# Learning Manipulation by Predicting Interaction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.00439 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00439/

## Key facts

- Cited by 37 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 61 of its 71 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 1 Jun 2024.

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

- [Deep Residual Learning for Image Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1512.03385/) (2015)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Representation Learning with Contrastive Predictive Coding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1807.03748/) (2018)
- [Momentum Contrast for Unsupervised Visual Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.05722/) (2019)
- [Masked Autoencoders Are Scalable Vision Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06377/) (2021)
- [Emerging Properties in Self-Supervised Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.14294/) (2021)
- [DistilBERT, a distilled version of BERT: smaller, faster, cheaper and lighter](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.01108/) (2019)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [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)
- [Ego4D: Around the World in 3,000 Hours of Egocentric Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.07058/) (2021)
- [Generalized Intersection over Union: A Metric and A Loss for Bounding Box Regression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1902.09630/) (2019)
- [Meta-World: A Benchmark and Evaluation for Multi-Task and Meta Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10897/) (2019)
- [The "something something" video database for learning and evaluating visual common sense](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04261/) (2017)
- [Scaling Egocentric Vision: The EPIC-KITCHENS Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.02748/) (2018)
- [R3M: A Universal Visual Representation for Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.12601/) (2022)
- [CLIPort: What and Where Pathways for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.12098/) (2021)
- [LLaMA-Adapter V2: Parameter-Efficient Visual Instruction Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.15010/) (2023)
- [Learning Universal Policies via Text-Guided Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00111/) (2023)
- [End-to-end Autonomous Driving: Challenges and Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16927/) (2023)
- [Time-Contrastive Networks: Self-Supervised Learning from Video](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.06888/) (2017)
- [Learning Interactive Real-World Simulators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06114/) (2023)
- [Lumiere: A Space-Time Diffusion Model for Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.12945/) (2024)
- [LM-Nav: Robotic Navigation with Large Pre-Trained Models of Language, Vision, and Action](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.04429/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 37)

- [Latent Action Pretraining from Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.11758/) (2024)
- [DreamGen: Unlocking Generalization in Robot Learning through Video World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.12705/) (2025)
- [Predictive Inverse Dynamics Models are Scalable Learners for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15109/) (2024)
- [EgoVLA: Learning Vision-Language-Action Models from Egocentric Human Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.12440/) (2025)
- [FLARE: Robot Learning with Implicit World Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.15659/) (2025)
- [FlowVLA: Visual Chain of Thought-based Motion Reasoning for Vision-Language-Action Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.18269/) (2025)
- [Lift3D Foundation Policy: Lifting 2D Large-Scale Pretrained Models for Robust 3D Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.18623/) (2024)
- [Learning to Manipulate Anywhere: A Visual Generalizable Framework For Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.15815/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Embodied Learning for Object-Centric Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.11537/) (2024)
- [ViPRA: Video Prediction for Robot Actions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.07732/) (2025)
- [Robots Pre-train Robots: Manipulation-Centric Robotic Representation from Large-Scale Robot Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.22325/) (2024)
- [PALM: Progress-Aware Policy Learning via Affordance Reasoning for Long-Horizon Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.07060/) (2026)
- [Modeling Fine-Grained Hand-Object Dynamics for Egocentric Video Representation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.00986/) (2025)
- [Is Diversity All You Need for Scalable Robotic Manipulation?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06219/) (2025)
- [AirExo-2: Scaling up Generalizable Robotic Imitation Learning with Low-Cost Exoskeletons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03081/) (2025)
- [Parallels Between VLA Model Post-Training and Human Motor Learning: Progress, Challenges, and Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.20966/) (2025)
- [Phoenix: A Motion-based Self-Reflection Framework for Fine-grained Robotic Action Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.14588/) (2025)
- [Efficient Robotic Policy Learning via Latent Space Backward Planning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.06861/) (2025)
- [Human-assisted Robotic Policy Refinement via Action Preference Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07127/) (2025)
- [MAPLE: Encoding Dexterous Robotic Manipulation Priors Learned From Egocentric Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.06084/) (2025)
- [chi0: Resource-Aware Robust Manipulation via Taming Distributional Inconsistencies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.09021/) (2026)
- [Rethinking Latent Redundancy in Behavior Cloning: An Information Bottleneck Approach for Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.02853/) (2025)
- [A Data-Centric Revisit of Pre-Trained Vision Models for Robot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.06960/) (2025)
- [ViSA-Flow: Accelerating Robot Skill Learning via Large-Scale Video Semantic Action Flow](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.01288/) (2025)
- [EgoDTM: Towards 3D-Aware Egocentric Video-Language Pretraining](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15470/) (2025)
- [Robot Learning from Human Videos: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.27621/) (2026)
- [Provable Ordering and Continuity in Vision-Language Pretraining for Generalizable Embodied Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.01218/) (2025)
- [Token Bottleneck: One Token to Remember Dynamics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.06543/) (2025)
- [Learning Skills from Action-Free Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.20052/) (2025)
- [From Imagined Futures to Executable Actions: Mixture of Latent Actions for Robot Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.12167/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Representation learning approaches for robotic manipulation have boomed in recent years. Due to the scarcity of in-domain robot data, prevailing methodologies tend to leverage large-scale human video datasets to extract generalizable features for visuomotor policy learning. Despite the progress achieved, prior endeavors disregard the interactive dynamics that capture behavior patterns and physical interaction during the manipulation process, resulting in an inadequate understanding of the relationship between objects and the environment. To this end, we propose a general pre-training pipeline that learns Manipulation by Predicting the Interaction (MPI) and enhances the visual representation.Given a pair of keyframes representing the initial and final states, along with language instructions, our algorithm predicts the transition frame and detects the interaction object, respectively. These two learning objectives achieve superior comprehension towards "how-to-interact" and "where-to-interact". We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of several challenging robotic tasks.The experimental results demonstrate that MPI exhibits remarkable improvement by 10% to 64% compared with previous state-of-the-art in real-world robot platforms as well as simulation environments. Code and checkpoints are publicly shared at https://github.com/OpenDriveLab/MPI.