# CAGE: Causal Attention Enables Data-Efficient Generalizable Robotic Manipulation

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.14974 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14974/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 19 Oct 2024.

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [Dense Policy: Bidirectional Autoregressive Learning of Actions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.13217/) (2025)
- [CordViP: Correspondence-based Visuomotor Policy for Dexterous Manipulation in Real-World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.08449/) (2025)
- [AirExo-2: Scaling up Generalizable Robotic Imitation Learning with Low-Cost Exoskeletons](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.03081/) (2025)
- [Look, Focus, Act: Efficient and Robust Robot Learning via Human Gaze and Foveated Vision Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15833/) (2025)
- [ABPolicy: Asynchronous B-Spline Flow Policy for Real-Time and Smooth Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.23901/) (2026)
- [RoboRouter: Training-Free Policy Routing for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.07892/) (2026)
- [Multi-Camera View Scaling for Data-Efficient Robot Imitation Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.00557/) (2026)
- [HeRO: Hierarchical 3D Semantic Representation for Pose-aware Object Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.18817/) (2026)
- [Knowledge-Driven Imitation Learning: Enabling Generalization Across Diverse Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.21057/) (2025)
- [LIDEA: Human-to-Robot Imitation Learning via Implicit Feature Distillation and Explicit Geometry Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10677/) (2026)
- [Asynchronous Multimodal Diffusion Policy Composition via Latency-Aware Guidance Fusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.17257/) (2026)
- [CR-VLA-Force: Learning Control-aware Compliance VLA Model for Robust Contact-rich Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.05832/) (2026)
- [Dynamics-Aware Meta-Imitation for Generalization to Unseen Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.15880/) (2026)
- [CARF: Contrastive Attraction-Repulsion of Failure-Guided Flow Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.21982/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Generalization in robotic manipulation remains a critical challenge, particularly when scaling to new environments with limited demonstrations. This paper introduces CAGE, a novel robotic manipulation policy designed to overcome these generalization barriers by integrating a causal attention mechanism. CAGE utilizes the powerful feature extraction capabilities of the vision foundation model DINOv2, combined with LoRA fine-tuning for robust environment understanding. The policy further employs a causal Perceiver for effective token compression and a diffusion-based action prediction head with attention mechanisms to enhance task-specific fine-grained conditioning. With as few as 50 demonstrations from a single training environment, CAGE achieves robust generalization across diverse visual changes in objects, backgrounds, and viewpoints. Extensive experiments validate that CAGE significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art RGB/RGB-D approaches in various manipulation tasks, especially under large distribution shifts. In similar environments, CAGE offers an average of 42% increase in task completion rate. While all baselines fail to execute the task in unseen environments, CAGE manages to obtain a 43% completion rate and a 51% success rate in average, making a huge step towards practical deployment of robots in real-world settings. Project website: cage-policy.github.io.