# RoboLLM: Robotic Vision Tasks Grounded on Multimodal Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.10221 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10221/

## Key facts

- Cited by 12 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Embodied and 3D vision-language models, one of 16 directions in Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models.
- Builds on 27 of its 46 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Oct 2023.

## Placed in

- Multimodal LLMs / vision-language models / [Embodied and 3D vision-language models](https://mlsanity.com/mllm/embodied-and-3d-vision-language-models/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 27 of 27)

- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Swin Transformer: Hierarchical Vision Transformer using Shifted Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.14030/) (2021)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [BLIP-2: Bootstrapping Language-Image Pre-training with Frozen Image Encoders and Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.12597/) (2023)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [Rich feature hierarchies for accurate object detection and semantic segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1311.2524/) (2013)
- [PaLM-E: An Embodied Multimodal Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.03378/) (2023)
- [Pyramid Vision Transformer: A Versatile Backbone for Dense Prediction without Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.12122/) (2021)
- [CoCa: Contrastive Captioners are Image-Text Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.01917/) (2022)
- [Multiscale Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.11227/) (2021)
- [Open X-Embodiment: Robotic Learning Datasets and RT-X Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08864/) (2023)
- [Exploring Plain Vision Transformer Backbones for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.16527/) (2022)
- [Image as a Foreign Language: BEiT Pretraining for All Vision and Vision-Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.10442/) (2022)
- [Fine-tuning CNN Image Retrieval with No Human Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.02512/) (2017)
- [Cascade R-CNN: High Quality Object Detection and Instance Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.09756/) (2019)
- [Particular object retrieval with integral max-pooling of CNN activations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.05879/) (2015)
- [Deep Image Retrieval: Learning global representations for image search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1604.01325/) (2016)
- [Segmentation-Based Deep-Learning Approach for Surface-Defect Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08536/) (2019)
- [Training Vision Transformers for Image Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.05644/) (2021)
- [Night-to-Day Image Translation for Retrieval-based Localization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.09767/) (2018)
- [Structured Multi-modal Feature Embedding and Alignment for Image-Sentence Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.02417/) (2021)
- [Boosting vision transformers for image retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11909/) (2022)
- [ARMBench: An Object-centric Benchmark Dataset for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16382/) (2023)
- [Cross-modal Semantic Enhanced Interaction for Image-Sentence Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.08908/) (2022)
- [Reviving Shift Equivariance in Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.07470/) (2023)
- [LaCViT: A Label-aware Contrastive Fine-tuning Framework for Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.18013/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Object Detection with Multimodal Large Vision-Language Models: An In-depth Review](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19294/) (2025)
- [Where, What, Why: Towards Explainable Driver Attention Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.23088/) (2025)
- [LADEV: A Language-Driven Testing and Evaluation Platform for Vision-Language-Action Models in Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05191/) (2024)
- [CLCE: An Approach to Refining Cross-Entropy and Contrastive Learning for Optimized Learning Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14551/) (2024)
- [Robot Instance Segmentation with Few Annotations for Grasping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01302/) (2024)
- [Understanding and Mitigating Human-Labelling Errors in Supervised Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.06289/) (2024)
- [Learning Embeddings with Centroid Triplet Loss for Object Identification in Robotic Grasping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06277/) (2024)
- [HARMONY: Hidden Activation Representations and Model Output-Aware Uncertainty Estimation for Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.22171/) (2025)
- [ORACLE-Grasp: Zero-Shot Affordance-Aligned Robotic Grasping using Large Multimodal Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08417/) (2025)
- [RoboEye: Enhancing 2D Robotic Object Identification with Selective 3D Geometric Keypoint Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.14966/) (2025)
- [Strategic Fusion of Vision Language Models: Shapley-Credited Context-Aware Dawid-Skene for Multi-Label Tasks in Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.01126/) (2025)
- [Intent-Driven LLM Ensemble Planning for Flexible Multi-Robot Disassembly: Demonstration on EV Batteries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.17576/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Robotic vision applications often necessitate a wide range of visual perception tasks, such as object detection, segmentation, and identification. While there have been substantial advances in these individual tasks, integrating specialized models into a unified vision pipeline presents significant engineering challenges and costs. Recently, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have emerged as novel backbones for various downstream tasks. We argue that leveraging the pre-training capabilities of MLLMs enables the creation of a simplified framework, thus mitigating the need for task-specific encoders. Specifically, the large-scale pretrained knowledge in MLLMs allows for easier fine-tuning to downstream robotic vision tasks and yields superior performance. We introduce the RoboLLM framework, equipped with a BEiT-3 backbone, to address all visual perception tasks in the ARMBench challenge-a large-scale robotic manipulation dataset about real-world warehouse scenarios. RoboLLM not only outperforms existing baselines but also substantially reduces the engineering burden associated with model selection and tuning. The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/longkukuhi/armbench.