transformerscited by 2
- 2025Self-Supervised Multisensory Pretraining for Contact-Rich Robot Reinforcement Learningcited by 2
- 2026Tactile-based Multimodal Fusion in Embodied Intelligence: A Survey of Vision, Language, and Contact-Driven Paradigmscited by 2
- 2026Seeing Touch from Motion: A Unified Modality-Aware Visuo-Tactile Policy with Tactile Motion Correlationcited by 2
- 2026FlowTouch: View-Invariant Visuo-Tactile Predictioncited by 1
- 2026DexSim2Real: Foundation Model-Guided Sim-to-Real Transfer for Generalizable Dexterous Manipulationcited by 1
- 2025DML-RAM: Deep Multimodal Learning Framework for Robotic Arm Manipulation using Pre-trained Modelscited by 0
- 2026Tactile Memory with Soft Robot: Robust Object Insertion via Masked Encoding and Soft Wristcited by 0
- 2026RAPID: Reconfigurable, Adaptive Platform for Iterative Designcited by 0
- 2026Let Robots Feel Your Touch: Visuo-Tactile Cortical Alignment for Embodied Mirror Resonancecited by 0
- 2026Spacetime Optimal-Transport Attention for Visuo-Haptic Imitation Learning of Contact-Rich Manipulationcited by 0
- 2026Beyond Binary: Sim-to-Real Dexterous Manipulation with Physics-Grounded Contact Representationcited by 0
- 2026Tac2Pix: Image-Space Visuo-Tactile Fusion for Dexterous Manipulationcited by 0
- 2026NoContactNoWorries: Estimating Contact through Vision and Proprioception for In-Hand Dexterous Manipulationcited by 0
- 2026TAP-VLA: Tactile Annotation Prompting for Vision Language Action Modelscited by 0
- 2026TACTIC: Tactile and Vision Conditioned Contact-Centric Control for Whole-Arm Manipulationcited by 0
- 2026S2A2: Audio-Visual Imitation Learning for Manipulation Tasks Using Acoustic Spatial Informationcited by 0
- 2026VT-MUSE: Multimodal Unified Sequential Visuotactile Representation Learning for Manipulationcited by 0
- 2026TAO-Force: Unifying Force-Aware Perception and Fast-Slow Control for Contact-Rich Manipulationcited by 0
- 2026What to Attend, What to Keep: Skill-Conditioned Visuotactile Representation with Progress-Guided Event Memorycited by 0
- 2026What to Attend, What to Keep: Skill-Conditioned Visuotactile Representation with Progress-Guided Event Memory29 Sep 2026
- 2026TAO-Force: Unifying Force-Aware Perception and Fast-Slow Control for Contact-Rich Manipulation16 Sep 2026
- 2026VT-MUSE: Multimodal Unified Sequential Visuotactile Representation Learning for Manipulation21 Aug 2026
- 2026S2A2: Audio-Visual Imitation Learning for Manipulation Tasks Using Acoustic Spatial Information28 Jul 2026
- 2026TACTIC: Tactile and Vision Conditioned Contact-Centric Control for Whole-Arm Manipulation10 Jul 2026
- 2026CoRE-VLA: Towards Scalable and Robust Vision-Language-Action Modeling via Conditional Routing of Experts4 Jul 2026
- 2026Seeing Touch from Motion: A Unified Modality-Aware Visuo-Tactile Policy with Tactile Motion Correlation29 Jun 2026
- 2026TAP-VLA: Tactile Annotation Prompting for Vision Language Action Models27 Jun 2026
- 2026NoContactNoWorries: Estimating Contact through Vision and Proprioception for In-Hand Dexterous Manipulation23 Jun 2026
- 2026Tac2Pix: Image-Space Visuo-Tactile Fusion for Dexterous Manipulation7 Jun 2026
- 2026Beyond Binary: Sim-to-Real Dexterous Manipulation with Physics-Grounded Contact Representation27 May 2026
- 2026Spacetime Optimal-Transport Attention for Visuo-Haptic Imitation Learning of Contact-Rich Manipulation19 May 2026
31 more
- 2026Tactile-based Multimodal Fusion in Embodied Intelligence: A Survey of Vision, Language, and Contact-Driven Paradigms17 May 2026
- 2026Let Robots Feel Your Touch: Visuo-Tactile Cortical Alignment for Embodied Mirror Resonance14 May 2026
- 2026DexSim2Real: Foundation Model-Guided Sim-to-Real Transfer for Generalizable Dexterous Manipulation3 May 2026
- 2026FlexiTac: A Low-Cost, Open-Source, Scalable Tactile Sensing Solution for Robotic Systems30 Apr 2026
- 2026FlowTouch: View-Invariant Visuo-Tactile Prediction9 Mar 2026
- 2026ViTaS: Visual Tactile Soft Fusion Contrastive Learning for Visuomotor Learning12 Feb 2026
- 2026RAPID: Reconfigurable, Adaptive Platform for Iterative Design6 Feb 2026
- 2026TaF-VLA: Tactile-Force Alignment in Vision-Language-Action Models for Force-aware Manipulation28 Jan 2026
- 2026Tactile Memory with Soft Robot: Robust Object Insertion via Masked Encoding and Soft Wrist27 Jan 2026
- 2025Self-Supervised Multisensory Pretraining for Contact-Rich Robot Reinforcement Learning18 Nov 2025
- 2025Multimodal Diffusion Forcing for Forceful Manipulation6 Nov 2025
- 2025Enhancing Tactile-based Reinforcement Learning for Robotic Control24 Oct 2025
- 2025Multi-Modal Manipulation via Multi-Modal Policy Consensus27 Sep 2025
- 2025TA-VLA: Elucidating the Design Space of Torque-aware Vision-Language-Action Models9 Sep 2025
- 2025Touch in the Wild: Learning Fine-Grained Manipulation with a Portable Visuo-Tactile Gripper20 Jul 2025
- 2025ConViTac: Aligning Visual-Tactile Fusion with Contrastive Representations25 Jun 2025
- 2025ViTaPEs: Visuotactile Position Encodings for Cross-Modal Alignment in Multimodal Transformers26 May 2025
- 2025DML-RAM: Deep Multimodal Learning Framework for Robotic Arm Manipulation using Pre-trained Models4 Apr 2025
- 2025VTAO-BiManip: Masked Visual-Tactile-Action Pre-training with Object Understanding for Bimanual Dexterous Manipulation7 Jan 2025
- 2024Precision-Focused Reinforcement Learning Model for Robotic Object Pushing13 Nov 2024
- 20243D-ViTac: Learning Fine-Grained Manipulation with Visuo-Tactile Sensing31 Oct 2024
- 2024AugInsert: Learning Robust Visual-Force Policies via Data Augmentation for Object Assembly Tasks19 Oct 2024
- 2024AnySkin: Plug-and-play Skin Sensing for Robotic Touch12 Sep 2024
- 2024ManiWAV: Learning Robot Manipulation from In-the-Wild Audio-Visual Data27 Jun 2024
- 2024Transferable Tactile Transformers for Representation Learning Across Diverse Sensors and Tasks19 Jun 2024
- 2024Generalize by Touching: Tactile Ensemble Skill Transfer for Robotic Furniture Assembly26 Apr 2024
- 2024VITaL Pretraining: Visuo-Tactile Pretraining for Tactile and Non-Tactile Manipulation Policies18 Mar 2024
- 2024M2CURL: Sample-Efficient Multimodal Reinforcement Learning via Self-Supervised Representation Learning for Robotic Manipulation30 Jan 2024
- 2024Multimodal Visual-Tactile Representation Learning through Self-Supervised Contrastive Pre-Training22 Jan 2024
- 2023Robot Synesthesia: In-Hand Manipulation with Visuotactile Sensing4 Dec 2023
- 2023General In-Hand Object Rotation with Vision and Touch18 Sep 2023
- 2024VITaL Pretraining: Visuo-Tactile Pretraining for Tactile and Non-Tactile Manipulation Policiescited by 14
- 2024Generalize by Touching: Tactile Ensemble Skill Transfer for Robotic Furniture Assemblycited by 6
- 2025Multimodal Diffusion Forcing for Forceful Manipulationcited by 3
- 2026Spacetime Optimal-Transport Attention for Visuo-Haptic Imitation Learning of Contact-Rich Manipulationcited by 0
- 2026S2A2: Audio-Visual Imitation Learning for Manipulation Tasks Using Acoustic Spatial Informationcited by 0
- 2026S2A2: Audio-Visual Imitation Learning for Manipulation Tasks Using Acoustic Spatial Information28 Jul 2026
- 2026Spacetime Optimal-Transport Attention for Visuo-Haptic Imitation Learning of Contact-Rich Manipulation19 May 2026
- 2025Multimodal Diffusion Forcing for Forceful Manipulation6 Nov 2025
- 2024Generalize by Touching: Tactile Ensemble Skill Transfer for Robotic Furniture Assembly26 Apr 2024
- 2024VITaL Pretraining: Visuo-Tactile Pretraining for Tactile and Non-Tactile Manipulation Policies18 Mar 2024
- 2025TA-VLA: Elucidating the Design Space of Torque-aware Vision-Language-Action Modelscited by 30
- 2026TaF-VLA: Tactile-Force Alignment in Vision-Language-Action Models for Force-aware Manipulationcited by 11
- 2026CoRE-VLA: Towards Scalable and Robust Vision-Language-Action Modeling via Conditional Routing of Expertscited by 3
- 2026TAP-VLA: Tactile Annotation Prompting for Vision Language Action Modelscited by 0
- 2026TAO-Force: Unifying Force-Aware Perception and Fast-Slow Control for Contact-Rich Manipulationcited by 0
- 2026TAO-Force: Unifying Force-Aware Perception and Fast-Slow Control for Contact-Rich Manipulation16 Sep 2026
- 2026CoRE-VLA: Towards Scalable and Robust Vision-Language-Action Modeling via Conditional Routing of Experts4 Jul 2026
- 2026TAP-VLA: Tactile Annotation Prompting for Vision Language Action Models27 Jun 2026
- 2026TaF-VLA: Tactile-Force Alignment in Vision-Language-Action Models for Force-aware Manipulation28 Jan 2026
- 2025TA-VLA: Elucidating the Design Space of Torque-aware Vision-Language-Action Models9 Sep 2025
- 2023General In-Hand Object Rotation with Vision and Touchcited by 87
- 20243D-ViTac: Learning Fine-Grained Manipulation with Visuo-Tactile Sensingcited by 67
- 2023Robot Synesthesia: In-Hand Manipulation with Visuotactile Sensingcited by 51
- 2024Transferable Tactile Transformers for Representation Learning Across Diverse Sensors and Taskscited by 44
- 2024Multimodal Visual-Tactile Representation Learning through Self-Supervised Contrastive Pre-Trainingcited by 30
- 2024ManiWAV: Learning Robot Manipulation from In-the-Wild Audio-Visual Datacited by 29
- 2025Touch in the Wild: Learning Fine-Grained Manipulation with a Portable Visuo-Tactile Grippercited by 29
- 2024AnySkin: Plug-and-play Skin Sensing for Robotic Touchcited by 22
- 2025Multi-Modal Manipulation via Multi-Modal Policy Consensuscited by 9
- 2024M2CURL: Sample-Efficient Multimodal Reinforcement Learning via Self-Supervised Representation Learning for Robotic Manipulationcited by 7
- 2025ConViTac: Aligning Visual-Tactile Fusion with Contrastive Representationscited by 7
- 2025Enhancing Tactile-based Reinforcement Learning for Robotic Controlcited by 5
12 most cited of 32 All 32 (JSON)
- 2026What to Attend, What to Keep: Skill-Conditioned Visuotactile Representation with Progress-Guided Event Memory29 Sep 2026
- 2026VT-MUSE: Multimodal Unified Sequential Visuotactile Representation Learning for Manipulation21 Aug 2026
- 2026TACTIC: Tactile and Vision Conditioned Contact-Centric Control for Whole-Arm Manipulation10 Jul 2026
- 2026Seeing Touch from Motion: A Unified Modality-Aware Visuo-Tactile Policy with Tactile Motion Correlation29 Jun 2026
- 2026NoContactNoWorries: Estimating Contact through Vision and Proprioception for In-Hand Dexterous Manipulation23 Jun 2026
- 2026Tac2Pix: Image-Space Visuo-Tactile Fusion for Dexterous Manipulation7 Jun 2026
- 2026Beyond Binary: Sim-to-Real Dexterous Manipulation with Physics-Grounded Contact Representation27 May 2026
- 2026Tactile-based Multimodal Fusion in Embodied Intelligence: A Survey of Vision, Language, and Contact-Driven Paradigms17 May 2026
- 2026Let Robots Feel Your Touch: Visuo-Tactile Cortical Alignment for Embodied Mirror Resonance14 May 2026
- 2026FlexiTac: A Low-Cost, Open-Source, Scalable Tactile Sensing Solution for Robotic Systems30 Apr 2026
- 2026FlowTouch: View-Invariant Visuo-Tactile Prediction9 Mar 2026
- 2026ViTaS: Visual Tactile Soft Fusion Contrastive Learning for Visuomotor Learning12 Feb 2026
12 newest of 32 All 32 (JSON)